Why Occupy Wall Street Is Spreading Fast

Barely a month after taking over Manhattan's Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street has spread to communities across the U.S. and sparked similar protests in more than 900 cities across the globe. That begs a simple question: Why is the movement growing so fast?

After all, the most hostile critics of OWS paint it as nothing more than a hippie bitch-fest, a carnival of kooks who are, as pollster Douglas Schoen claimed in the WSJ this week, "dangerously out of touch" with most Americans. Others deride the movement's embryonic agenda as vague and hopelessly Utopian.

The problem with this critique, elements of which are found across the political spectrum, is that it runs smack dab into evidence of OWS's surging popularity. Beyond the group's rapid rise, a new poll shows that nearly 60 percent of Americans mostly or wholly agree with the protesters. And in a rare burst of public support for organized labor, tens of thousands of non-unionized workers are also making common cause with groups such as the AFL-CIO.

For a movement of tie-dyed radicals supposedly spouting empty slogans and spitting anti-capitalist venom, in other words, OWS has struck a chord. Issues that until recently were largely banished to the political margins, such as income inequality, corporate power and class, are increasingly front and center.

Wage slaves
The movement is resonating for several reasons. First, it's the economy, stupid. High, long-term unemployment. Crippling household debt. Shrinking purchasing power. Virtually all Americans are feeling the pinch, making "We are the 99 percent" less of a rallying cry than a statistical reality.

Like a receding tide that reveals the waste below, the slump's most visible adverse effects also are exposing related aspects of our damaged economy. Perhaps the most salient, since it highlights the extreme concentration of wealth at the top end of the income ladder: wages. Notes journalist David Cay Johnston in assessing the latest government payroll tax data:

There were fewer jobs and they paid less last year, except at the very top where, the number of people making more than $1 million increased by 20 percent over 2009.

The median paycheck -- half made more, half less -- fell again in 2010, down 1.2 percent to $26,364. That works out to $507 a week, the lowest level, after adjusting for inflation, since 1999.

This polarization of income is a global phenomenon, which helps to explain OWS's worldwide appeal. The trend is also accelerating. The roughly 30 million people around the world with a net worth of at least $1 million now control nearly 39 percent of all wealth, up from 36 percent last year, according to a new report by Credit Suisse (CS).

Welcome wagon


Second, Occupy Wall Street transcends partisan differences. While the full spectrum of the American left, from union hard-hats to hardcore anarchists, is clearly playing a role in the movement, OWS is gaining momentum expressly because it is largely nonpartisan in its animus toward financial power.

Rather, the protests are rooted in real differences over political ideology -- an ideology that a growing number of Americans believe serves the wealthy few at the expense of the many. Writes Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin in remarking on the plurality of OWS's message:

[T]he occupiers have made the brilliant decision to appeal to anyone with a grievance of any kind against the visible corporate hands who helped bring us low and have suffered little or not at all for their actions.

If OWS bridges the usual political divide, so does its suspicion of our major political parties. Under this view, partisanship is less an expression of real political difference than a side-show that distracts from a more threatening reality: that neither party has much interest in fundamental reform when it comes to things like battling Wall Street or stemming the flow of corporate money in Washington.

Youth in revolt
My colleague Jessica Stillman hits on a third factor that explains the blossoming support for Occupy Wall Street -- youth. As she notes, the movement is drawing much of its energy from young people who are increasingly aware of their diminished economic prospects.

Far from the shiftless layabouts caricatured in the right-wing press, many of these protesters are college graduates who followed the prescribed script in preparing for adulthood. Writes anthropologist David Graeber in exploring OWS's growth:

In politics, too, as in education, we are looking at a generation of young people who played by the rules, and have seen their efforts prove absolutely fruitless.

Yet it is clear that the movement has in short order tapped a deep vein of dissent. In this country, that dissent is largely non-denominational, inviting the economically aggrieved to join in regardless of political affiliation. The protests are also inter-generational. And their main target is effectively a set of ideas, including that wealth trickles down, regulation is bad for business and corporations are people, too.

It is these ideas that more and more Americans seem to find dangerously out of touch.

Thumbnail from We Are the 99 Percent; images by David Shankbone via Wikimedia Commons, CC 3.0
Related:

• Days of Rage: Occupy Wall Street Goes Global
• Why Occupy Wall Street Has Already Won
• Why "Occupy Wall Street" Critics Are More Clueless Than the Protesters
• Occupy Wall Street: Movement of "Ne'er-Do-Wells" Is Catching On
• Occupy Wall Street: Media Bias Won't Stop Budding Protest