Can the Democratic Socialists Succeed Where Occupy Wall Street Failed?

In the predawn hours of November 15th, 2011, New York City police, armed with shields and batons, swarmed Zuccotti Park, rousing slumbering Occupy Wall Street protestors from sleeping bags in their Lower Manhattan encampment, with high-intensity klieg lights illuminating the half-acre plaza in a blinding glare. Police ripped apart tents and arrested 142 people. A viral photograph of 84-year-old Seattle activist and retired schoolteacher Dorli Rainey, her red face dripping white with pepper spray, became the night's most emblematic image—the fleshly embodiment of a militarized police state's indiscriminately cruel wrath exacted on everyday people in the shadow of an unperturbed financial industry rife with criminality.

The raid marked the end of the two-month protest, which galvanized satellite protests in cities across America and 80 countries around the world, against rapidly expanding wealth inequality, an unregulated banking system and its role in economic collapse, and the ballooning dominance of multinational corporations in the democratic process.

Yet despite its ubiquity, the iconic protest was in the words of one Occupy Wall Street co-creator a "constructive failure." Today, with Bernie "99 percent" Sanders driving policy in the Democrat party, it seems as though the Occupy themes have made their way in mainstream discourse, but the movement had to dissemble first.

Occupy Wall Street, heavy on theoretical idealism and sketchy on the usual recognizable demands of protest, was confounding to pundits of various political stripes. It started organically and almost inadvertently, in June 2011, when Micah White, then a senior editor at Adbusters, and Kalle Lasn, the magazine's founder, decided to send an #OccupyWallStreet e-mail to their subscribers that said: "Are you ready for a Tahrir moment? On September 17, flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street." It rippled through social media and materialized, three months later, in the form of graduate students, anarchists, socialists, and scholars gathering in Zuccotti Park. Occupy became known for its quirkier characteristics: a "leaderless" movement with "horizontal" organizing tactics that made decisions based on consensus through a series of hand gestures. But the entire production was buttressed by a sophisticated level of activist organizing: Zuccotti was identified because its status as a public-private park meant there was no enforceable curfew.

To remedy the shortcomings of the Obama administration response to the 2007/2008 global financial crash, White and Lasn, based in the Adbusters office in Vancouver, Canada, proposed a manifesto with specific demands: tightening banking-industry regulations, banning high-frequency trading, a presidential commission to investigate corruption in politics, and arresting the "financial fraudsters" responsible for the crash. But the proposal was politely rejected by core organizers on the ground at Zuccotti who were drafting their own manifesto. The Occupy General Assembly, instead, adopted a more philosophic "Declaration of the Occupation," which lacked specific policy demands in favor of articulating a more utopian vision.

Today, the same forces the Occupiers were protesting have gained new ground. In the years since the 2007/2008 financial crisis, predatory lending, corporate tax cuts, and dark-money political groups have metastasized. Across all 50 states, inequality, according to the Economic Policy Institute, continues to grow, with the top 1 percent of families earning an average of 26.3 times as much income as the bottom 99 percent in 2015. This year, Bloomberg reported that "subprime auto debt is booming even as defaults soar," and lenders announced that subprime home mortgages will be making a comeback rebranded as "nonprime." Student debt hit $1.5 trillion, up from $600 billion ten years ago, and the Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos set out to protect debt collectors from state laws meant to protect student borrowers. Last May, Congress voted to roll back key provisions of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. And eight years after Citizens United v. FEC unleashed even more corporate money into the political process, the U.S. Treasury changed its rules so nonprofits don't have to report their dark money donors to the IRS—right after revelations that the NRA was on the take from Russia.

For several years now, White, the former Adbusters editor who helped start Occupy Wall Street, has been arguing in op-eds, interviews, and his recent book, The End of Protest: A New Playbook for the Revolution, that it's time to turn away from protest ("yesterday's tired tactics") to achieve political ends.

"That's one storyline that exists out there: Occupy didn't really fail, it splintered in a thousand shards of light," he told the Los Angeles Review of Books in a 2015 interview. "I think that that's the kind of false positive outlook that underlies a lot of contemporary activism and leads us astray. The reality is that, actually, Occupy failed to achieve its revolutionary potential because the movement was based on a false notion of what creates social change." The next year, he told The Globe and Mail that, "we set out to achieve a very specific goal, which was to get money out of politics, and we failed because we based our actions on a theory of change that wasn't true, and we didn't know it wasn't true." His answer to bringing about the promise of Occupy Wall Street? "Create social movements to dominate elections."

If there is burgeoning social movement right now most ripe for earning that mantle it just might be the democratic socialists. Take Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the young democratic socialist who just ousted 10-term incumbent congressman Joe Crowley and was just 22 years old when New York City police raided Zuccotti Park. Like the Occupiers and her old boss Bernie Sanders, for whom she organized during the 2016 presidential campaign, Ocasio-Cortez frequently rails against Wall Street, its hold on both Republicans and Democrats, but she lasers in on achievable political goals instead of utopian abstractions. And her platform eschewed the convoluted, think-tank-tested "see my website" policies for simple but workable ideas: Medicare for all, a federal jobs guarantee, tuition-free public college, curb Wall Street gambling/restore Glass-Steagall.

