Everything else being equal, all it might have taken to put me off Occupy Wall Street was a widely circulated photo of an overweight Jerry Garcia lookalike wearing nothing but a loincloth, dancing barefoot and tootling on a flute.

That said, things are very far from being equal. Or even halfway fair.

Which partly accounts for the near-hysteria on the Fox News/Limbaugh right.  To them, the guy with the flute is no harmless eccentric, but a terrible threat. An excitable columnist in my local newspaper described Occupy Wall Street protesters as an “unwashed, whining, smelly mob occupying and infesting Wall Street.”

Infesting, no less. “The Flea Party,” the man called them, blood-sucking insects “being paid by big-bucks special interests … to create violent confrontations.” Elsewhere, he likened the protesters to Nazis.

The author gave no evidence of said conspiracy; his was sheer paranoia. Meanwhile, the only big-bucks special interest in sight would be Americans for Prosperity, funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, which employs Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Mike Masterson’s wife as “Director of Grassroots for Arkansas,” i.e., as a professional Tea Party activist.

Nice work if you can get it.

I mention this not because it’s unusual or highly significant. Rather, it’s the way of the world. Many Washington pundits have grown accustomed to cozy arrangements with the various Scrooge McDuck think tanks, or have been drawn into sympathy with what Teddy Roosevelt called “malefactors of great wealth” through the seductive rewards of TV celebrity.

That’s one big reason why with millions of Americans unemployed over the past three years, everybody in Washington’s been worried about budget deficits. In a courtier society, only the nobility really counts.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s what’s making professional right-wingers jumpy, as described by Rolling Stone’s resident hothead Matt Taibbi: “The reality is that Occupy Wall Street and the millions of Middle Americans who make up the Tea Party are natural allies and should be on the same page about most of the key issues.”

That’s not going to happen over the short term. The populist left, such as it is, has long had the dream of persuading working- and middle-class Americans to ignore the “tribal” differences that divide them—regional, racial, religious and cultural—to vote their shared economic self-interest.

Except during times of grave national danger—the Great Depression, for example—it’s pretty much remained a dream. Taibbi’s point, however, is that the ongoing economic crisis created by Wall Street greed and recklessness makes it possible that a new movement taking aim at incestuous political and financial corruption in Washington might have a chance.

Breaking up “too-big-to-fail” banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, for example, might be an issue left and right could coalesce around. Just last week, Citigroup agreed to pay a $285 million settlement to the SEC to settle charges that it swindled mainly institutional investors like pension funds in a billion-dollar derivatives scam—deliberately creating junk securities based upon bad mortgages, then shorting them in the market.

Goldman Sachs paid $550 million for similar offenses in 2010.

Accountants who embezzle a few thousand bucks from their employers go to prison. Crooked used car dealers go out of business. Wall Street bankers whose fraudulent schemes caused millions of ordinary Americans to lose their homes, however, got government bailouts, soon returned to business as usual, and now whine that President Obama says bad things about them.

Conceding that it’s hard explaining complex financial scams to citizens enthralled by celebrity dance contests, Taibbi sees Wall Street chicanery as “an issue for the traditional ‘left’ because it’s a classic instance of overweening corporate power—but it’s an issue for the traditional ‘right’ because these same institutions are also the biggest welfare bums of all time, de facto wards of the state.”

That’s a useful metaphor, but nothing more politically. In today’s climate GOP audiences cheer presidential candidates who spend two hours promising jobs, then tell unemployed workers it’s their own damn fault.

Economic justice will require a long-term struggle. Shorter term, neither party will propose legislation Wall Street hates. Occupy Wall Street’s wise to resist being co-opted.

That’s also why it absolutely must not succumb to 1968-style revolutionary romanticism. A couple of Molotov cocktails could ruin everything.

But that does not mean comparisons to the Tea Party should be dismissed. There are striking parallels between the two movements when viewed through the lenses of politics, society and history.

Some similarities are obvious. The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street both oppose the bailouts of the banks orchestrated by the two parties in Washington. The two movements are thick with people who feel they have little say in the political process. And supporters on each side think the middle-class “American dream” is nearly extinct.

As social forces, the resemblance deepens. I have interviewed protesters at Zuccotti Park and Tea Party members who discuss their involvement in comparable terms. They speak of a personal “awakening,” of finding inspiration in a gathering of kindred spirits, and of not having been political before. In fact, both movements thrive on bringing new people into politics. Each creates a new notion of “the people.”

