Perhaps it is simply the nature of politics that focused elites will inevitably take over movements where the members are doing things other than politics.

Are both the British Labour Party and the Republican Party are in the control of elites who fear the populism of its traditional, core membership?

//Danczuk’s logic is that Blair had a number of Old Labour stalwarts, like John Prescott, Alan Johnson and Alan Milburn, who appealed to Labour’s traditional constituency. By contrast, Miliband surrounds himself with career politicians and ex-academics turned MPs who will only alienate ordinary Labour voters. Now, this is both a pretty dim view of the electorate and a naïve view of Labour under Blair. Yes, a number of Blair’s cabinet ministers had proletarian backgrounds and cultivated gruff northern personas, but that didn’t prevent any of them from popularising the idea that Labour’s older voters were a tribe to be feared, loathed and, above all, controlled.

 It is the consequences of Labour’s loathing of its older, traditional constituency, not the fact it has shadow-cabinet ministers called Tristram, which has turned its voters towards UKIP. And if anyone personified the rise of sneering metropolitan values in Labour politics and beyond, it was the former poster boy for Islington’s dinner-party set, Tony Blair.

But even this is to miss the point about the Labour Party. Despite once having a working-class constituency, Labour has always been a reactionary and elite-driven organisation. It has always been led and run by well-to-do and high-minded types who hoped to save ‘the poor’ from their own vices. This has been reflected, not just in its paternalistic policies, but in Labour’s anti-democratic structure and its bureaucratic measures to prevent ordinary voters from having an influence within the party. Still, Labour has no worries about an influx of angry workers, or anyone else for that matter, joining its ranks any time soon. The phrase ‘empty shell’ springs to mind. But while Labour’s membership and appeal diminishes, its supporters’ capacity for delusion and fantasy-land thinking only gets bigger.//

Compare to the Republican elite opposition with the Tea Party.

More idiots wandering the streets in an unmedicated condition.

Zombie offers a photo-essay showing the level of psychosis at the OccupyMayDay protests.

What can you say about the kind of incoherence shown in the picture at right other than the person has an untreated psychosis? And, yet, this passes without notice among the Occupiers.

And in what universe does anyone think that there is a market for supporting Communism?   

But compare these pictures with the pictures of the San Francisco Tea Party rally.  And realize that it is the Tea Party that is branded as weird and extremist.                                                           

 

Compare and Contrast...

...Occupier v. Tea Partier

Preference Cascade - The Tea Party.

The Virginian argues that the "preference cascade" concept explains why the Tea Party movement formed in spite of the opposition and derision of the official political class.

The "Taranto Principle" may be a special case of "preference cascades."

What is the Taranto Principle? It is a principle laid down by the Wall Street Journal's perceptive editorialist, James Taranto. Mr. Taranto, in his column "Best of the Web Today," surveys the press and reports daily on their output with special emphasis on their contradictions, hypocrisies and — most deliciously — imbecilities. Like all other thoughtful observers of American press, Mr. Taranto recognizes that they are heavily biased toward the Democratic Party and the left in general.


Yet, while many who hold that this advances the Democratic Party and the left, Mr. Taranto believes that it has a harmful effect on left-wing politics, often causing left-wing candidates to lose at the polls.

According to the Taranto Principle, the press's failure to hold left-wingers accountable for bad behavior merely encourages the left's bad behavior to the point that its candidates are repellent to ordinary Americans. According to Mr. Taranto, in 2004 the press quietly went along with Senator Jean-Francois Kerry's exaggerated claims to heroism and military prowess, thus encouraging his braggadocio and leaving him utterly unprepared when his fellow vets stepped forward and demonstrated that he had been a dreadful showoff in Vietnam.