It does not seem to have occurred to Dr. Dineen that the objects of protest have changed because the political economy has a different set of contours than was the case in 1900. Consider the following statistics on the distribution of employees by size of enterprise:

http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2010/tables/10s0742.pdf

You will notice that about 85% of the private sector workforce (public employees and the self-employed not tallied here) toil for establishments that employ fewer that 750 workers. (I have worked for a company that size. It has one site, the deputy personnel director addressed me on sight by my first name on the infrequent occasions when I stepped into their offices, and if I did not know someone working there, a co-worker I did know likely did). Consider, now, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the agency which operates the Voice of America and a half-dozen other broadcasting services. This is among the smallest of federal agencies and has not been the subject of any notable controversy in nearly 60 years. It employs about 750 people. What is baseline for a federal agency puts you at the 85th percentile of the private sector.

Now, consider the employment level in industrial sectors with strong tendencies toward an oligopolistic market structure. A generation ago, about 2.5% of the private-sector workforce was employed in the auto industry. To that you can add steel and smelting, oil, rubber, &c. The share of the workforce earning their living in these sorts of enterprises was modest and in our own time is more modest still. The largest employer at that time, American Telephone & Telegraph, employed about 2.5% of the private sector workforce and operated as a regulated monopoly. The largest now is Wal-Mart, which, with 1.1 million employees, comprehends less that 1% of the private-sector workforce. Did you consider the possibility that ‘corporate power’ is typically too dispersed to be all that problematic in extra-local contexts?

One exception is the financial sector, which has been problematically influential of late. The thing is, the entanglement of the financial sector with the state is unsurprising. Knowledgeable people (e.g. Luigi Zingales and Charles Calomiris) have offered cogent public complaints about the manner in which the banking and financial crisis is being resolved. However, you cannot just say sooo long to troubled banks en bloc. It has been tried before, in 1930, 1931, 1932, and 1933. Such a policy has consequences.

What you have now, and you did not have 110 years ago are…

1. Public employee unions, and the attendant cossetting of public sector workers at everyone’s expense;

2. A ratio of public expenditure to domestic product of 0.4 (0.1 being the norm for occidental countries ‘ere 1914) with what that implies for the allocation of resources by state employees and politicians (acting in concert with lobbies).

3. A bloated social services industry.

For these reasons, it is not surprising that inchoate public discontent finds the state rather than business corporations its primary object.

A – freakin’ – men, with one caveat: there are some Leftists I’ve run across who are a sort of agrarian anarchist. They like Wendell Berry, they are suspicious of both big government and big business, etc., but they lean left socially — one sometimes finds them in the home schooling movement, or amongst the Ron Paul supporters. These folks seem to have some sympathy for the Tea Party movement; but they are not part of ‘the Left’ that Mr. Salyer refers to, and in any case are probably not numerous enough to have a real impact.

“What also struck me is how the Left has been entirely inept at harnessing the anger of the Tea Parties against those very corporate powers.”

It’s not ineptitude. The Left defines itself in terms of stamping out the ethnic/religious/cultural demographic that comprises the Tea Party, and is too committed to anti-Christian, anti-Western, & anti-WASP principles to make anything approaching a common cause with such people.

The Left is no more interested in Tea Party hostility toward corporate powers than it was in the Pope’s opposition to the invasion of Iraq.

Sore Winners have a tendency to enjoy dystopia a tad too much and as a result, the Tea Party, a veritable font of alarms about everything they feel they have lost control of…because make no mistake, the Tea Party is not so much about excessive government control as it is a sense of lost control wished to be re-claimed by the Tea Partier themselves…..well, the Tea Party is a professional level Doom and Gloomer and this fertilizes fear and loathing and herds the public into the sheep fold.

The only interesting thing about modernity is the way its participants believe themselves to be some kind of perpetual summit of achievement. In no need of God, the smiling technocrat kills Socrates too, leaving the field virtually free of any profitable use of the human brain beyond that entailed in a livestock form of citizenry.

Welcome to the Funny Pages Writ Large. Underneath, a sordid rot accumulates and occasionally erupts into the light, smearing us like this swell oil “leak”. Gut shot for two months and counting and we moan about whether someone is acting emotional enough. The people of this country have utterly forgotten what stewardship is. They wait to be herded…the farmer has gone feral.

But emphasis on crime and educational collapse does not necessarily entail fearmongering, just as an emphasis on erosion of economic status is not necessarily a promotion of greed.

“The more salient concerns of postbourgeois Middle Americans that a new Right can express are those of crime, educational collapse, the erosion of their economic status, and the calculated subversion of their social, cultural, and national identity by forces that serve the interests of the elite above them and the underclass below them, but at the expense of the middle class.”

This is almost exactly the messaging that the tea party is using… and it emphasizes fear (crime, collapse) and greed (erosion of their economic status). What is the Tea Party articulation of the ‘positive cultural and political results’? And can those results include opposition to big businesses when it emphasizes economic status (too often measured by chinese manufactured goods)?

If I’m reading him right, this is one of Francis’s points. The middle class feels itself being hosed by the upper class/elites in the government, who make decisions designed to keep the lower classes on the dole, thus maintaining their electoral base. On the Right so-called, decisions are made that benefit Wall St. rather than Main St. The middle class is frustrated by this whole process but doesn’t see itself as having the power/clout to do anything about it. A conservative appeal to the middle class, then, could have positive cultural and political results. Of course this appeal would have to be A) truly conservative and B) done in good faith, neither of which I would trust the GOP to accomplish.

Martha makes a good point. I’m the last person to reduce any issue to a “socio-economic” factors, but they certainly do play a role. As the middle class has expanded and expanded and “regular folk” have become more middle than lower class, the populist movement has taken on more of a middle class than lower class feel. Though I’d also say the expansion of the middle class has transformed the middle class into something quite different from the old bourgeois idea.

I think he would have been pleased with many of the varieties of tea partiers.

Sam Francis is instructive here; see his essay ‘Beautiful Losers’ in the book of the same title.

I stopped reading at this point. Until I got this far, I thought it was a serious article with some good points. I hadn’t realized the author had been pulling my leg.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/17/tony-hayward-testimony-video_n_616690.html