The messages have proven so reasonable and powerful that attacks from conservative outlets, like Sean Hannity showing a graphic of Ocasio-Cortez's platform on his show, have ended up looking like campaign ads instead. "They talk about things you want: education for your kids, healthcare for your kids," a Daily Caller writer, who attended Ocasio-Cortez's stump speech for Missouri congressional candidate Cori Bush, reported on Fox News. "It's easy to fall into that trap and say my kids deserve this." The day prior Fox Business News tweeted out: "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: "We will not rest until every person in this country is paid a living wage to lead a dignified life." The assumption that this was a bad thing seemed beyond parody.

Naysayers like to point out that more moderate Democrats, like Conor Lamb in Pennsylvania, have been winning in more conservative districts—as if they're constitutionally unable to understand that it's possible to run different kinds of candidates in different kinds of districts. But Ocasio-Cortez is among a small but growing contingent of political aspirants who are pulling off what previously seemed unthinkable in a post-Citizens United America: winning elections while rejecting corporate PAC money or on unapologetically progressive values. Ayanna Pressley, who has rejected corporate PAC donations, is giving 10-term incumbent Mike Capuano a run for his money in MA-07. Both Ben Jealous in the Maryland gubernatorial primary and John Fetterman in a Pennsylvania lieutenant governor primary beat out more moderate candidates. Neither identify as democratic socialists, but both were endorsed by Sanders and ran on similar policies. Pennsylvania will have four democratic socialists in the state legislature next year.

The themes of Occupy Wall Street repackaged as bullet-point political goals has been electrifying voters and moving public opinion. The democratic socialists have even been drawing some former Occupiers, like Cecily McMillan, who was sent to Rikers for her participation. Last year, Sanders—who according to a 2017 Harvard-Harris poll is the most popular politician in the U.S. with a 54 percent favorability rating—introduced a Medicare-for-All bill with 16 cosponsors, up from exactly zero two years ago, and the idea is now polling at 62 percent approval. Three of those cosponsors were expected presidential hopefuls and centrist Democrat senators Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand. After Illinois Democrat Senator Tammy Duckworth claimed that Ocasio-Cortez's politics couldn't win in the Midwest, the newly minted political star held rallies in Kansas, which went by 20 points for Trump, with Sanders to stump for progressive congressional candidates James Thompson in Wichita and Brent Welder in Kansas City. Four thousand people showed up in Wichita. Could Conor Lamb bring out a crowd of that size in a deep-red state?

Turnout, fundraising, and the recruitment of new candidates is up among all Democrats. The question is: Are they offering something to the voters who sat out the 2016 election? In Wisconsin, Trump got about the same number of votes as Mitt Romney, but Clinton received almost 240,000 fewer votes than Obama in 2012. In Michigan and Pennsylvania, Clinton, who overperformed Obama in blue states like California, also failed to turn out the votes. There was, as numerous polls have demonstrated, racial animus as a driver for Republicans, whose incomes are, on average, higher than Democrats. But there was also a simmering anger with the political establishment that perhaps can be traced to the fallout of the 2007/2008 financial crisis in which ordinary citizens watched their house values and 401Ks evaporate, with 9.3 million kicked out of their homes and unlikely to return, while the banking elite scooped up a $700 trillion government handout. Is it really a mystery that a portion of lower-income Democrats, whose labor movement was abandoned by the Democrat leadership in places like Wisconsin, didn't show up to the polls for a candidate who refused to release her Goldman Sachs speeches?

Earlier this month, centrist think tank Third Way organized an "Opportunity 2020" convention where the goal was to stem the tide of progressivism in the Democratic party. (Yes, Democratic strategists are working on fighting progressives who are advocating for single-payer healthcare, jobs, and Wall Street reforms, not fixing the mistakes that lost the 2016 election.) The convention introduced a set of policy issues to compete with the Sanders wing of the party, with clunky ideas conjured up for donors, not voters, like: an apprenticeship program for training workers, a "small business bill of rights," and a privatized employer-funded universal pension that would supplement Social Security. Not exactly move-the-dial stuff. Meanwhile, hosts on mainstream platforms, like The View and the Joe Rogan Experience, are defending Ocasio-Cortez's policy proposals, while conservative outlets, like Fox News and the Daily Caller, are accidentally promoting the slogan-friendly ideas because they are crystal clear, eminently reasonable, and sharpened to meet the realities of today's working class.

"I'm tired of losing," said Iowa state Sen. Jeff Danielson, one of the Opportunity 2020 attendees, seemingly unaware that it was forgettable centrist policies that failed to turn out the electorate in states that flipped red in 2016. "You're not going to make me hate somebody just because they're rich. I want to be rich!" Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, told the laughing crowd. But the complaints with progressives mostly seemed to be superficial, not substantive. Ryan, himself, has made single-payer healthcare a pet issue—that drum Sanders has been beating for years and Ocasio-Cortez made a central part of her platform. The leaderless Occupy gave way to a movement bearing today's most recognizable political stars. It's no coincidence that developed as Americans are crowdsourcing their healthcare on GoFundMe and Amazon warehouse workers relate horror stories, while Jeff Bezos muses on the challenges of deploying his personally accumulated wealth. Whether this new labor movement can pick up more seats in general elections this fall remains to be seen. But, in some ways, the democratic socialists are already winning.