Tag: another take on occupy

larkandkatydid:

foxnewsfuckfest:

Unpopular opinion: Occupy was a failure because it lacked intersectionality, and was the equivalent of the boy sticking the TV remote up his ass because his mom wouldn’t renew his WoW account.

My pushback and possibly equally unpopular opinion is that it might be simplistic to say that Occupy “failed”.   It succeeded in changing the public discourse and I think we can see that if we remember two things that happened right before Occupy:  First, the “Rally to Restore Sanity” which dominated center-left media and promoted very forcefully the idea that every thing was actually fine and we should all chill out.  The Second was the debt ceiling debate that dominated the broader mainstream media and create a media narrative where “concern about the national debt” was supposedly very, very important and a much more pressing crisis for “the public” than government services. Occupy blew up both of those assumptions pretty heavily.  

Also, I think we should be fair that there is a winding path from Occupy to Bernie Sander’s candidacy to the current Democratic Party’s behavior. 

But I think you’re right in implying that Occupy got too entranced with it’s own protest style, when that was probably the least useful thing about Occupy. And the style it got really attached to made it really hard to come together around tangible policy goals.  I don’t think that’s unique to Occupy though.  I think that it’s Occupy inheriting the challenges of the other left wing movement of the early 2000s (specifically anti-globalization and anti-War movements) where it was, to be fair, really difficult to think of tangible local political goals that would make a difference.   And, for a whole bunch of reasons both Black Lives Matter and the Women’s March have been really good at translating energy to the kind of small scale political goals that the right has been so good at achieving: I think we need to give the Women’s March more time to have victories other than specific left-of-center women being elected to local office (ALTHOUGH THAT IS HUGE), but BLM is racking up specific policy victories all over the place.