If politics is show business for ugly people (which, by the way, it’s not, not this time, not the ugly-people part anyway, not with a cast of characters as glossy as Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin’s ghost, and Barack Obama), is Occupy Wall Street the Tea Party for liberal people? Or, at least, for people who generally prefer a Democratic lesser evil to a Republican greater one?

Illustration by Tom Bachtell

Something Tea Partiers and Occupiers might agree on is that the groups are not like each other. (They certainly don’t look alike.) Yet there’s an irresistible symmetry. Both arose on the political fringe, more or less spontaneously, in response to the financial crisis and its economic consequences. Neither has authoritative leaders or a formal hierarchical structure. Each was originally sparked by a third-tier media outlet, albeit of opposite types—one by a cable business-news reporter’s rant against “losers’ mortgages,” the other by an e-mail blast from an anti-corporate, nonprofit, incongruously slick Canadian magazine. Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party are both protest movements, not interest groups, and while both are wary, or claim to be, of established political figures and organizations, each welcomes their praise, if not their direction. Both have already earned places in the long, raucous history of ideologically promiscuous American populism. But only one, so far, has earned a place in the history of American government.

From the start, Democratic politicians and their center-left institutional allies watched the Tea Party with, besides fear and loathing, a certain professional envy. After Obama sailed into office on the biggest popular-vote majority in twenty years, Republicans were left treading water. A few months later, the Tea Party came along to pick them up, dry them off, give them a new suit of clothes, and set them on a starboard course to victory in the 2010 midterms. The rescue wasn’t free of charge, of course. The cost, to the country as well as to the sad remnants of moderate Republicanism, has been high. But there’s no denying the potency of whatever it was that the brave new party injected into the scarred veins of the grand old one.

Now Democrats are hoping that the drug might be available as a generic. Among the hopers, apparently, are President Obama (“In some ways,” he said recently, when asked about the Occupations, “they’re not that different from some of the protests that we saw coming from the Tea Party”) and Vice-President Biden (“Look, there’s a lot in common with the Tea Party”). Occupy Wall Street went to the air mattresses on September 17th. Not long after, statements of sympathy and outright endorsements started pouring into Zuccotti Park like donated pizzas. Nancy Pelosi, Al Gore, congressmen galore, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the editorial board of the Times, big unions like the Auto Workers, the Service Employees, the Teamsters, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. itself—it’s been quite a stampede. But translating the visionary protest of the Wall Street Occupiers into the grubby Washington politics of electoral calculation and legislative maneuvering is unlikely to be as easy as it was for the Tea Partiers and the Republicans.

The Tea Party is simply better adapted to—and, despite its angry face, less alienated from—the actually existing environment of American politics and government. Its purported fear of coöption didn’t stop it from accepting millions of dollars (and offers of “training”) from Astroturf outfits like the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity and Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, while Fox News and talk radio provided it with a ready-made apparatus for organizing and propaganda. The Tea Party has never doubted the efficacy of elections; it has focussed on officeholders and would-be officeholders all along. The paradigmatic Tea Party activity, in the summer of 2009, was to pack a local congressman’s “town hall” and shout imprecations against Obamacare. By 2010 it was all electoral politics, all the time. And all Republican: Tea Partiers helped hard-right novices defeat scores of “establishment” candidates in Republican primaries for federal, state, and local offices. The net effect on the November outcome was uncertain—though the Tea Party “energized the base” everywhere, some of its recruits were so extremist they blew winnable races—but the impact on Republican governance, if that’s the right word, was unmistakable.

On Capitol Hill, obstructionism descended into nihilism. Absent the Tea Party, a routine debt-ceiling squabble would never have metastasized into a terrifying episode of hostage-taking. Nor would a lineup of Republican Presidential candidates have unanimously rejected a debate moderator’s hypothetical debt-reduction deal of ten dollars in spending cuts for every dollar in increased revenue. Nor would those candidates now be desperately outdoing one another with brutish demands for ever more tax relief for zillionaires. Nor, one suspects, would Republican governors and state legislatures be so brazenly enacting laws designed to prevent millions of voters with Democratic-leaning demographic profiles—such as voters who do not possess certain government-issued photo I.D.s—from exercising the franchise.

The paradigmatic activity of Occupy Wall Street and its many offshoots around the country was the establishment of impromptu encampments in symbolic public places. Now it’s mostly housekeeping, physical and spiritual. The Occupiers’ Web presence is impressive; its improvisatory openness has helped the movement go globally viral. On the ground, though, most of the protesters’ time and energy goes into site maintenance and into a rolling encounter-group-style mélange of meetings formal and informal. But, for all its inwardness and self-contemplation, the movement has achieved one obvious, and stunning, outward success. It has pierced the veil of silence that, for decades, has obscured the astounding growth of what can fairly be called plutocracy. Public opinion is beginning to realize that there are hard truths behind the Occupiers’ “99 per cent.” Last Tuesday, a CBS News/New York Times poll found that two-thirds of Americans agree that the nation’s bounty is unfairly distributed. The same day, that view got support from an unexpected quarter with the release of a Congressional Budget Office report, jointly commissioned several years ago by the Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate Finance Committee. The report affirmed that the after-tax income of the richest one per cent has nearly tripled since the eve of the nineteen-eighties, while the share of the least affluent eighty per cent has fallen—and that the declining progressivity of the tax code is part of the reason.

For O.W.S., though, there is danger ahead. Winter is coming. The strategy of static outdoor encampments is straining the patience even of sympathetic mayors in cities like Oakland, where last week riot police stormed the site and a Marine veteran was left in critical condition. If the weather and the cops pare the numbers in the camps, it’s far from unimaginable that ideologues in the mold of the Old New Left—people for whom the problem is “capitalism” per se, as opposed to a political economy rigged to benefit the rich at the expense of the rest—could end up dominant. As it is, the Occupiers’ brand of romantic participatory democracy can too easily render their decision-making vulnerable to a truculent few. In the most notorious example, Representative John Lewis, the revered civil-rights hero, was prevented from speaking at Occupy Atlanta—not because the crowd didn’t want to hear from him (the great majority did, as they signalled, in the movement’s semaphore language, with raised hands and wiggling fingers) but because one man clenched his fists and crossed his forearms, thereby exercising a consensus-breaking “block.” A vegan filibuster, you might say. The pollsters tell us that Americans like O.W.S.’s essential message. They like the Occupiers, too—not as much as they like the message, but more than they like the Tea Party. But if the pressures of hypothermia, frustration, and correcter-than-thou one-upmanship converge to push them toward more provocative, less mellow forms of civil disobedience—“occupying” a nice warm state capitol building, for example—the messengers will mess up the message. And the public will cross its fists.

Unlike the Tea Party, which was born when the alien/socialist enemy held all three of Washington’s elected redoubts, Occupy Wall Street inhabits a different political world, one whose most prominent figure, the President, has fallen short of not only many Occupiers’ hopes but also his own—in large part because of the Republicans’ conscienceless exploitation of the perverse veto points of the congressional machine. Yes, O.W.S. has “changed the conversation.” But talk, however necessary, is cheap. Ultimately, inevitably, the route to real change has to run through politics—the politics of America’s broken, god-awful, immutably two-party electoral system, the only one we have. The Tea Partiers know that. Do the Occupiers? ♦