The Tea Party’s rallying cries include “we the people” and “take America back.” Its vision of the people is of self-reliant, industrious and frugal Americans who through moral example and political force would return this country to the greatness pioneered by the Founding Fathers. The Occupy Wall Street movement is inchoate, but already chants of “the 99%” offer another version of the people: those whose dreams and aspirations have been squashed by the greedy and power-hungry, but who can revive fairness and justice as national ideals.

For both, the legitimate people is complemented by the illegitimate other. For the Tea Party, the other is embodied by liberals, unions, illegal immigrants, Muslims, welfare recipients and Obama. For the Occupy Wall Street movement, the others are the 1 percent, the catch-all for bankers, corporate executives, the super-rich and their political allies who have an iron grip on the economy and politics.

Another similarity is that the success of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street is owed to their vagueness, at least initially. Each has united disparate coalitions under their respective banners. The Tea Party’s historic references appeal to people who feel that social and political changes in the last few decades have made their country unrecognizable. It unites those who oppose unions and immigration, favor small government (apart from the sprawling military-security apparatus), want a return to the gold standard, cuts in social spending, unlimited gun rights and less regulation of business and markets. The common theme is that parasitical and selfish groups have sapped America’s wealth and power.

Likewise, the Occupy Wall Street movement has been criticized for a lack of demands, but when you speak to supporters they have no lack of ideas: better-paying jobs, government-funded jobs, single-payer healthcare, debt forgiveness, a moratorium on home foreclosures, cutting defense spending, saving Social Security and Medicare, strengthening unions. One secret of its success, analogous to the Tea Party’s obsession with the undeserving, is that it allows many groups and individuals to see their demands as equivalent to everyone else’s because the opponent is the same: Wall Street.

Most Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street partisans feel something has gone fundamentally wrong in America, and they are united in envisioning a different type of society. It’s a mistake to reduce either movement to politics or policy. Each is motivated by values and idealized ways of relating to one another. But this is where the differences become stark.

The Tea Party embraces heroic, rugged individualism where freedom and liberty are best secured through the free market. In reality, though, the Tea Party ideology often evokes an exurban nostalgia for white supremacy. Tea Party members rage against deficits run up by an African-American president with an anger never directed at his deficit-prone predecessor. Their disdain for government subsidies rarely extends to the interest deduction for homeowners, funding for the interstate highway system, crop support payments  and other state supports for a suburban or rural lifestyle.

On the other hand, Occupy Wall Street believes in a more collective economy and decision-making process, as seen in the General Assembly and free exchange of goods in Zuccotti Park and other occupation sites. Activists think increasing access to public goods — starting with the public squares themselves — is the way to achieve social harmony.

These radically divergent worldviews are matched by distinct demographics. The average member of the Tea Party is in his or her 50s, whereas the typical Wall Street occupier looks to be a recent college graduate. This probably explains why the two also have different relations to history. The Tea Party romanticizes the American Revolution, while Occupy Wall Street is inspired by more contemporary uprisings in Europe and the Arab world in which youth say they are trying to reclaim the future.

It would be tempting to define the divide between those who support an unfettered free market because government has too much power versus those who want a robust social welfare state (or even socialism) because corporations have too much power. But that is just part of it. The fact that genuinely popular movements could blossom so quickly at both political poles indicates how hollow the political center has become.

The Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements may have diametrically opposed visions of society and power relations, but they both appeal to growing ranks of people who believe the system no longer works for them. Whatever their differences they present a similar challenge that will not disappear because of some policy reforms or reshuffling of the cast in Washington.

Nonetheless, it should be emphasized: Comparisons between the 2012 and 1964 GOP races completely miss the mark, and treating the current contest as a repeat of Goldwater vs. Rockefeller is a poor way to understand the evolution of the Republican Party since the 1960s and how Romney fits into it today.

The most important thing to realize about the Nelson Rockefeller who ran for president in 1964 is that he was an authentic political liberal, a believer in the power of government to fix the nation’s biggest problems, and he made essentially no effort to hide it. He favored strong civil rights laws, expansive anti-poverty programs, and major investments in education, healthcare and conservation. And the most important thing to realize about the Republican Party of 1964 is that to many of its leaders and rank-and-file members there was nothing at all alarming about Rockefeller’s liberalism. It was common in a party that was littered with Northeast moderates and liberals and light on conservative white southerners.

