On 1 May 2013
in
Why Occupy Wall Street Failed,
msilenus said:
OWS did not fail. Liberals think that we live in some magical fairy land of instant radical political gratification. Political reality shifts so slowly in this country that most liberals cannot even perceive what actual victory feels like. In some ways OWS was more successful than the TEA movement.
OWS was successful in precipitating a shift in popular perspective. Prior to OWS, all economic discourse centered around GDP growth. Today, disparity is routinely also discussed. OWS did nothing less than open up a new dimension in how we perceive the economy. The winning Presidential candidate in 2012 made wealth disparity ("strengthening the middle class") a major issue of his campaign. Creating a notion that wealth disparity is a thing that government should be worried about is a huge ideological coup for a country like this.
Furthermore, OWS did nothing more than that. That is a virtue. Contrast that with TEAism, which attempts to coopt and extort the GOP into adopting its agenda by running radicals in primary elections. Without TEAism, there is simply no way the Democrats could possibly have held the Senate for the last four years. Karl Rove just founded an organization to combat the threat TEA poses to the GOP's Senate aspirations through open and organized infighting. Perhaps even more significantly: with real power has come real scrutiny on their batshit extremist ideology. If Mitt Romney hadn't been forced to cover himself in that stinking taint during the Republican primary, he might be President today.
The wheels of politics turn slowly, but wealth disparity is a serious issue in national politics today, and OWS did nothing to sabotage its chances of leading to real policy changes. The only sense in which the movement was a failure is a simple artifact of the fact that liberals don't have the good sense to know when they're winning. Or, at least, not yet losing. See also: pretty much all liberal critiques of Barack Obama's first term.
