I still think it's cope. There's no way creaky old bankers and nerdy quants came up with a brilliant poison pill, infiltrated OWS consensus structure, and pulled the most effective subversion op the left has ever seen on the left themselves. All in the space of 1-2 months.
OWS was the retarded, less successful response to the Tea Party that everyone said it was. They both started with a reaction to a single political issue, and once it got traction broadened out to encompass the generalized complaints of its largest group. But the Tea Party was filled with boomers and good-government believers, whose general complaints lined up with the normal political process, so they got elected and influenced the larger GOP coalition. OWS was filled with the anti-establishment, street-fighting anti-WTO activists who wanted revolution and instant, radical change. Their general complaints are exactly the kind of progressive stack nonsense that came out of OWS, because they're against the entire American cultural order, not just against banks.
The big difference is where the subversion came from, and while you aren't wrong, there's a few parts you're missing.
With the Tea Party, the subversion effect was top-down paid for by the uniparty, financing and advancing the craziest motherfuckers in town, so that the movement would become synonymous with its craziest fucking elements. Promote shit like the birthers and 9/11 truthers, and leave the rest to wither on the vine. The more successful elements of the Tea Party saw what was going on, and learned from this mistake going forward, and they carried that to the larger political game.
Contrastingly, OWS never
needed that sort of subversion because the disparate elements of the left - including the most corrosive elements of it, saw the initial successes and thought: "This is our time." When it began, none of the progressive stack BS you'd come to later associate with it was present, the protest was solely focused on accountability for the 2008 bank bailout. When the initial protests and peaceful occupations succeeded in getting media attention, it was the Anarchist and Socialist fucks who decided: "You know what we need to do? Cause wanton property damage and attack cops before hiding in the crowd of regular protestors so that our insane nihilistic revoloutionary beliefs can look justified." They showed up after shit had already started rolling - I remember it well.
Those of us who were on the ground during it genuinely thought these assclowns were state-hired fifth column units when it first started happening. The truth, of course, is that they weren't; they were other leftists who wanted their fucking glorious revolution, and the initial protests getting media attention was something they fucking hated. How fucking
dare they try something that might influence things without trying to steer us all into the revolutionary ditch. When people like me looked into it, found out who the clowns doing this shit were and why, there was immediate attempts to call them out on this shit, we were told by the groups who basically started attacking police that we needed to "respect the diversity of tactics," meaning they were effectively demanding that the initial batch of protestors shut up and take it when the socialist shithead brigade decided they wanted to loot shops, fight police, and break shit. This would be the point where most of the original people who started OWS and kept it going fucked off.
Around that time is also when the feminist groups and racial grievance groups all showed up because they wanted fucking attention, and they fucking overwhelmed the core contingent who made the mistake of sticking around after the Anarchist/Socialist fucks started showing up.
For Dems on the ground, we met the enemy that day, and that enemy was us.
