As outside-the-establishment movements like the tea party, Occupy Wall Street and Ron Paul followers are showing, the two-party system isn't big enough to absorb the concerns and passions of hundreds of thousands of grass-roots activists.
CNN: From Howard Dean to the tea party: The power of Meetup.com
Ideally, you'd want the most stringent wall between the third-party owner with an interest in the player and the agent who represents that player and influences his decisions.
So why can't Occupy Wall Street become a tea-party movement for the other side, one that might jolt the Democrats out of their torpor, tug them left, and switch back on some of the electricity that Barack Obama generated when he was running for president?
His appointments in key economic posts have been very much in sync with the Schumer-Robert Rubin Wall Street wing of the party.
The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street have both tapped into that - but so far no politician has harnessed its power.
There's more common ground between the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movements than you might think - a kind of populist revulsion at what seems to be the irresponsible excesses of the American financial sector and at the unwillingness or inability of the lawmakers in Washington to do enough about it.
The moment power beckoned, he tilted instinctively toward the establishment, and, in the Democratic Party that Obama had grown up in, the establishment was pro-Wall Street.
The interest groups that led the Democrats astray, according to Cost, have come to prominence in the Party since the Great Society: public-sector unions, elements of Wall Street, feminists, environmentalists, and members of Congress who represent districts drawn to be majority-minority.
It may be that Wall Street prefers the Republicans because the party favours the better-off.
In any case, the Occu-Party, as its name suggests, has no intention of leaving Wall Street and the downtown areas of dozens of cities until the wealth distribution they are calling for actually occurs.
This week, the LDP leader, Sadakazu Tanigaki, told the Wall Street Journal that the party may not continue to co-operate with Mr Noda over the consumption tax (the bill has yet to clear the upper house).
ECONOMIST: An unusual militancy is creeping into mainstream politics
Will the anti-Wall Street movement become the progressive version of the conservative Tea Party?
应用推荐