War of ideas on Wall Street: Flickr/David_Shankbone.

The Occupy Wall Street protests that started in New York have proved contagious. Sit-ins and attempted occupations have spread to other major American cities including Chicago, Boston, Seattle, and Atlanta, as well as across the Atlantic to Europe, and to Hong Kong and other Asian cities, along with parts of Africa and Latin America.

On Saturday there were more internationally coordinated protests. Julian Assange addressed the crowd in London, while parts of Rome were trashed and scores of people injured in rioting after hundreds of thousands of marchers turned out. Sizable gatherings took place in many other European cities.

The ‘Occupy’ phenomenon was almost business as usual in countries including Spain, Greece, and Chile, where protests and dissent have long been raging against high unemployment and government austerity measures.

In a very modest manner, the revolt has even spread to Australia, despite what Donald Horne ironically dubbed the ‘Lucky Country’ having an unemployment rate almost half that of the US and a quarter Spain’s. Melbourne’s City Square and Sydney’s Martin Place have hosted small numbers of ‘occupiers’ over the last few days.

The Conversation asked a range of academics for their views on the protests. More will be added as they arrive.

Murray Bessette, Assistant Professor of Government, School of Public Affairs, Morehead State University

Ever since the Tea Parties began in early 2009, liberals in America have been hoping for a similar political awakening on the left. The advent of the Occupy Wall Street Protests little more than a month ago in New York City, and their subsequent spread to several other cities in the United States, is seen by many as such a movement.

To a certain extent this understanding is accurate.

The Parties and Protests alike consist of individuals dissatisfied with the political status quo and with the failure of political elites not only to address their concerns, but also to formulate public policy in light of them. Both movements, moreover, are fundamentally populist, and have found themselves subject to efforts to guide them, to influence them, even to take them over by the very elites (the Republican Party on the one hand, the Democratic Party and their union allies on the other) who have failed to deliver to date. The one point of genuine agreement worthy of note is the common opposition to the current system of crony capitalism characterized by bailouts and subsidies for the politically connected.

It is not without reason, then, that liberals in America are hopeful that the Occupy crowd can energize and invigorate the left-leaning part of the electorate for the 2012 elections, just as the Tea Partiers did for the right-leaning electorate in 2010.

These hopes, however, will likely go unfulfilled.

Whereas the Tea Parties are rooted in conservative and libertarian ideas, the Wall Street protests reflect liberal and socialist ones. The Tea Partiers profess a consistent message promoting the idea of limited government: lower spending, less taxation, and fewer regulations. The Wall Streeters demands are diametrically opposed: more spending, higher taxes on the wealthy, and further regulation. Partiers call for a return to the founding principles that made America exceptional. Protestors call for revolution to make America like the states failing at the moment in Europe.

The Tea Party positions in every case are those that still resonate with the broad spectrum of the American public, they are those that most Americans still identify with freedom. The class-warfare advocated by the Occupy crowd has never resonated with more than the sliver of the American electorate that lies furthest to the left. While no one knows what the future holds, this ideological inconsistency with the American mind will prove for now to be an insurmountable obstacle to the expansion of the Occupy movement to anywhere near the size and political potency of the Tea Party.

Click here to read more assessments on the Occupy Movement.