Leonard Pitts mentions a revealing fact in a column on the “Occupy Wall Street” movement:

“By one measure at least, the movement that began with Occupy Wall Street is already bigger than the tea party ever was.

According to a report in the Washington Post, Occupy rallies were held in over 900 cities around the country and across the globe last weekend. The tea party is big, but it is not known to have had an impact in Barcelona, London, Tokyo, Johannesburg, Brussels, Munich, Rome, Sydney, Manila, Lisbon, Paris and Zurich.”

I consider this important because it is symptomatic of the difference in the movements. We all knew, almost instinctively, that OWS was a liberal movement, just as we all knew instinctively the “Tea Party” was a conservative one.

And liberals–cosmopolitans, as I like to say–are all over the world and, I think, feel a vague sense of unity with one another. Conservative nationalists are also all over the world, but they do not always feel the same unity, because, after all, what is good for one nation may not be good for another.

There are nationalist movements in every nation, and sometimes one is allied with another, but just as often they are in direct opposition. A cosmopolitan movement is by definition international. This, I suspect, is partly  how each movement was so easily sorted as “liberal” or “conservative”.