More anger, more waiting

In the spring of 2009, Jeff Musselman found himself in Washington, D.C., at one of the earliest tea party rallies. He and thousands of others were protesting the nation's busted political system.

This morning, you can probably find the rangy Old Dominion University student in Commercial Park, occupying Norfolk and doing the same.

The Chesapeake native is the kind of guy who would freak out Washington, if Washington bothered to pay attention to him.

His message is simple and descriptive: American democracy is broken. Money broke it.

The only people who argue with that premise are the corporations, unions and the wealthiest individual contributors. Oh, and the politicians who get rich and powerful in the process.

Whether a tea partier or occupy whatever-er, the folks who have taken to the street in the past few years have done so because American politics in 2011 doesn't routinely care one whit what most of us think. Instead of listening to the message from the streets, Washington finds some excuse to marginalize anyone who points that out.

And so the tea party becomes an angry tricorn caricature right up until the moment it is absorbed into the Republican Party. The occupy movement becomes a festival of incoherent and unemployed hippies trashing America's cities.

Neither, of course, is anywhere close to the truth. But the opprobrium is predictable from a political class desperate to maintain the status quo. After all, imagine the damage those folks could do to a sweet scam.

At that scam's heart, a few donors are able to buy politicians, parties, PACs, pundits. The resulting political horror show is defined by bribes masquerading as contributions resulting in an institutional system of double-dealing that makes the most corrupt banana republic look like a paragon of rectitude.

This corruption is where you'll find the birth pangs of crony capitalism, of an overcomplicated tax code that gives its advantages to those who least need it, of a regulatory structure that is an array of impossible standards, of a monumental federal bureaucracy built to support it all.

Through the years, I've thought that public financing was the solution to fundamentally immoral politics. Auctions. Pooled contributions. Completely opening the system. Completely closing it.

In the end, I still have no idea.

At this point, all I can tell you is that there's a problem, that it was exacerbated by an overly ideological Supreme Court, and that if it isn't soon arrested, American democracy will be well and truly sold to the highest bidder.

All of which apparently makes me a member of both Occupy Norfolk and the tea party, though I haven't spent an evening in the park and I think listening to Glenn Beck is punishment.

A quartet of occupiers - occupants - came in to talk with the Editorial Board this week, and they were as unclear about how to fix the problem as I have been for the past several paragraphs.

"We feel like we're drowning," said Dariel Clark, a student at Old Dominion. "We get our head above water for like 30 seconds, and then we get dragged back down."

And if that is an apt description of the current economy, the lack of help is no surprise.

"There's so much lobbying that politicians end up representing corporations rather than people who elected them," said Anita Cafiero, who runs Path Norfolk, a vegan restaurant.

It's no wonder people are angry in America, that it has become our existential stance in a punishing economy. Even if we're not waking up in Commercial Park, we still wake up frustrated with the system, frustrated with the lack of change, frustrated with the pats on the head from the political class, frustrated as real grievances become talking points.

And through it all, the symbiosis between elected officials and their sponsors grows worse with every day. As my 15-year-old put it: The only people who can fix the problem are the ones benefiting from it. So why would they?

The answer, of course, is they won't. Instead, they'll wait out the anger. Wait for the tea party to be softened and absorbed by the system, wait for the occupants to get cold. Wait for everyone to go back to families, jobs, lives.

A few minutes before the meeting was due to end, Musselman stood up from the table. He had to go to work.

Donald Luzzatto is The Pilot's editorial page editor. Email: donald.luzzatto@pilotonline.com.