Thomas Frank: Why Occupy failed and how it's more like the Tea Party than anyone wants to admit

[coalition_unwilling]

58. I think it is the final 3 paragraphs with which i take issue:

"It is as clear to me today as it was last year, however, that the conservative era will be brought to a close only through some kind of mass social movement on the left. But what kind of movement might succeed?

Well, for one thing, a movement whose core values arise not from an abstract hostility to the state or from the need for protesters to find their voice but rather from the everyday lives of working people. It would help if the movement wasn’t centered in New York City. And it is utterly essential that it not be called into existence out of a desire to reenact an activist’s fantasy about Paris ’68.

Try Mississippi in the fifties instead. Reenact Flint, Michigan, circa 1937 and you could get somewhere. Look to Omaha, 1892, and things could work out differently."

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Note that Frank mentions neither Europe of 1848 (and the 'Communist Manifesto') nor Paris of 1870 (and the Commune). Those two strike me as far more relevant models than any Frank mentions.