10 Years Later: Occupy Wall Street’s legacy
Ten years after Occupy Wall Street, we reflect on how the movement for “the 99%” inaugurated a new class consciousness in America — and how political elites continue to ignore its warnings.
Astra Taylor and Jonathan Smucker reflect on Occupy’s legacy in New York Magazine:
Today, Occupy’s insights about extreme inequality and political corruption sound commonplace. At the time, they were a revelation. Occupy cut through the stifling ideological fog that had governed economic policy-making since the Reagan era by acknowledging reality: The system is rigged… Nearly three years into the Great Recession, Occupy was arguably late to the game. But by 2011 the public was primed for revolt. Wall Street greed had evaporated trillions of dollars of wealth overnight and caused millions of families to lose their homes, savings, and jobs — with Black and Latino families losing more than half their collective wealth. Meanwhile, President Barack Obama, purveyor of “hope and change,” left millions of underwater homeowners in the lurch and refused to hold bankers accountable, instead tasking men like Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers with fixing a crisis that, as negligent government regulators of both Republican and Democratic administrations past, they had helped cause.
And Jonathan wrote an additional piece for The Intercept about the Democratic Party’s failure to heed Occupy’s warnings:
So while the GOP has harnessed popular discontent, bringing as many disaffected voters into the fold as possible, Democrats are still struggling massively with voter abstentionism — the inevitable result of decades of not giving the base much to be excited about beyond beating the other team.
