OWS: "began in a particular place, sputtered and subsided, only to re-emerge elsewhere" [View all]

[madfloridian]

Not done yet by any means. Just re-emerging!

This is from way down in an article today in The Atlantic Monthly:

Why America Is Moving Left

When academics from the City University of New York went to Zuccotti Park to study the people who had taken it over, they found something striking: 40 percent of the Occupy activists had worked on the 2008 presidential campaign, mostly for Obama. Many of them had hoped that, as president, he would bring fundamental change. Now the collapse of that hope had led them to challenge Wall Street directly. “Disenchantment with Obama was a driver of the Occupy movement for many of the young people who participated,” noted the CUNY researchers. In his book on the movement, Occupy Nation, the Columbia University sociologist Todd Gitlin quotes Jeremy Varon, a close observer of Occupy who teaches at the New School for Social Research, as saying, “This is the Obama generation declaring their independence from his administration. We thought his voice was ours. Now we know we have to speak for ourselves.”

The article does a good job of describing the rise and fall and rise in another form of the Occupy Movement.

For a brief period, Occupy captured the nation’s attention. In December 2011, Gitlin notes, the movement had 143 chapters in California alone. Then it fizzled. But as the political scientist Frances Fox Piven has written, “The great protest movements of history … did not expand in the shape of a simple rising arc of popular defiance. Rather, they began in a particular place, sputtered and subsided, only to re-emerge elsewhere in perhaps a different form, influenced by local particularities of circumstance and culture.”

That’s what happened to Occupy. The movement may have burned out, but it injected economic inequality into the American political debate. (In the weeks following the takeover of Zuccotti Park, media references to the subject rose fivefold.) The same anger that sparked Occupy—directed not merely at Wall Street but at the Democratic Party elites who coddled it—fueled Bill de Blasio’s election and Elizabeth Warren’s rise to national prominence. And without Occupy, it’s impossible to understand why a curmudgeonly Democratic Socialist from Vermont is seriously challenging Hillary Clinton in the early primary states. The day Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy, a group of Occupy veterans offered their endorsement. In the words of one former Occupy activist, Stan Williams, “People who are involved in Occupy are leading the biggest group for Bernie Sanders. Our fingers are all over this.”

I agree with some parts of this next paragraph, but strongly disagree with others.

I think many Democrats in general agree with the leftward movement, but the party's infrastructure is not on board at all. The leadership of the DNC is in full lockstep with the new policy think tank, The Third Way. They are not the majority of our party, but they are seemingly in complete charge for now.

Arguably more significant than the Sanders campaign itself is the way Democratic elites have responded to it. In the late 1980s and the ’90s, they would have savaged him. For the Democratic Leadership Council, which sought to make the party more business-friendly, an avowed Socialist would have been the perfect foil. Today, in a Democratic Party whose guiding ethos is “no enemies to the left,” Sanders has met with little ideological resistance. That’s true not only among intellectuals and activists but among many donors. Journalists often assume that Democrats who write big checks oppose a progressive agenda, at least when it comes to economics. And some do. But as John Judis has reported in National Journal, the Democracy Alliance, the party’s most influential donor club, which includes mega-funders such as George Soros and Tom Steyer, has itself shifted leftward during the Obama years. In 2014, it gave Warren a rapturous welcome when she spoke at the group’s annual winter meeting. Last spring it announced that it was making economic inequality its top priority.

Point 1 disagreement: Sanders IS meeting with ideological resistance. The power of those currently in charge is threatened by such change.

Point 2 disagreement: The savaging of the left took place in 2003/2004, not just in the 80s and 90s. They even had a press conference announcing Dean would not be president.

Point 3 about the Democracy Alliance. They are secretive in which media they are funding, so we really don't know what those mega-donors believe.

Howard Dean said a few months ago not to underestimate Bernie Sanders. I agree, and I also say don't underestimate the remaining power of the shape-changing OWS.

(Posted this in GD rather than GDP primary as it is not really about just this primary, and it is not so much about either candidate as about a movement that started in one form and is morphing. )