Washington Hasn't Changed, The People Have.

The most popular theme about politics in the main stream media today is that "Washington is broken." The national television media like CBS and NBC and the national print media like the New York Times and Washington Post all trumpet the same claims made by the national candidates for President. The candidates do it because they say they will fix things when they get to Washington. The media trumpet the same theme because it gets them off the hook for not paying attention to what Washington has been doing for years.

So, let's start at the beginning: Washington is not broken. It has been doing very well at providing the tax codes, and trade policies that serve the interests of the big corporate donors. To spare you the exotic political analysis, it has always been pretty simple-- "He who pays the piper calls the tune." 
So Washington is not broken, but what has changed is that the American people have changed. Many of them are better educated and better informed, and they have learned how to organize to express their grievances. Two of the most successful efforts have been the Tea Party (in 2009) and the Occupy Movement (in 2011). The mainstream media have done their best to portray these two movements as being in opposition to each other. The Tea Party's right-wing populism has received the most media attention, while coverage of the Occupy Movement faded as soon as the movement faded. The most attention to these movements by the media was to ask the question "What do they want?" The second question was "Who are they?" Their ages? Their occupations? Their education? Were they authentic "grass roots" movements or artificial "astroturf" movements, with the latter term referring to fake movements created by wealthy elites hoping to shape their message.

What has been missing from most corporate media reports on these two movements are serious efforts to consider their similarities and the potential that exists for both groups to merge into a single unified movement for change.  While the Tea Party and Occupy Movements appear to differ in important ways, they are unified in their anger about class-based grievances about the demise of middle-class jobs, wages, benefits, and opportunities.

In some ways, the Tea Party and Occupy Movements are similar to populist movements of the past. Both then and now there has been widespread interest among Americans in changing unequal, unfair, and corrupt economic and political systems into forms more consistent with traditional American democratic ideals. However, just as past populist movements rose and then subsided, it may be that the Tea Party and Occupy Movements will shift into a dormant mode, becoming part of what some sociologists have called "abeyance structures." But sometimes new grievances arise that may stimulate new versions of these earlier movements.