The magazine of the North Carolina Center for Voter Education • Saturday May 19, 2012

Tea Parties, Occupiers and Pumpkin Pie

By Damon Circosta
Published: Nov. 21, 2011

RALEIGH - Put your average tea party member and occupy protestor in a room together and chances are they won’t have much in common.

In both style and substance the people who belong to these two groups don’t appear to see eye-to-eye on much. It’s easy to oversimplify any social movement, but if we were to deal in generalizations, you would characterize a tea partier as typically blue collar, politically conservative and a bit older. On the other hand, the occupy crowd tends to be younger, politically progressive and frustrated that their education has not afforded them a white-collar job.

This week, in homes throughout the country, a young occupier replete with lip piercing and college loan debt will sit down at the same table with their tea party uncle who is wearing a “don’t tread on me” T-shirt and worries about his job being outsourced.

Thanksgiving is one of those all-too-rare opportunities in America when we get to spend time with people we often don’t align with politically. It’s one of the beauties of American democracy that families often don’t share political views.

The tendency in these situations is to remain silent and glare at one another wondering how someone so different is a member of the same family.

Left to our own devices, we won’t share how we feel about our civic affairs and our worries that the country might be coming apart at the seams. Rather than risk upsetting grandma with an argument about the future of our democracy, the occupier and the tea partier will simply make some small talk and perhaps distract themselves with some football.

But if we were to start talking, if we were able to see past the tri-corner hats and the snarky protest signs, we might see that we have some commonality. Thanksgiving dinner, much like the original thanksgiving, could serve as a mini-summit between people as different as the occupier and the tea partier.

If we could talk -- really talk -- without resorting to slogans or talking points, we might figure something out. Alternative viewpoints could be discussed, workable solutions could be proposed and differences could be hashed out. No one is pretending that by the time pumpkin pie hits the table that the vastly divergent views of these two groups will have become a unified vision for our country. But that’s not the point.

We may view the world differently. We may have radically divergent ideas on how to fix our political system, but most of us agree on one thing: our broken political system is due at least in part to the problem of money in politics.  The tea party movement calls it “crony capitalism” and decries a government that meddles in the marketplace. The occupy movement calls it “corporate oligarchy” and decries the lack of regulation of campaign finance.

But really, everyone is concerned with the same coin, even if we see it from two different sides.

Perhaps the conversation can begin there, with an earnest discussion at a dinner table on how to go about fixing the vexing problems of campaign finance. We might not end up convincing our tea party uncle or occupier niece, but we can start working on something together. Maybe all we get out of it is the realization of how truly difficult it is to make policies that are fair and equitable.

But if we can have this discussion and no one storms off in a huff or ends up throwing mashed potatoes at each other, we will be light years ahead of the discussions in Washington. And that’s something to be thankful for.