Time’s choice for 2011 Person of the Year—the Protester—arouses many a consideration.  The first Time-nominated Man of the Year was Charles Lindbergh in 1927, before everyone forgot that, on his flight, he wore a suit and tie.

Times have changed.  Hitler and Sta­lin were interesting Men of Their Years, and then dead ones.  Time marches on.  The Henry Luce era of the American century is today a memory, if that, and having lost its identity in the 1960’s, Time still somehow resists its disappearance into a digitalized haze.  This latest muted assertion of relevance may be the last one from Time.

Time’s globalist abstraction conflates the Tea Party with the Occupy Wall Street exhibitionists, and these irreconcilables with the varied protesters of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Russia, and so on.  The unnecessary and unjustifiable logical leaps instituted by Time reflect the very problems that the Tea Party of 2009 was organized to protest.

The Tea Party was, as its name suggests, organized to evoke some culture-specific associations that remind us of an original defiance of government.  The government was the problem then, and it is the problem now, because of its magnitude and arrogance.  The reaction to the Tea Party among the Talking Heads, the Beltway clerisy, and the anointed ones of the media made the challenge posed by that group most evident.  Such a protest has little to do with the Occupy movement, which is something else altogether.

That the Occupiers had something going for them—the grossness of the provocation—no one will reasonably deny.  But they are a deceptive bunch, even so.  In the first place, Wall Street is not suitable for occupying, nor is Zuccotti Park on Wall Street.  Beyond that, the trivialities of their attitude, the hygienic and other practical problems, and the essentially misleading quality of their politics have led to indifference and even dislike.  The purpose of the Occupiers was to claim that they were “the 99 percent”: The problem was the fat cats.  And here was the fallacy—because the financial disaster was aided and abetted not only by government, but also by much of the 99 percent, who maxed out their credit cards, took out second mortgages on their houses or first ones on McMansions in the desert, and in general were part of the problem.  The innocence of the Occupiers was and is a diversion and even a fraud: They were and are poseurs, intense in tents, and that on television.

To put it another way, the Tea Party appealed to reason, but the Occupiers were suspiciously romantic, though not as romantic as was the treatment of the Arab Spring.  Zing went the heartstrings of Tom Friedman, Nicholas Kristof, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, who outbid everyone in an ecstatic vision of global equality and respect for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons.  Perhaps that would indeed eventuate after the democratic sweethearts of Tahrir Square quit assaulting female journalists.

After various wars, revolutions, killings, bombings, and lies, the mystically democratic desires of peoples who have not known self-government are broadcast on the social networks and YouTube.  “Our” “government” has attempted to co-opt them, as it attempted to co-opt the Libyan rebels, and Time has followed suit.

But some, even many, will find difficulty in crediting whimsically asserted feelings as political propositions.  Opposing “inequality” means opposing the stratification of society, and therefore society itself.  It might even mean opposing nature.  It means opposing capitalism and private property.  It means the enforcement of quotas.  There are names for the imposition of “equality,” of course, and communism, socialism, national socialism, dictatorship, and tyranny are only some of them.  Those are hard names for a reason.  And there is a powerful strain in American history that values liberty, and only acknowledges equality as a status before the law.

There is moreover a powerful strain in civilization called reason, which tells us that sovereign nations would not be exposed to financial speculation if they kept control of their debt.  Modest debt would mean low interest rates, and confidence in bonds.  In such a situation, a financial downturn could be addressed through a stimulus, but not now.  And how did we get into this mess?  We somehow trusted the deceitfully assuring words of politicians on television.  And now we are supposed to trust the intentions of as yet unempowered politicians on the internet.  We have been here before, as for example in the early 70’s, when Hillary Rodham went after Richard Nixon before she unpacked her suitcase in Washington, D.C.  There isn’t anything sacrosanct about aggressive youth, after all.  They know less and have fewer wrinkles than the establishments they affect to despise, while seeking to become the next establishment.

And if the Occupy movement is incoherent about political science and economics, then we must also wonder about the Timely credibility of the global protests against various dictators.  To replace tyranny with self-government is quite a feat—one unlikely to be pulled off by a Protester without a Protestant Ethic.