Since the eruption of the Occupy Wall Street protests in mid-September, many have tried to limn the similarities and contrasts between OWS and the Tea Party movement, which first appeared on the American political scene in 2009. Some, like President Obama, strain to draw a parallel between the two. Speaking about OWS, Obama said, “I understand the frustrations being expressed in those protests. In some ways, they’re not that different from some of the protests that we saw coming from the Tea Party.”
For their part, Tea Party “conservatives” are having none of it. They are rigorously focused on the contrasts. Jim Boyd, a columnist for something called the Dallas Conservative Examiner, has written that OWSers are an “assemblage of intellectually deplete vagrants.” Not to be outdone, the pontiff of Tea Party politics, Rush Limbaugh, referred to OWS as a “parade of human debris.” Nice.
But there is one contrast between the two movements that we can all agree on. The Tea Party is dominated by older people, while OWS is clearly sustained by the young. Polls and surveys of participants at Tea Party rallies have confirmed that they tend to be older than the general population, averaging more than 45 years old. I’m not aware of similar surveys of OWS protesters, but the evidence of the eyes is that they are generally younger, many in their 20’s. Certainly, those were my impressions at both a Tea Party rally in 2009, and attending my local “Occupy” protest one day last week.
Perhaps the key to understanding both of these movements, and their apparently oppositional relationship to one another, can be found in some news that broke today regarding the relative net worth of young and old in the United States. The respected Pew Research Center announced that the wealth gap between older and younger Americans is now as wide as it’s ever been. According to the report, the average net worth of households headed by a person 65 years old or older was $170,000, while the average net worth of households headed by a person 35 years old or younger was $3,662. That’s a gap of 47:1. Why is that a big deal? Because in 1984, the gap was 10:1. The background statistics are even more troubling. A household headed by an older person is 42% better off than its counterpart in 1984, but the younger household is 62% worst off than its 1984 counterpart.
The report notes that while it isn’t at all surprising to find households headed by older people in a better position financially, the gap today is unprecedented and speaks to larger, disturbing patterns in American income inequality. “These age-based gaps widened significantly during the sour economy of recent years,” the report notes, “but all key trends are several decades old, indicating that they are also linked to long-term demographic, social and economic changes that have affected different age groups in different ways. These changes include structural changes in the labor and housing markets; delayed marriage; delayed retirement; and the changing racial and ethnic composition of the population.”
Given this as a background, is it really any surprise that Tea Partiers and OWSers seem to live in two different countries. Tea Partiers live in an America where they have already have theirs. They may admit that the game is rigged, but they got in early enough to make a future for themselves, one they now inhabit. For them, the problem is government taxes and the threat those taxes represent to their existing net worth.
OWSers, on the other hand, live in an America where there is little prospect that they will do as well as their parents and grandparents. They know the game is rigged, but they got in far too late to do anything about it. The problem for them is the economic system that robbed them of hope.
“The dignity of the individual and the demands of justice require, particularly today, that economic choices do not cause disparities in wealth to increase in an excessive and morally unacceptable manner.” -Benedict XVI, Caritas et Veritate
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