What happened to Occupy? The divided left and the demise of a movement: The divided left and the demise of a movement

Occupy Wall Street had me at hello—as it did most every other left-liberal college professor in the country. Suddenly, after decades of worsening inequality and adulation of wealth, after the financial crisis and the Bush-Obama strategy of saving the financial system by flooding the banks with money, after a faux-populist Tea Party movement—after all that, suddenly the power of the plutocracy was publicly confronted. Occupy’s success in getting out this message was astonishing.

But as soon as reports poured in about crowds communicating by waggling fingers and about the movement’s resistance to making concrete demands, I got a familiar feeling, and it was not a good one. This isn’t going anywhere, I thought.

I remembered my college days in the 1980s when I was involved in divestment activism aimed at apartheid South Africa. In the spring of 1986, the student group which I was part of set up a mock apartheid shantytown on Harvard Yard next to a tall wooden structure, painted white—the ivory tower. Our message was clear. The university could not pretend it was aloof from the political debates and struggles outside its walls.