Occupy Is a Year Old

Rebecca Solnit hails the movement as an unqualified success:

Realism is overrated, but the fact is that the Occupy movement has already had extraordinary results. We changed the national debate early on and brought into the open what was previously hiding in plain sight: both the violence of Wall Street and the yearning for community, justice, truth, power, and hope that possesses most of the rest of us. We found out something that mattered about who we are: we found out just how many of us are furious about the debt peonage settled onto millions of “underwater” homeowners, people destroyed by medical debts, and students shackled by subprime educations that no future salaries will ever dig them out of. And here was Occupy’s other signal achievement: we articulated, clearly, loudly, incontrovertably, how appalling and destructive the current economic system is.

Charles P. Pierce is doubtful:

I have no patience for the they're-all-alike crowd, or for the fantasts dreamily thinking of the presidency of my old former fencing-parent buddy Dr. Jill Stein, but this is not an opinion that is in anyway irrevocable. Instead, after a year of people yelling quite sensibly, and with great insight, at the right buildings, what do we get? We get this latest from Willard Romney, which, if Occupy actually had "changed the national dialogue" would sink his campaign like a stone.

Pierce is, of course, referring to Romney's latest gem. Naturally, he's right: there has been no significant change in the national dialogue, and any shift in the — now here's a good Zucotti word — zeitgeist was absorbed into the pavement as the protesters picked up their things and went home. To say either that it has done nothing or that it has heralded a promising change in the tone of political discourse would be to engage in ignorance on both counts. If anything, it wasn't enough. In Pierce's words:

There are too many powerful people in this country who don't see the danger in treating most of the population like moochers and wage slaves. There are too many powerful people in this country who don't see the simple fact that Occupy is by far the most polite response they're likely to see to a general consensus that the system is being rigged to produce another Gilded Age plutocracy. There are far too many powerful people in this country who don't hear the common sense in making sure that you're yelling at the correct buildings.