[joshuamcginnis]

> In short, occupywallst.org is a living archive and occasional update point for a landmark left-wing protest movement that put economic inequality and corporate power at the center of national conversation starting in 2011.

Is this true?

[bfung]

Dunno about the website or corp, but the occupy wall st movement was/is true. Happened right after 2008 stock market crash and people camped out on Wall Street in protest of bailing out the banks.

[irishcoffee]

One can make the argument that trump was elected because of OWS knock-on effects...

[johnvanommen]

> One can make the argument that trump was elected because of OWS knock-on effects...

Absolutely.

And guys like Tim Poole got famous off Occupy, then parlayed that fame into building an audience for themselves.

The libertarians at OWS never went away, they just found new causes.

I was at the HUMONGOUS rally that Obama held in Portland in 2008.

The epicenter of OWS was based a few blocks away, years later, and reflected the optimism of 2008 hardening into frustration over Wall Street excess.

[tolerance]

I’m listening—...

[DiscourseFan]

Just, like, it was the first populist political movement following the ‘08 crash, and while Obama was supposed to be the liberal technocratic answer to the failure of neoliberalism, he was not able to create policies that restored the social and economic post-war order in the US. After Bernie Sanders lost the 2016 nomination, the populist left, which still retained a hope of a new kind of society, no longer had a political representative, and Trump managed to clinch the nomination by campaigning in states that had been neglected by the Clinton campaign. Biden was another, more radical but still fundamentally liberal technocratic attempt to save the status quo of America politics, but the largest economic gains were for the educated professional class, and many people in the country felt left behind and ignored—-again, now with the backing of popular support, Trump won the 2024 election with a promise to completely reshape the country. And he has at least in part succeeded.

[giraffe_lady]

How do you get from occupy to the tea party is the link this hypothesis is missing.

Tea party was the clear predecessor to the maga movement, with its nucleation point being simple racist backlash against obama and trump being personally & directly involved in stoking that racism. In retrospect it obviously laid the groundwork for trump's movement, and I can't see any direct link from occupy to tea party other than perhaps some individuals like tunney.

[DiscourseFan]

I think the Tea Party is only tenuously connected to Trump. A lot of his policies involve a lot of government spending and federal overreach, and his policies are often opposed by the Freedom caucus. Historically, anyway, right wing populism tends to follow the collapse of the radical left and becomes a dark mirror of those very same movements, attempting to absorb their energies (Steve Bannon’s Leninism, Trump’s workerism). The tea party was, conversely, the last cry of reaganism and the dream of mixing traditional life with libertarian economics, which was flawed from the start as it was that very same deregulation which led to our contemporary technologically inflected society where all social norms are broken for the sake of profit. So the tea party was not the legitimate bearer of world history.

[tolerance]

Hmm…there has to be more to it though right? The timeline tracks but it looks like there are events missing in between. How do we go from OWS to things like “Drain the Swamp” within a span of roughly five years?

[DiscourseFan]

Its a rough sketch. In the end, the viccisitudes of individual history are unable to capture the broader conditions of the events they take place in.

[worik]

Yes

Trump told people "you're OK".

It is what people need to hear

[GorbachevyChase]

I would make the correction that the protest movement was not left wing. I think he’s trying to take credit for his favorite team. TARP was opposed by 80% of Americans. It passed legislation anyway. I think there’s a good lesson to be learned in how performative and inconsequential the electoral process is.

[barbazoo]

Carried over to Europe too, I remember the camps and protests in many cities' financial districts.