Conservatives Should Support Occupy Wall Street

John Thorpe | Benzinga | November 1, 2011

We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately...What the elites truly fear is not the tea partiers or the occupiers, but the tea partiers and the occupiers TOGETHER. Imagine if both sides came together and announced a joint effort to eliminate the unholy marriage of government and business, so that neither side had the power to threaten our collective liberties? Imagine if liberals and conservatives agreed that, no matter what else we disagree on, we agree on this fundamental point: that power belongs to the people, and should be removed from the government and from corporations as quickly as humanly possible?

Once that is done, we can set about deciding what kind of political system we want. We can debate and vote and decide, among ourselves, the best answers for solving education, health care, the environment, the wars, the military, the budget, and everything else we've fought over for 40 years. We can do so without the undue influence of corporations and without the heavy hand of government dictating our every move.

Do you really want to argue that Americans cannot come together, regardless of political leanings, to simply get the job done? Do you want to argue that we cannot agree to disagree on some things, but still move the country forward?

After all, there are no liberal ideas and there are no conservative ideas. There are simply things that work and things that don't. Maybe the conservatives are right about taxes. Maybe they're wrong. Maybe the liberals are right about health care. Maybe they're wrong. The problem is, we can't get to the point where we honestly, publicly debate these issues because the current system is not democratic, is not a republic and is, in fact, beholden to the elites who now seek to divide us...