I’m sure everyone who reads this blog is familiar with the “Tea Party” protest in Washington DC last month. It was an adult response to overbearing government, expressed within constitutional parameters by people strongly vested in the American dream. On the surface it stands in stark contrast to the anarchist G20 protest in Pittsburgh a couple weeks later where all hell broke loose and riot police acted to disburse demonstrators.
The DC protest was a perfect picture of order, and the Pittsburgh protest was extreme disorder. While DC was a mature and law-abiding exercise in civil dissent and Pittsburgh was an adolescent riot that provoked a violent response, both events constituted dissent from current governance and power structures.
If you could lift the fog of Marxist theory from the brains of the Pittsburgh anarchists, grow them up by 20 years and allow them to become vested in the American dream, they would be indistinguishable from those in the DC protest.
Both of these public demonstrations, one from the right and one from the left, were public outbreaks of expressions of individualism against totalitarian power, though you have to remove several layers of socialist brain washing from the Pittsburgh gang to uncover their individualism. Federally oriented power structures provoked a response from both the right and the left, and both the right and the left responded in character.
This suggests the existence of a common, fundamental American loathing of totalitarian power shared by both political camps. It further suggests that when it comes to the basic tension between the individual and the state, the right and the left in America probably have more in common than they might want to admit. And this further suggests a basis to bridge the gap between the right and the left and focus our combined energies on the real enemy – unchecked power.