Hello readers, and happy Saturday.
You may have noticed this newsletter is coming out later than usual. Today has been a sad day for my family, as we lost my sweet Uncle Paul to COVID-19. Uncle Paul was unvaccinated. Please, if you are not already, consider getting vaccinated. The life you save may be your own.
I want to thank Rita for the generous contribution she made to my writing. It has been a slow week, with lots of rejections and other outstanding pitches that I have yet to hear back from, so getting a donation from a reader lifted my spirits and motivated me to continue. Writing is my sole source of income, and some of the work I do (including this newsletter) is unpaid. if you want to help me make a living, you can become a Patron for as little as $3 a month, make a one-time donation using PayPal, or buy me a book to help with my research. All contributions are greatly appreciated, no matter how big or how small!
This week’s essay is one of those I wrote but never got paid for, because the editor who commissioned it (“on spec” – meaning without a commitment to publish) hemmed and hawed before finally rejecting it after the anniversary of the Occupy takeover of Zuccotti Park had passed. Yeah, I’m pretty salty about it, I’m not even going to lie. However, I expanded the essay a little and used it for this week’s newsletter.
So here it is. I hope you enjoy.
On Occupy Wall Street…
“But what good can sleeping in a park possibly do?”
That was – and remains – my biggest question about the Occupy Wall Street movement. Ten years ago this month, thousands of largely Millennial activists took to the streets across the country, protesting… well, what they were protesting remains as uncertain and nebulous today as it was in 2011.
Back then, I lived in a house on Chicago’s northwest side with three other activists. I was interested in racial justice and liberal feminism but had just taken a job at the country’s largest mortgage company. Two of them were radical environmentalists. And the third was an Occupier.
Occupy Wall Street – and the offshoot movements it spawned in cities around the world – was one of the biggest news stories of 2011. Yes, it burned bright and fast, fizzling almost as quickly as it began. The movement itself never went much further than the parks it occupied. There are reasons for this, including a lack of organization and no cohesive messaging besides “we’re angry and we’re not going to take it anymore.”
Yet the story of Occupy is so much more than that one storied autumn ten years ago. For the first time in a generation – certainly for the first time in my living memory – questions around income inequality were not only raised but thrust into the mainstream political conversation in the United States. Where we have traditionally organized around the axes of race, gender, and sexual orientation, millions of American Millennials suddenly developed some semblance of a class consciousness.
This was a huge development then, and it is one that continues to animate our politics ten years later. Looking at the Occupy movement proper, it’s easy to dismiss it as a failure, a temporary outpouring of anger that faded as quickly as it formed. But that is not quite the whole story. The legacy of Occupy is that it forced Americans to examine our economy in all it structural inequality, to ask probing and difficult questions about the nature of capitalism and the role of Wall Street in not only our economy, but our politics and our society.
As a movement, Occupy failed. But the movements that it spawned, and the conversations it began, are still raging today. It is worth taking a moment to examine that legacy, to ask ourselves what Occupy got wrong, and to learn from what it got right.
I was not someone who was wholly sympathetic to the Occupy movement at the time. Ten years ago, I was a progressive, sure, but I still identified as a capitalist – certainly not the Marxist my roommate was and I would become. I had participated in and even organized many actions around gay rights in my time, which up until that point had been my primary field of activism. Earlier that summer I had participated in a flash mob protesting Chiquita Banana’s use of tar sands – my first foray into environmental activism – and several anti-racist demonstrations in Boystown, Chicago’s gay village.
I recognized that there was a fundamental unfairness in our economy, as I think every Millennial who graduated from college from 2008 to 2012 understood on some level or another. Jobs were hard to come by, and what jobs were available paid squat. Meanwhile, we were saddled with thousands of dollars in student loan debt that demanded repayment. It was clear we got screwed.
But still, I thought socialism was a dirty word. Capitalism needed reworking, but it was still our best shot. “Capitalism brought you that iPhone,” I told my Occupy housemate once, accusing her of hypocrisy for using the fruits of capitalism while protesting that same system. She and I had several heated debates about the Occupy movement’s goals, tactics, and lack thereof. I found it too mercurial, too opaque. It had no clear vision, no list of demands (it would develop one, but too late). Instead, it felt like just a bunch of angry young people storming the streets, demanding that something be done (what, they couldn’t say) but someone (not them, though) about the problem (which was…?).
These were then and remain valid points. The failure of Occupy to address them inevitably led to its failure as a movement. It achieved no concrete policy changes, made no political wins, and fizzled by the end of that year. Yet as critical as I was of that incohesive movement’s lack of vision, I find myself reevaluating its legacy. There are lessons to be learned from Occupy, and not all of them in its failure. The truth is, I – and the left of today – owe a debt of gratitude to Occupy Wall Street, one that we’ve never fully acknowledged.
In some ways, the Occupy movement was inevitable. Perhaps not that specific movement, but some movement against the injustices of Wall Street. The Great Recession of the late ‘00s left my generation of Americans feeling as though we were sold a bill of lies. We were told that if we worked hard, got an education, and played by the rules the American dream could be ours. Yet, as we graduated college, the stock market crashed, housing prices skyrocketed, job opportunities diminished. All the while bankers, stockbrokers, and CEOs were making millions upon billions. We were promised the keys to the kingdom, only to graduate college and find out they’d changed the locks.
That injustice was never going to be met with passivity. Even then, as a 25-year-old who finally landed his first full-time job with benefits, I felt a sense of solidarity with the protestors. Their anger was my anger. The system sucked. But I always felt the Occupy movement was doomed to failure.
Much like the CHOP in Seattle during last year’s Black Lives Matter protests, those who occupied the parks of New York, Chicago, and other major cities were unprepared to manage a large and nebulous movement. In New York, incidents of rape and sexual assault plagued the encampment in Zuccotti Park. Occupy camps from Philadelphia to Oakland were sanitation nightmares. In Chicago, the protestors in Grant Park smelled like the #49 bus when the Lane Tech boys’ soccer team boarded after practice.
The horizontal decision-making model adopted by the protestors not only made basic health and safety concerns unmanageable, it hampered efforts to form a cohesive movement. Other than complaining that the system was unfair, the goals of Occupy Wall Street were always vague and changing. For weeks, no one then could tell me who, specifically, they were seeking to oust or what change would come from camping in Grant Park.
Finally, the Chicago movement issued a series of concrete demands, including reinstating Glass-Steagall (something I supported then and now), repealing the Bush tax-cuts (something the Trump tax-cuts make look like a joke), and prosecuting “the Wall Street criminals who clearly broke the law and helped cause the 2008 financial crisis.” By then, however, the movement had lost control of its narrative. It was no longer viewed as a grassroots uprising against corporate greed and laissez-faire capitalism, but a leaderless, directionless mass of dirty hippies ruining city parks.
The lack of a clear early strategy, the delay in issuing concrete policy demands, and the unwillingness to engage with and in the political system were the movement’s making and its ultimate undoing. Many Occupy activists felt that raising awareness was enough, and that it was up to the powers to be to clean up the mess they made. That was an understandable sentiment, but it was never realistic.
It’s also why I did not take them seriously at the time. As a working-class man from Appalachia who was new to the city, Occupy looked to me like little more than a bunch of bored middle-class Millennials trying to be edgy. In many ways, it was. But it was also a watershed moment that I did not quite recognize.
“We have to raise awareness,” I remember my exasperated roommate explaining to me then. At the time, I thought that was not enough – and certainly from a policy position, it isn’t. But Occupy did raise awareness. It brought the injustices of income inequality and the malfeasance of Wall Street into mainstream American discourse and served as a harbinger of things to come on both the left and the right.
It’s easy to forget that before Occupy, few on either the right or left were talking about income inequality. Bernie Sanders was a little-known politician from Vermont, and Elizabeth Warren had only been elected to the Senate the year before. The last Democratic presidential candidate to really center economic inequality was Dennis Kucinich, and he was laughed out of town.
The Democratic Party largely identified class-based politics by 1992. The Reagan Revolution of 1980 ended the postwar Keynesian consensus. In its place, a neoliberal consensus arose, one that valued a globalized economy, weakened labor unions, the elimination of the welfare state and any social safety net in favor of rugged individualism and bootstrap theory.
Bill Clinton, running as a “New Democrat,” finally gave up the ghost of New Deal economic progressivism and fully embraced Reaganomics. With it, class consciousness died, replaced by identity politics and culture wars. On economics, the Democrats were only marginally better than the Republicans.
Certainly, both identity politics and culture wars still rage today but Occupy managed to do something that nothing since FDR’s New Deal had managed to do: it instilled a new generation of Americans with a budding class consciousness. You can draw a through line from the Occupy movement to the rise of Bernie Sanders and even Donald Trump five years later.
The 2016 Democratic nomination looked like it was Hillary Clinton’s to lose. Early in the primary, it felt to many of us – myself included – as a formality, something we needed to do to keep up appearances but that was really a distraction from the inevitable. To say this is not how primaries should function is an understatement, and that cockiness undoubtedly cost the Clinton campaign both in the primary and in the general. But it also isn’t how it happened.
In hindsight, Bernie Sanders’ popularity should’ve surprised no one. The anger and energy of the Occupy movement never disappeared. It simply took on new forms.
About a year after the Occupy movement, Trayvon Martin was killed. Especially on the left, Black Lives Matter began dominating the public discourse – understandably so – and it looked like this would be the movement do define the decade. What any student of the 1960s could tell you, though, is that one movement often births several more. Attending a Black Lives Matter march in Chicago in 2014, I remember seeing a sign that read “Black liberation through socialist revolution.”
For this generation of activists, you could not divorce racism from classism. Intersectional feminism had taken root in leftwing Millennials, who no longer felt obliged to fight one oppression. Instead, this new generation vowed to end all oppression – including class-based oppression, which they understood was at the root of so many other oppressions. Structural racism, patriarchy, and gender norms were all problems that in some way stemmed, or at least intersected with, the problem of capitalism.
Bernie Sanders understood that better than any other politician, mainly because he’d been saying so his entire public life. He did not have to tap into this burgeoning class consciousness because he’d always been there, a benevolent grandpa waiting for his prodigal grandchildren. And they came to him, in terms of voters but also in a new generation of politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Cori Bush, who are championing economic justice alongside other, more usual liberal social justice movements.
Meanwhile, on the right, a different form of class consciousness was forming. The Occupiers were decidedly leftwing, but the problems they protested were problems experienced by Americans across the political spectrum. In the 2016 Republican primary, populists (led by Donald Trump) smashed the neoconservative establishment and moved towards more protectionist rhetoric which at least pretend to favor Main Street over Wall Street.
Of course, this is all just rhetoric. Rather than a backlash of the white working class, Trumpism as a movement has been a reaction of the petite bourgeoise against a growing working-class coalition that spans the boundaries of demographics. Fully 40% of those arrested in the January 6th insurrection were business owners or white-collar workers, while in 2016 NBC News found that only a third of Trump voters had a household income below the national median of $50,000 a year. Trump and his acolytes paid lip-service to the white working-class, but their policies – a $2.3 trillion tax cut for billionaires – were for the 1%. (That’s a phrase popularized by the Occupy movement, by the way.)
Even still, both the rise of Bernie Sanders and the rise of Donald Trump represent a radical shift from the neoliberal consensus that dominated before 2011. Here we are in 2021, governed by a supposed centrist in Joe Biden, who is proposing the largest expansion of the welfare state in more than half-a-century as well as proposing the most ambitious public works project since the 1930s. Meanwhile, the Republican Party is in a pissing contest to see who can appear the most populist. You may not like one or the other or either of these developments, but they represent a marked change from a decade ago.
This legacy is the ultimate success of the Occupy movement. It fostered class consciousness among a new generation of Americans, me included, and put economic justice at the forefront of American politics for the first time in decades. Ten years later, we must make sure we do not repeat those same mistakes, but rather build on that class consciousness to achieve true social justice for the working class.
On “The Conners”…
The Conners returned to American tv screens this past Wednesday. For me as a working-class gay man, the show means a great deal.
Growing up, we never missed an episode of Roseanne because it was just so damn relatable. 33 years after its debut, it is easy to forget just how revolutionary that show was. It changed the way that working-class people, especially working-class mothers, were portrayed on tv. These were not the Huxtables in their tony Brooklyn brownstone or the Keatons in their leafy suburban splendor. The Conners struggled – really struggled – to make ends meet. They worried about putting food on the table, paying the bills, losing their home. Poverty was not just around them, it was actively a part of their everyday lives. That was something we had not seen much of on tv. Even All in the Family shied away from economic struggles, focusing more on the cultural differences between Archie and Meathead.
As a child living a duplex in Dayton, Ohio, the Conners still seemed to be doing better than we were. They at least owned their own house and, at various other times, their own businesses. (Dan ran a motorcycle shop in earlier seasons, while in later seasons Roseanne owned a loose meat sandwich restaurant.) Yet the struggles that they had, and the way they talked to one another, was so very relatable. Roseanne and Dan yelled, just like my parents yelled. The children bickered and fought, just as I bickered and fought with my own siblings.
Not everyone got along. Not everyone liked one another. Not everyone was well-behaved or mild-mannered. The boorish were the heroes, the prim and proper were the snobs. Rather than feeling shame at being “white trash,” Dan and Roseanne Conner embraced the label with pride. After all, they worked hard for what they had. They treated others with, if not always kindness, usually compassion. They were good, if not always well-mannered, people. But when you are struggling to feed three kids and pay the mortgage, who has time for manners?
As I responded to a depiction of family life that felt more like my own, so I responded to the way Roseanne Barr broke other barriers, too. While its titular star has since mired the legacy in controversy, Roseanne and The Conners both in their own ways have advanced LGBT representation in television.
They hold a special place in my heart because of the way they deal with the realities of being LGBT and working class, an intersection few shows tackle. Roseanne has repeatedly said that it was important for her to include gay characters on her show because gay people exist and, indeed, were part of her family. Today that is a banal statement; in the 1980s and 1990s it was revolutionary.
Keep in mind, this was the same decade that saw Ellen’s coming out tank her hit sitcom. So when Roseanne made recurring characters like Sandra Bernhard’s Nancy and Martin Mull’s Leon bisexual and gay, respectively, this was a massive deal. The show would go on to feature one of the first same-sex kisses in primetime television (between Roseanne herself and guest star Mariel Hemmingway) and one of televisions first same-sex weddings when Mull’s character married his partner, played by the brilliant comic actor Fred Willard, who sadly passed away last year.
This is a legacy The Conners not only carries on but doubles down on to brilliant effect. Darlene – played by out actress Sarah Gilbert – especially reminds me of myself. Her monologues about not having the opportunities rich kids did, and her frustration at realizing her writing career might not be enough to support her and her family, hits home like a ton of bricks.
The truth is working-class people don’t get to have dreams like people with means. But we also have a lot of love. That is evident in the way Darlene and the rest of the Conners handle her gay, gender-nonconforming son, Mark. I see so much of my young self in Mark: confident, unafraid to be himself, but constantly aware of the limitations society places on him not only because of his sexuality and gender expression, but because of his class. My family was not homophobic, and took my coming out in stride, just like the Conners. But the world around me was. When Mark got in trouble for kissing his boyfriend and had to deal with his boyfriend’s homophobic grandmother, I saw flashes of my own past and my family’s defensiveness over me.
When Mark frankly recognizes how much harder he must work than his wealthier peers, it is like watching myself realize that the deck was stacked against me. In an episode last season, he competes for a spot at an elite magnet school. It brought back memories of being working class gay kid who realized the life he wanted – and the life he saw in shows like Will and Grace and Queer as Folk – was in many ways unattainable for someone of my economic background. In the season premier that aired this week, Mark starts to look for a “Conner gene” which might explain why his family has been trapped in generational poverty. Trying to find an explanation for the seemingly bad luck your family always has makes sense, though I suspect as the series progresses Mark will realize that pathologizing poverty is the wrong way to go. I look forward to his emerging class consciousness.
This is why The Conners is so special to me. It’s one of the few times I have seen people from my socioeconomic background portrayed in all our complexity and humanity. It doesn’t portray us as stupid hillbillies or as noble people who are “rich in the things that matter.” It shows the realities of struggling to get by in 21st century America, which frankly sucks but can also be pretty damn funny – whether you’re straight or gay.
I should know. I’m currently living back home (again, like Darlene). My siblings and I argue—my sister and I famously didn’t speak for over a year following the 2016 election (like Roseanne and Jackie)—but we are ride-or-die. Our humour is dark, our lives are hard, and we yell a lot. Put us all in one town and hell, we are the Conners.
What I’ve been up to…
I loved the remake of “The Wonder Years” so much that I wrote about it for Watercooler! It really is such a timely show, exploring themes of racism at a time when we are undergoing a renewed rational reckoning. The pilot, packed with belly laughs and gut punches, was brilliantly done. Don’t miss this show. It’s must-see TV.
What I’ve been reading…
I’m reading The Melungeons: The Resurrection of a Proud People – An Untold Story of Ethnic Cleansing in America by N. Brent Kennedy. Part memoir, part genealogy, and part history, it is an interesting book. I found myself less interested in Kennedy’s family history than he is for obvious reasons, but it was still enjoyable hearing stories of how the Appalachians of the past lived. The story of the Melungeons is a sad story of discrimination and bigotry not unfamiliar in American history, and Kennedy’s search for the ethnic origins of his Melungeon ancestors is compelling. He arrives too easily, I think, at his conclusions and makes some serious mistakes (including making conjectures about Cherokee ancestry and culture I’m not sure he was positioned to make), but he’s upfront that this is not an academic treatise, so fair enough. The book was last updated in 1996, so 25 years of research has passed. Recent findings suggest that the “tri-racial isolate” theory Kennedy spends much of the book railing against is in fact the most likely origin of the Melungeon people; DNA testing suggests that the Melungeons are the descendants of sub-Saharan African men and Northern European women, not the “Portuguese” or “Turkish” descent Kennedy is convinced they possess. Still, the book is worth reading if you’re interested in some anecdotal stories of how Melungeons in the 19th and 20th century lived and were treated by wider society or are interested in the ways in which Americans whose ancestors are clearly not indigenous to the continent often are desperate to claim a heritage and culture in the Old World. N. Brent Kennedy died last year, and so convinced was he that the Melungeons were of Turkish descent (and so much of his work based on that assumption) that the Assembly of Turkish American Associations posted a glowing tribute to him on its website.
This essay from Robert Kagan scared the shit out of me. It’s all about how the Constitutional crisis we all fear from Trumpism has already arrived, laying out an all-too-plausible situation where Republican claims of voter fraud lead to not only chaos over the 2024 election but a breakdown in civil society, where violent factions engage one another. With Democrats rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, it is hard to imagine they pass any sort of voting rights law that will prevent the disaster ahead of us. Trump will run again, and God help us when he does.
Last Sunday, the Sunday Times ran a story on the abuse and violent threats directed at Rosie Duffield MP for simply stating that women have cervixes and sex is a matter of material reality. Labour leader Keir Starmer finally came out later in the week and said that actually, women do have a right to single sex spaces. This is not a matter of opinion; the Equality Act 2010 literally says this. The whole thing shows how the rift over sex and gender identity is not something politicians can ignore, at least in the UK.
One of my favorite bloggers, A Communist At Large, has begun a fantastic series looking at the rise of China and the decline of the United States through a Marxist-Leninist framework. Now, I’m not someone who considers himself a Leninist, but I do find reading what Lenin had to say about imperialism and capitalism to be worthwhile. This series puts into context the economic conditions of China, the US, and the West today, making a convincing case that China is already the dominant economic power and will continue to be for the 21st century. I believe this is the case, and that those of us in the United States need to begin reckoning with our reduced place in the world and what that means not just for us, but for the global order.
Rissi Palmer wrote this beautiful and important essay on racism in country music for The Tennessean. I love country music, but it is woefully white. Discovering artists like Palmer, but also Rhiannon Giddens, Mickey Guyton, The War and Treaty, and Brittney Spencer has been one of the highlights of the past few years for me as I sought to diversify my playlist. Country music is a genre that I, as a white working-class southerner, grew up listening to but that as a gay man I’ve never felt entirely at home in. Palmer is leading the way in making Nashville more inclusive, and we should all thank her for that.
What I’m listening to…
As mentioned above, I’ve become quite the fan of Brittney Spencer, an up-and-coming country artist. Her song “Sober and Skinny” is one of the best country songs I have ever heard, and I encourage you all to have a listen. Even though she went to MTSU – one of the rivals of my beloved WKU – I won’t hold it against her. Her voice is just too heavenly.
A picture of the puppy…