Rebuild the Dream (18 page)

The Tea Party movement creates linkages between existing, likeminded groups across the country. Some of these preexisting groups had just six people in them; some had hundreds. The Tea Party offered them all a shared brand to augment, rather than replace, each group's original name. Affiliates didn't have to change their name, their logo, their leadership, or their board of directors. The only thing that changed was what they inserted after their name: a comma and the words “Tea Party affiliate.” Having pulled together their affiliates, the Tea Party re-presented these groups—not “represented,” but re-presented them to the
public—as something new. In fact, the Tea Party is made up of many old ideas and old organizations.

Even the Tea Party's doctrine was created collaboratively. The Tea Partiers produced a guiding document called the “Contract from America,” which laid out their three basic principles—individual liberty, limited government, and markets—and ten basic objectives. But no single individual wrote it. Thousands of people coauthored it together, as a wiki document, which allows multiple users to easily add, remove, and edit text. Afterward, anyone who embraced the tenets of the contract could consider himself a member of the Tea Party movement. In other words: the guiding document of the Tea Party was crowd-sourced.

There is an irony here. The Tea Party movement speaks of “rugged individualism.” If you have problem, they insist that you should not look to society to help you; you should just be tough and handle it yourself. Yet these rugged individualists have enacted the most collective, cooperative strategy for taking power in the history of the republic. On the other hand, progressives always talk about solidarity and collective action but tend to adopt the most individualistic approaches imaginable, generating thousands of little groups that fight over grants, each with its own little name and its own little domain. The twin ironies ought to be cause for some reflection.

Less than one year after the Tea Party movement's electoral triumph, another force arose on the American scene. This group looked very different from the Tea Party.

Young, creative, and colorful, they called themselves Occupy Wall Street. They claimed to represent 99 percent of Americans, as
distinguished from the miniscule 1 percent for whom our political and economic systems are working, and who control more than 40 percent of the financial wealth of the country. They took inspiration from 2011's popular revolutions around the world—the Arab Spring and the general strikes in Europe.

For more insight into the sources of Occupy Wall Street's inspiration, it is worth reviewing global events in the months preceding their daring protests. In December 2010, a Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire after a policewoman confiscated his cart and humiliated him. His action sparked protests against injustice in Tunisia that continued for weeks despite brutal attempts to subdue them. The Tunisian president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, finally fled the country in mid-January 2011.

This success inspired the people of Egypt to take to their streets—tens of thousands growing to hundreds of thousands and then surpassing a million people who gathered in and around Tahrir Square in Cairo. By February 11, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was stepping down as well, ending his thirty-year reign. The Arab Spring had sprung.

Egyptian writer Youssef Rakha commented,

Like many Egyptians, until I saw thousands upon thousands of demonstrators gathered in Midan al-Tahrir on 25 January—saw that they were neither Islamists nor negligible—and totally identified with them—I was largely skeptical about Egypt having much capacity for true dissent. . . . In the space of a fortnight the spot at which thousands of younger Egyptians have gathered, contrary to all expectations, will have turned irrevocably
into a place of memory, a historical site. Passing the square or hearing about it, people start to wonder whether “this is real”; they are already joining in. Faces and voices are incredulous, but it is true: for once at a political event the number of demonstrators is actually greater than the number of Central Security troops restricting their movement and ready to subdue them by force; for once a political event is taking place in the open, in a central space, lasting all day and well into the night.

When Mubarak stepped down, President Obama responded,

We saw a new generation emerge—a generation that uses their own creativity and talent and technology to call for a government that represented their hopes and not their fears; a government that is responsive to their boundless aspirations. One Egyptian put it simply: “Most people have discovered in the last few days . . . that they are worth something, and this cannot be taken away from them anymore, ever.”

This is the power of human dignity, and it can never be denied. Egyptians have inspired us, and they've done so by putting the lie to the idea that justice is best gained through violence. For in Egypt, it was the moral force of nonviolence—not terrorism, not mindless killing—but nonviolence, moral force, that bent the arc of history toward justice once more.

The populist wave didn't stop there. It rose again and again in Algeria, Libya, Jordan, Mauritania, Sudan, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Kuwait, and Morocco. After enduring decades of injustices and oppression, thousands of people were protesting corruption and greed, rising up against dictatorships that had turned a blind eye to the suffering of their people. Everywhere, they were met with force; in many countries, they were
subdued, at least for the moment. In Libya, Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown and then killed; the leaders of Sudan, Iraq, and Yemen announced that they would step down.

The region calmed somewhat by the end of the spring of 2011, and much has yet to be resolved. But it is clear that the demands of the protestors, who universally called for justice and dignity, did not go unheard.

Meanwhile, Europe was sparking, too. In Italy, Greece, Ireland, and Spain, people united against government austerity measures, were saying, “We will not pay for your crisis.” The newly elected conservative government in Britain—which faces many of the same crises as the United States—responded to financial challenges by cutting public services, asking students to pay higher university fees, closing libraries, and evicting people from their homes. While some of the defining images of 2011 were from the riots that gripped London and parts of the English Midlands, less well known was the inspiring work of organization UK Uncut. Created by a dozen frustrated British citizens, UK Uncut proposed alternatives to the government's spending cuts by organizing peaceful protests around the country and leading an initiative against the mobile phone giant Vodafone, which owed the government £6 billion in unpaid taxes. These decentralized demonstrations spread like wildfire social networks. They foreshadowed a new pattern of protest: fast-multiplying, leaderless eruptions united by shared grievances, rather than shared leadership structures. It was only a matter of time before such protests leaped “across the pond” and landed in the United States.

