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[benjipwns]

Given up for dead, the leftist movement born in Zuccotti Park had an unlikely big year—but it’s still not clear how its supporters can turn its energy into permanent wins.

it was five years ago today that hundreds of activists descended on New York City’s Zuccotti Park, 5 blocks from the New York Stock Exchange, to “Occupy Wall Street”— a blunt but effective idea that resonated far wider that their original numbers would ever suggest. The organizers were shrouded in mystery. Their goals were vague. But they sought to emulate the social-media driven protests in Egypt that (briefly) toppled a dictator and, in the words of one organizer “rise up and reform the global economic system.”

The round-the-clock encampment and “general assembly” lasted for two months and gained national attention before being forcibly shut down, but not before sparking a multitude of protests around the world and permanently altering the national dialogue about economic inequality. It's because of Occupy that today we regularly hear broadsides against “the 1 percent” and critiques about the system rigged for the rich.

Since then, Occupy as a functioning movement has largely ceased to be. Its mirror-image populist rival, the Tea Party, had a higher arc and more immediate political success, channeling its anti-Wall Street conservatism into enough midterm electoral wins to get a genuine seat at the table in Congress.

But in 2016, to a degree nobody expected, Occupy finally got its moment on the national stage. You could even argue that its heart is now beating more loudly than that of the Tea Party, whose momentum has been gutted by the raw and ideologically impure populism of Donald Trump. This year, Bernie Sanders rode a wave of Occupy energy to do what no self-described socialist had ever done: win more than 20 presidential primary contests and play a major role in shaping a major party platform.

Today, it's Occupy rather than the Tea Party that can claim some ascendancy: the banner of the Tea Party’s extreme fiscal conservatism is carried by fewer congressional Republicans, who are seen as pesky nuisance by Republican leaders who just want to keep the government open. Meanwhile, the Democratic presidential nominee is leaning on Sanders and his progressive energy in order to keep the party coalition together.

But even in a moment of relative triumph, the movement formerly known as Occupy still faces the challenge it was born with. Its leaders need to do something they, and many millennial activists, appear allergic to doing: build a centralized, top-down, hierarchical organization, and prioritize a few key policy goals. Otherwise their movement stands ready to vanish into the administrative priorities of Hillary Clinton, precisely the kind of candidate they arose to run against.

Big challenges remain for those who want Occupy’s embers to once again become a roaring fire. Clinton’s fervent belief in working within the system and comfortable relationships with Wall Street titans make her an unlikely vehicle for radical change. And the most likely electoral outcome—a Democratic presidency with at least one Republican-controlled house of Congress—does not create the conditions for a radical break with the status quo. Small-bore compromises along with, in the most optimistic of scenarios, breakthroughs on a few pressing issues, will be in the offing. The most that a revitalized Occupy movement can expect to accomplish is to rally enough grassroots pressure to deprive bipartisan proposals with sufficient support from the left to pass. Realizing left-wing goals like breaking up the banks or enacting single-payer health care will remain mere dreams.

Despite its high point this year, the movement is likely to remain hobbled by the strategy that limited it in the first place: its commitment to a decentralized, mostly leaderless vision of activism. That ethos prompted many Bernie Sanders’ aides to quit his Our Revolution organization, on the grounds that the group would be raising fat checks instead of building a bottom-up grassroots movement. It also shapes Black Lives Matter, another movement that has done a better job driving conservation than locking down policy wins. (A Black Lives Matter-related group recently unveiled an ambitious list of 40 policy recommendations, but in going far beyond its original focus on police brutality into areas such as the military budget and slavery reparations, the effort is likely to be too diffuse to secure concrete victories.)

 

[Valhelm]

Occupy will never be relevant without direction. Unless statistically significant numbers of Americans take to the streets, committed and professional organizers are necessary to focus on solving specific problems.

 

[sphagnum]

I almost quit a job to go camping out at Zuccotti and then it got shut down like a week later.

Still probably would've been a better decision.