In our dour moment in which citizens of all stripes are taking to the streets, the plazas, and the parks, we see accusing placards, but no persuasive manifestos. As sociologist William Gamson has pointed out, the first step is to demonstrate an “injustice frame” as a precursor to action. Point taken, but it is a start.

Despite their manifold and manifest differences, the polyester Tea Party and the scruffy Occupy Wall Street protests have at least this in common: palpable anger and resentment. We feel at the mercy of distant puppet masters, and elites in pinstripes and in gowns have much to answer for.

Neither the Partiers nor the Occupiers are wrong to recognize the sway of elites, even if they are not sufficiently aware of those powers that stand behind their own movements: David Koch, the Alliance for Global Justice, and FreedomWorks. Anti-elites are the playthings of the powerful.

Yet, despite their backers, both the Partiers and the Occupiers are solidly 99%’ers. Both radicals of the left and upstarts of the right think that there is not so much difference between the Bush Administration and the Obama Administration. The oil establishment and the financial services establishment could share breakfast of caviar and champagne, discussing whether their interests are better served by this president or the last one. Peasants with pitchforks are on no guest lists, whether they dress in denim or dacron. Despite partisan bickering, it is easy to feel that on the basic issues of security and capital the gap between competing establishments is small. I am struck by how little fundamental restructuring, hope and change has brought. The same powers will control health care, energy development, and financial services.

The fatal illusion of the Tea Party Movement is that America could have a smaller government, without programs cut, and more freedom, by allowing those with control to have less oversight. The Tea Partiers treasure the idea of a stripped down government, but what they call for is a government that provides largess without controlling that largess. A sincere Tea Party would be talking about slashing safety nets and insuring that small businesses can compete against corporations that, in effect, operate as governments. The Tea Party supports in fact a conservative movement whose desires are sure to permit few of its dreamy members to enter that one-percent. (At least the collegiate corner of Occupy Wall Street movement has a few budding oligarchs in their midst). The grievances are real, but blurred, and the solution of freezing government spending at past levels is dishonest in its unwillingness to make tough choices about programs.

The Occupy Wall Street collective also has its illusions. Are they socialists, naïfs, the distraught, or simply leeches? Whichever it is, they too smell rotten fish. In order to establish a movement – a congregation of collegiate radicals, union members, and impoverished minorities – these occupiers of tiny bits of public space drew a cartoonish enemy: the super wealthy fat cat, erasing the class fractions of Barbra Streisand, David Koch, Glenn Beck, Oprah, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet. And they are right in that each, despite varied political positions, demands social stability, governed by those wise oligarchs that they prefer.

But something essential is missing. It is what George H. W. Bush ineptly, if memorably, called the “vision thing.” I have observed a South Carolina Tea Party rally and a Washington OWS encampment, and in both cases, I was struck by an absence of a call to greatness. Consequential leaders – Kennedy, Reagan, King, Bush in the days after 9/11, and campaigner Obama – have persuaded us that we are a city on a hill, imbued with destiny. Effective movements begin in grievance, but end in achievement. Ultimately, neither group has a vision of America transformed, bathed in golden light. Who speaks for a revived America in which we reconsider our institutions? It is easy to ask for more and cheaper student loans, a safety net for home buyers, banks that can never fail, and Medicare for everyone, all on the cheap. But will this produce a robust nation? Anger is a tonic whose bitter tang is but a jolt. To last, an infusion of communal faith is what matters. The Partiers and the Occupiers taste a jangly, acrid past; what they need is to brew a chamomile future.

Beyond the 1937-like craze in Congress today over cutting the budget deficit, there is a more serious debate going on in the US over how to stimulate aggregate economic demand in order to spur more rapid job growth. In this debate, there are competing views over whether to raise spending or cut taxes – sometimes referred to as left Keynesians and right Keynesians. Macroeconomists have mainly favored the spending route because the historical evidence is that spending gives more bang for the deficit buck since the initial impact brings a one-for-one boost to demand, while a tax cut initially loses some bang because tax cut recipients initially save a part of their higher disposable income. But there is agreement among those who engage in this debate that tax cuts too will stimulate demand and job growth, especially when they are aimed at lower income Americans who spend more of their disposable income on the margin than do the rich.

In fact, the greatest moment of success of Keynesian policy in the history of the United States is not the New Deal, as is often claimed by proponents of greater deficit spending in the current crisis. The height of the influence and success of Keynesian policy advisers was the Kennedy administration’s income tax cut of $13.5 billion over three years. The policy was strongly urged by President Kennedy’s Council of Economic Advisers, led by the great American Keynesian economists James Tobin, Walter Heller and Arthur Okun. Facing unemployment rates around 7 percent, the economists sought to bring it down to 4 percent. By early 1964 (after Kennedy’s death), the proposal was passed into law. The tax cut is attributed with moving the economy to 4 percent unemployment and a very high rate of capacity utilization. In his history of that era, Michael Bernstein (A Perilous Progress) writes that “by the fall of 1964 the success of the tax cut was so apparent that, in the words of Arthur Okun, ‘economists were riding about as high a crest of esteem and respect …as had ever been achieved.’ ” It was the bold advice of Democrats Heller, Tobin and Okun that initially established the Council of Economic Advisers as an important political institution.

