Last weekend’s “Tea Party Protest” of conservative activists in Washington, D.C., provided another example of the growing trend toward the loss of popular social movements in the United States. Despite the protest’s fringe anti-government message, it attracted considerable media attention. However, it wasn’t the remarkable magnitude or substance of the protest that garnered the interest of the media and politicians. Instead, the interest was attributable to the relative novelty such a protest engenders in America today.In the months after the 40th Anniversary of Woodstock, we live in a country that is waging two wars, emerging from the most severe recession since the Great Depression, struggling to provide health care for its citizens and facing a looming environmental crisis. Yet, the most notable movement our society displays before the world is a small group of people who believe our president is a “socialist” and wasn’t born in the United States.As a result, American society is losing the generational capability for mass social movements that inspired the great social progress of the 1960s. When one looks at the recent narratives of contemporary social movements, the evidence points strongly to the corporatization and dissolution of social causes into a managed movement for political gain.Take this “Tea Party Protest” as an example. While the members of the protest desperately try to brand themselves as grassroots opposition to “big government,” they are instead serving the political interests of opportunistic Republican political organizations. The most notable is Dick Armey’s “Freedomworks,” which is heavily backed by corporate dollars, to delay the president’s health care and energy agendas.The movement against the war in Iraq is another example. While Cindy Sheehan was the most visible face of the movement, it was quickly folded under the wing of MoveOn.org. In the years prior to the 2008 presidential election, MoveOn capitalized on the anti-war sentiment and turned it into a political issue to attack a Republican president. Instead of a nonpartisan peace movement to realign American foreign policy, the momentum stopped with the election of President Obama.Not only did the anti-war cause virtually stop with the election of President Obama in 2008 with his promise to end the Iraq war, but much of the young generation’s enthusiasm used to elect him has largely fizzled. This is seen in the notable lack of a social movement that would act in support of his health care and environmental agenda. The last time I checked there weren’t 75,000 screaming young people marching to the Capitol demanding affordable health care.This recent trend in society may be due in part to the isolating and paradoxical effect social networking technology has had on our society. One would think that Facebook would facilitate the type of social interaction that is necessary for a social movement. However, it has lowered the threshold for social engagement.Instead of actually partaking in an act of social or political activism, we are content to push a button and join a cause on Facebook as an expression of our sentiments. In some respects, this marks the ultimate destruction of the possibility for social cohesion because a for-profit entity now dictates the terms of people’s interaction.—-Contact The Daily Reveille’s opinion staff at [email protected]