Occupy Gets Its Due

Harry Reid Occupy - What Occupy Did to 2012, What It Will Do to 2013 - Esquire

Here's a word that hasn't popped up in the various post-mortems of the election so far: Occupy.

From the start, it's been my opinion that the very least you could say about the movement was that people were yelling at the correct buildings. And, I agree with Todd Gitlin in that the first iteration of the movement pushed things about as far as it possibly could. But its effect on the election just passed could not be more profound, and it should not be ignored — though it likely will be — by the rest of the people trying to make sense of What It All Means. Occupy changed the national dialogue. Willard Romney's surreptitiously taped comments about "the 47 percent" would not have had the resonance they did had the Occupy movement not gotten the country talking about the 99 percent and the one percent. It created a new rhetorical paradigm that simply would not have been there had it not been originally shouted at the correct buildings. And it was that new paradigm that triumphed Tuesday night...