"The Tea Partiers are high on this idea that the country consists of "water carriers" and "water drinkers" and that society is essentially zero-sum, with cracking down on the "water drinkers" being the only solution to society's problems."
You seem to have confused the Tea Party with the Occupy movement? I mean, both are sort of amorphous and all, but to the extent that they have a distinct identity from each other that would seem to be one of the core such differences, and that's where the Occupy movement shows up, not the Tea Party. It's basically a restatement of the 1%/99% motto.
In that respect, the tea-party-affiliated "53%" movement has more or less the same structure, but disagrees over how to split the water carrier/drinker boundary.
You seem to have confused the Tea Party with the Occupy movement? I mean, both are sort of amorphous and all, but to the extent that they have a distinct identity from each other that would seem to be one of the core such differences, and that's where the Occupy movement shows up, not the Tea Party. It's basically a restatement of the 1%/99% motto.