Kennedy had the luxury of a Congress controlled by the Democrats. Today, President Obama does not have this luxury. Thus, a leader who understands the desperate need for stimulating demand also faces a Congress that will not move an inch in the direction of left Keynesianism. Obama’s jobs proposal recognizes the essential need for demand stimulus, that fallacy of the right-wing argument that a higher deficit in the short-run creates damaging psychological uncertainty, and the political reality that right Keynesianism may be the only route to demand stimulus. While the proposal of $447 billion in deficit stimulus, $253 billion of which takes the form of tax cuts, is too small and comes disappointingly late in the business cycle, it nonetheless represents a very positive step in the current landscape of economic policy. In two senses, then, President Obama has done the right thing.

As a rule, we do not post on weekends. But because of the rapidly approaching hurricane and the likelihood of a power outage, I offer today these thoughts inspired by Michael Corey’s last Deliberately Considered post, celebrating the new Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the Washington Mall, and by Cornel West’s op.ed. piece criticizing the Memorial and Barack Obama in yesterday’s New York Times. -Jeff

I am not a big fan of Cornel West. I liked and learned from his book The American Evasion of Philosophy, but most of his other books and articles involve, in my judgment, little more then posturing and preaching to the converted (I in the main am one of them). He does not take seriously the challenges political life presents. As he shouts slogans, cheers and denounces, I am not sure that he persuades. His and Travis Smiley’s ongoing criticism of President Obama seem to me to be first personal, then political, more the work of celebrity critics than critical intellectuals. That said, I think West’s op.ed. piece has a point, though not as it is directed against Obama and against the importance of symbolism.

“The age of Obama has fallen tragically short of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy…

As the talk show host Tavis Smiley and I have said in our national tour against poverty, the recent budget deal is only the latest phase of a 30-year, top-down, one-sided war against the poor and working people in the name of a morally bankrupt policy of deregulating markets, lowering taxes and cutting spending for those already socially neglected and economically abandoned. Our two main political parties, each beholden to big money, offer merely alternative versions of oligarchic rule.”

This is unserious. The two parties are very different, and Obama has clearly been trying to address the needs of the socially and economically abandoned in his battle against the Republicans and so called moderate Democrats in Congress: on healthcare policy, financial regulation and jobs. A debt default would not only have hurt Wall Street and Main Street businesses. It would have profoundly affected the poor and working people for whom West and Smiley claim to be speaking. Perhaps, Obama doesn’t negotiate in the most effective way. Perhaps, he has given in more than was required. But to assert that the two parties “offer merely alternative versions of oligarchic rule,” is to ignore crucial realistic differences.

Certainly Obama is not a revolutionary, as West imagines he should be, following his particular vision of the King legacy. But, the office of the President is not where social revolutionaries are likely to be found. Revolutions and their revolutionaries, as West, Obama, King and I would agree, are usually elsewhere, particularly in the sustained actions of social movements. They push Presidents, as Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement pushed Lyndon Baines Johnson, and President Kennedy before him.

West blames Obama for one important social movement, The Tea Party. The most eloquent of politicians, in West’s judgment, has failed in his primary story telling responsibility.

“The absence of a King-worthy narrative to reinvigorate poor and working people has enabled right-wing populists to seize the moment with credible claims about government corruption and ridiculous claims about tax cuts’ stimulating growth. This right-wing threat is a catastrophic response to King’s four catastrophes; its agenda would lead to hellish conditions for most Americans.”

Yet, the Tea Party is a radical response to the narrative of inclusion and opportunity that Obama forcefully has presented in his campaign and during his Presidency. The consequential fight against the Tea Party narrative cannot come primarily from the President, as I have analyzed in an earlier post. The fight has had to come from a social movement. Strong opponents of the Tea Party, like West, need to take the movement seriously and need to go beyond the leftist sentiment that whines about Obama’s failings. A movement has to directly oppose the Tea Party and push for different social values, a movement such as the one that seems to be developing since the pro worker confrontations in Madison, Wisconsin and beyond.

Here I agree with West that “extensive community and media organizing; civil disobedience; and life and death confrontations with the powers that be” are necessary. I just don’t understand why he imagines this as being something directed against Obama. It should, rather, push him on specific issues, and work against his significant opponents. Clearly, he is likely to bend in favorable ways, while the Republican alternative political leaders will likely continue to resist social change with all the power of the Tea Party behind them.

I also don’t get West’s concern about the symbolism of the new King memorial in DC. He seems to think that there is a choice between symbolism and substance and thinks that King was on substance’s side.

“King weeps from his grave. He never confused substance with symbolism. He never conflated a flesh and blood sacrifice with a stone and mortar edifice. We rightly celebrate his substance and sacrifice because he loved us all so deeply. Let us not remain satisfied with symbolism because we too often fear the challenge he embraced.”

Yet, King used symbols brilliantly, especially in his speeches, to achieve substantial goals. The monument doesn’t stand against substance, but contributes to the vocabulary of the alternative narrative that West calls for.

Words etched in stone, on the Washington Mall, at the symbolic center of the American Republic, as Michael Corey describes in his last post, provide the opportunity and inspiration for critical discussion such as West’s. He uses the symbolism of the inauguration of the monument to present his criticisms, but denies the importance of the symbol, revealing a limited self-awareness.

In the future, I am rather certain, there will be demonstrations, moving from the Lincoln Memorial, to the King Memorial, perhaps with activity as well at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Indeed, a walk around these places and discussion about the walk will enact and describe the alterative narrative to the Tea Party, as it most certainly will be inspired by King’s vision. And when President Obama takes part in the hurricane postponed official dedication of the monument in a few weeks, I won’t be surprised if he presents a compelling version of this narrative.