On September 17, 2011, hundreds of mostly young people decided to occupy a public space where they would enact genuine, direct
democracy. Some had responded to a call for action from the Canadian magazine
Adbusters
; the “tweet that started it all” read, “Sept. 17. Wall St. Bring Tent.” They set up camp in Zuccotti Park, which sits between the New York Stock Exchange and the site of the World Trade Center. Perhaps in honor of the site's original name, Liberty Plaza Park, they renamed the place Liberty Plaza. And from there, they cried foul at the elite's rigged economic and political systems. Occupy Wall Street was born. Within a month, the protesters had sparked occupations in solidarity in thousands of cities around the country and the globe.

The core group consisted of mostly activists in their twenties, many of whom had organized sleep-ins outside of New York's City Hall earlier in the summer, called Bloombergville. The actions were to protest Mayor Michael Bloomberg's proposed layoffs and city budget cuts. A few of my colleagues from the global justice movement, and from the protests in Seattle in 1999, were also in the mix—so were organizers who had been involved the actions in Tunisia, Greece, and Spain.

In choosing Wall Street as their target, the core group went to the scene of the crimes committed against their future. They announced to the banksters on Wall Street:
You got bailed out, I got left out, and now you're holding back the recovery. You won't forgive my student loans; you won't take the debt blanket off my parents with their underwater mortgages; you won't lend to the small business or the small farmers in my community; you won't lend a dime to the green businesses. You destroyed my future, so I'm here. I may not have the answers, but I can tell you I'm mad as hell about it, and something's got to be done.

In the heart of the financial district, these young people camped out in the rain and the cold, at risk of arrest, harassed by the police, and taunted by the mainstream media. Their peaceful
persistence inspired more and more people to emerge from the shadows, out of apathy, and into the bright light of the public square.

The encampments grew larger and more diverse every day. In the weeks and months that followed September 17, the Occupy Wall Street movement spread to eighty countries around the world. Young people, the majority of whom were under twenty-five and never before engaged in activism, managed arduous tasks. They did everything by consensus, meaning that everyone present had to agree with every proposal. They conducted their meetings without the benefits of a sound system. The nightly general assemblies attracted crowds in the thousands to gather with their peers and debate the path forward. Many were the same young people who had been inspired by Obama's candidacy and then disappointed by his presidency. Perhaps because their first experience of political engagement was successful—electing the nation's first black president—they believed that they could make more change.

By mid-December, the major encampments across the country had been shut down. But the tiny protest that began in Liberty Park had triggered a major shift in the national dialogue on inequality, our economy, and our democracy. Anyone who thinks the United States has seen the end of the 99% movement is mistaken—as we shall see.

If this is the first sign of a generation coming to voice, the world might want to buy some earplugs. Occupy Wall Street is composed of people of all ages, but it is powered by younger people. The youth demographics in the United States, alone, are staggering.
The Millennial generation is one of the biggest generations of Americans ever.

For a possible preview of things to come, consider the impact of the last big generation of Americans that came barreling through our society: the 76 million baby boomers who were born between 1946 and 1964. When they reached their teens and early twenties, they changed the whole country—positively and permanently.

The Americas had suffered through more than 270 years of enslavement, followed by 100 years of Jim Crow racial terror—almost 400 years of horror. On February 1, 1960, four black baby boomers participated in a sit-in—in which they “occupied” a lunch counter in North Carolina. Within a decade, that generation had helped to break the back of apartheid in the United States. In 1959, the United States was a fairly quiet and quaint country. By 1969, it had exploded into rebellion and color. Why? Because there was a huge generation of young people, with all their energy and idealism, whose energy was set loose. They changed America forever.

In the areas of the economy, the environment, and respect for diversity, the Millennials (born between 1980 and 1998) have the potential to make meaningful contributions that will put the baby boomers to shame. They rival the boomers in size. Plus the Millennials are more diverse in terms of race, faith, gender, sexuality, etc. Essentially born “connected,” they are more technologically savvy. They are more ecologically aware. Their values are more communitarian.

What's more, Millennials are going to account for one-third of all the eligible voters in 2016. They stood up in 2008 for Obama and made history. Disillusioned by politics, they sat down in 2010. In so doing, they made history again but in the opposite direction. Then they got out their tents and sleeping bags to lie down in the streets of New York and made history that way, too. Standing, sitting, or lying down, this generation shakes the foundations of the nation into which it was born.

If they continue to fight for a more fair economy, all bets are off as to the kind of transformation Millennials can bring about.

When
Adbusters
first ran the ads, calling for people to Occupy Wall Street, few predicted a global sensation. Protests using similar tactics and language had been tried and had come up short in the very recent past. For example, US Uncut and the New Bottom Line coalition had been protesting at banks for much of the prior year. In 2010, a campaign called The Other 98% made some early headway and then fizzled. My allies and I had been promoting the American Dream Movement, which sponsored thousands of successful “Jobs Not Cuts” rallies and house meetings across the country. But nothing took off like Occupy. Why not?