When the “Occupy Wall Street” protests began to attract notice last week, the initial reaction was to scoff at the “Trustafarian nitwits” who lacked leaders, spokespeople, a policy agenda, or even much of a philosophy beyond anarchy, its cousin minarchy, and drum circles.

And then, suddenly, everything changed. “OWS” was the video-conferenced toast of this week’s “Take Back the American Dream” conference, embraced as the vanguard of Van Jones’ new “Rebuild the Dream” initiative. Micah Sifry of TechPresident.org measured the movement’s growth through “likes” on Facebook and found 232,000 allies, with growth on track to double every three days. Press coverage turned from mockery to admiration. And mainstream groups, including labor unions, MoveOn.org, and New York’s highly effective Working Families Party headed down to Wall Street (which, ironically, is no longer the center of global finance, as the biggest firms have moved uptown) to lend the movement their leaders, spokespeople, and policy agendas. What happened? Once liberals stopped and took a long look at the motley protesters with funny signs, they began to see something they’d long envied with an irrational fervor: the Tea Party.

It wasn’t just that OWS was the only thing happening. In fact, as David Dayen of Firedoglake has put it, Occupy Wall Street can be seen as one additional voice in “a longstanding movement of bank accountability,” involving local protests in Los Angeles and elsewhere, the New Bottom Line project, which has become visible in the last few months, and others. This highly disorganized constellation of efforts includes the very moving “We Are The 99 Percent” blog on tumblr, and there’s also a site called “The Other 98 Percent,” which has almost 100,000 Facebook fans. (Perhaps they could join forces and compromise on 98.5 percent.) The most visible impact of these several efforts came just last week, when California Attorney General Kamala Harris opted out of the proposed comprehensive settlement with banks over foreclosure fraud, joining Eric Schneiderman of New York in pushing for a more aggressive investigation instead.

Perhaps the most interesting is National People’s Action, a coalition of community organizations that has been leading well-targeted protests for at least four years and getting meetings with members of the Federal Reserve Board to press their demands. In the spring of last year, I came across several dozen decrepit yellow school busses parked in Rock Creek Park—they had brought NPA protesters to Washington, where they jammed the nearby front yards of bank lobbyists and the next day snarled traffic on K Street. It’s not my style of politics, but strategically making bankers, lobbyists, and policy makers uncomfortable has gotten results. And most importantly, NPA represents the actual people affected most directly by the subprime and foreclosure crises—low-income people, working people aspiring to, but not yet settled into, the middle class.

While the NPA protests got some coverage, mostly on the DC traffic reports, they never received nearly the attention showered on OWS. Some of that is location and the rapid growth of the movement. But the turn from mockery to embrace by the popular media in a snap seems to have coincided with a sudden realization: Goofy costumes? Hand-scrawled signs making incoherent points? Haven’t we seen this before? It’s the Tea Party! E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post asked earlier this week, “Why hasn’t there been a Tea Party on the left?,” and here is the answer. Our Tea Party has come. And so all the good work and focused protests are tossed aside as liberals gravitate to the thing that looks and feels most like the early days of the Tea Party. Dayen is right that Occupy Wall Street fits into the general tenor of the other “bank accountability” efforts, but it feels like it’s starting entirely from scratch, with little awareness of anything that came before it.