There was a burgeoning conservative movement in the party, though, and it rallied around Goldwater, a second-term Arizona senator (and the only non-Southern Republican to join the unsuccessful Senate filibuster of that year’s Civil Rights Act). Believing the numbers were on his side, Rockefeller openly attacked the Goldwater faction and its “extremism” and made little effort to modulate his own liberal rhetoric. That he ended up losing didn’t necessarily mean that Rockefeller’s calculation was wrong. His own scandalous divorce and the Goldwater camp’s shrewd understanding and manipulation of the delegate selection process were probably the two biggest factors in the outcome. (The coast-to-coast primary campaigns that we are now familiar with didn’t exist in ’64, when only a handful of state contests were contested.)

The Goldwater-Rockefeller race, in other words, represented a clash of seriously conflicting ideologies, with each man promising to lead the party in a fundamentally different direction. In victory, Goldwater crafted the most conservative platform the Republican Party had ever seen; had Rockefeller prevailed, that document would have looked far different. This is nothing like the situation today. The great ideological battle within the Republican Party is over (and it has been for a while), with Goldwater-style conservatism prevailing — and with Tea Party absolutism taking hold in the Obama era. The party’s convention next summer will be filled with very conservative delegates who will approve a very conservative platform no matter which candidate emerges from the primaries. And if that candidate is elected president, he or she would be risking a debilitating intraparty mutiny by straying too far from the platform.

This is why the Romney-as-Rockefeller comparisons aren’t very helpful. Romney just isn’t running the kind of campaign that Rockefeller ran. Ever since he decided to give up on winning elections in Massachusetts and pursue the presidency, Romney has been tailoring his positions and rhetoric to the very conservative base of the national GOP, throwing out his old beliefs if need be. Rockefeller happily picked fights with the right, but Romney has been doing everything he can to make conservatives believe he’s just like them. If he wins the nomination, Romney will presumably affirm a platform that calls for repealing healthcare reform, outlawing abortion, protecting “traditional marriage,” extending the Bush tax cuts in perpetuity, undoing the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms, radically curbing the EPA’s power, and opposing the “class warfare” agenda of Democrat — just as all of his opponents would.

So why is Romney frequently portrayed as a moderate? There are three reasons. The first is that he absolutely was a moderate — or at least presented himself as one — in his Massachusetts days. The second is that it’s in the interest of his opponents, like Gingrich, to claim that he still is one. And the third is that he’s adopted a more restrained style in this campaign; four years ago, Romney missed no opportunity to toss red meat at the base, but this time he’s played the role of November-minded front-runner and held back.

The key, though, is that he’s shown almost no interest in antagonizing the GOP base’s Tea Party sensibilities. About the closest he’s come is on healthcare with his refusal to claim that his own Massachusetts law was a mistake and to beg forgiveness for it. But it’s easier to read this as a practical consideration than a Rockefeller-like stand of ideological defiance: Suddenly claiming that his biggest single achievement in Massachusetts (one that he bragged about as recently as 2008) was one giant mistake would make his image as a flip-flopper much worse and carry potentially serious general election consequences. Short of saying he was wrong, though, Romney is doing everything else imaginable to convince the Tea Party right that he’s as committed to dismantling ObamaCare and doing nothing to replace it as they are.

And if you put healthcare aside, there really aren’t any big spots where post-Massachusetts Mitt is out of step with his party — which explains why Rush Limbaugh felt comfortable pronouncing Romney the embodiment of “all three legs of the conservative stool” just three years ago.

The comparisons to 1964 just don’t compute. Back then, Republicans were asked to choose between two completely different directions for their party. But today, the direction is already set. The GOP is a deeply conservative party that will nominate a candidate for president who publicly commits himself or herself to a deeply conservative agenda. This isn’t to diminish Romney’s problems within the party; there is clearly a strong sense among conservatives that he secretly clings to moderate beliefs and that he’d betray them as president. But a different parallel is probably more apt: It’s not so much Nelson Rockefeller from 1964 whom Romney is channeling; it’s George H.W. Bush from 1988.

* * *

I was on MSNBC’s “Hardball” Friday night with Matt Kibbe from FreedomWorks and talked about Romney’s moderate reputation and his struggle to win over the GOP base:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy