Roughly once a week, in August and early September of 2011, I sat in a semicircle in Manhattan’s Tompkins Square Park with eighty to a hundred others to debate how, when and why to “occupy” the financial capital of the world. As a relative newcomer to political activism, I barely said a word in those assemblies. I wish I could say I participated in the New York City General Assembly (NYCGA) because of my convictions, but the truth was I had been dragged to the first meeting by two of my closest friends, the Spanish organizers Begonia Santa-Cecilia and Luis Moreno-Caballud. For most of the summer, they had been telling me about a massive popular mobilization that had erupted in Spain on May 15th of that same year, the 15-M or indignados movement, during which an estimated six to eight million people passed through encampments (acampadas) across their home country calling for an end to the domination of the political system by financial elites. As I sat mostly on the sidelines, viewing the discussions with interest but also with doubt about the prospects for successfully setting up camp anywhere in the Financial District, Begonia and Luis helped form the NYCGA Outreach Working Group, tasked with getting out word of the group’s plan to the public, and in early August, in an email chain involving the anthropologist David Graeber and other assembly participants, they played a decisive role in creating the “We are the 99 percent” slogan that came to define Occupy Wall Street (OWS) in the popular imagination. On September 17th, the date that the culture-jamming magazine Adbusters had somewhat whimsically proposed for OWS, I met up with Begonia and Luis in southern Manhattan, still not entirely convinced that they—that we—could pull off anything other than a publicity stunt. I was wrong. A sizeable group of Occupiers spent that night in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, and then the next. Occupy encampments began to mushroom around the United States, and then around the world.
Like many of my millennial peers, I date my political formation to the heady months surrounding the 2011 Occupy encampments. Occupy initiated a historical cycle on the left that spanned over a decade, despite the fact that its major phase lasted for just over two months from September to November of 2011. To this day, I believe that Occupy not only catalyzed the revitalization of a new “New Left” but also set the paradigm for a series of social movements that, from Black Lives Matter to the Gaza campus occupations, have remade American political culture. My position is hardly unusual among writers on the left. In the 2021 book Generation Occupy, the journalist Michael Levitin took aim at the still-prominent view that the Occupy movement “made no real impact on American political life,” insisting that OWS “revived the labor movement, remade the Democratic Party and reinvented activism” for the 21st century. In a similar vein, labor historian and popular left commentator Gabriel Winant asserted on the tenth anniversary of the 2011 Zuccotti encampment that “Occupy was the critical event in the formation of a new anticapitalist intellectual milieu,” out of whose “ferment” new left media outlets such as Jacobin and the New Inquiry gained visibility and older venues such as n+1 and Dissent “underwent much-heralded generational transformations.”
Arriving as they did in the middle of the Biden presidency, however, evaluations such as these couldn’t help but take on an elegiac quality. Even by then, the “ferment” of the 2010s seemed to have died out. On the international front, the anti-austerity parties that had emerged in the mid-2010s as serious contenders in Europe (Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain) had faded from the scene, while the so-called “pink tide” of progressive governments that dominated the Latin American landscape for most of the 2000s and 2010s had already suffered a series of stinging electoral defeats. Over the next few years, hard-right leaders surged into power in the region, in some instances (as with Javier Milei in Argentina, or José Antonio Kast in Chile) replacing administrations that embodied the resurgence of the 21st-century left. Domestically, the 2024 reelection of Donald Trump, this time with a majority of the popular vote, merely seemed to confirm the final ebb of the social-movement cycle initiated by Occupy, notwithstanding the Gaza campus protests that emerged in the months preceding his presidency. Already in a 2023 episode of the Jacobin-sponsored podcast The Dig, host Daniel Denvir observed, “It feels like we’re at the end of a notable moment in U.S. history that began with Occupy, Ferguson, Standing Rock, and … that reached its peak with the Bernie 2020 campaign and, amid the height of the pandemic, the summer 2020 George Floyd uprising.” In the wake of what journalist Vincent Bevins has dubbed the “mass protest decade” of the 2010s, during which economic and social justice were placed at the center of a civilizational debate, many have joined Bevins in asking whether our belief in a more equal future was a realistic expectation or mere “teleological self-deception”—an unearned conviction, that is, that “our” cause would eventually prevail because it was the correct one.
As the global tides have continued to shift rightward, I’ve found myself going back to those initial days of Occupy, looking for clues. What was it about the movement that captured the imagination of an entire generation? Where did it come from? How did it lay the foundations for the contemporary American left? And, equally important, what can we learn, fifteen years on, from a movement that promised so much and yet ultimately failed to deliver a political project strong enough to counteract the ensuing surge of right populism?
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Occupy materialized against the backdrop of the so-called Arab Spring of 2011, whose most notable achievement was the resignation of longtime Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, as well as the Greek and Spanish movements that exploded that same spring and summer. The defining feature that linked these movements was their concentration around large public encampments: Tahrir Square in Egypt, Syntagma Square in Greece, Puerta del Sol in Madrid, Zuccotti Park in New York City. In his brief consideration of Occupy in his 2023 book If We Burn, Bevins rightly suggests that the “North Atlantic” Occupiers split in their conceptions of what those camps should achieve. “For anarchists,” writes Bevins, “they were self-governed communities operating autonomously from society, a seed that could grow into a world of its own; for others, they were a temporary rallying point, a stage from which to blast out their claims.” And indeed, once officials in cities across the United States cleared out the encampments in November and December of 2011 (the Zuccotti Occupiers were evicted in mid-November), the lines of division were drawn between those who saw the occupation as the launching pad for the birth of a new institutional left, and those, like Graeber, who saw the camps as a “horizontalist” experiment that built on models of direct democracy rooted in the radical wings of the post-World War II civil rights and anti-nuclear movements.
An overemphasis on the split between horizontalists and institutionalists can, however, be misleading. For the Spanish contingent that I got to know through Begonia and Luis, the key concept was not horizontality but inclusivity. A “leaderless” structure was important to them not only because it established a protocol for nonhierarchical assemblies, but also because it blurred the lines between those inside and those outside of the movement. When the Spanish group Democracia Real Ya (Real Democracy Now) had first announced their plans for the May 15th march in Madrid, they deliberately eschewed affiliations with the existing left political parties, most notably Izquierda Unida (the United Left). The Spanish contingent of Occupy was impressed by the extent to which activists had ceded authority and agency to newcomers just arriving at the acampadas, and they were adamant about the need to frame their message in a vocabulary that non-activists and nonacademics could understand. (“Real democracy now” and “No house, no job, no retirement, no fear” are only a couple of the everyday phrases that caught fire during the 15-M movement.)
This group’s rejection of the “left” label and the specialized vocabulary typically associated with it was much more than a debate over semantics. From the earliest days of the NYCGA, tensions emerged among OWS planners and participants about what the movement should be that would set the stage for many of the most intense intra-left debates over the ensuing decade. On the one hand, there were those who had spent much of their lives in left activist circles, and who felt that, if OWS were to have any impact, it would need to implement political strategies that had already been developed elsewhere. On the other, there were those who believed that Occupy needed to break with the existing attitudes, institutions and languages of the left. To a large extent, the standard histories about Occupy have prioritized the former, which is to say, the narratives of people who have seen the movement as a rebirth or rearticulation of the U.S. left. And it is hard to argue with the fact that this was the effect that Occupy ultimately had on politics in this country.
Yet the strain of the movement that most persuaded me, and that to my mind gave Occupy its singular and (at the time) singularly resonant character, was the one that believed in activating ordinary people through ordinary language. Those who adhered to this strain of OWS had faith that most people in the country intuitively understood how skewed post-2008 U.S. economic policy had been toward the financial elite (“they got bailed out, we got sold out,” as the popular chant had it), and could communicate that message in their own words. In this conception, the encampments that arose around the country during the Occupy movement (like all the squares that arose in the Movement of the Squares in 2011) were not merely springboards for protests against neoliberal capitalism, though many of the organizers were strong critics of the capitalist system. The camps were also physical spaces for people to challenge the reigning politico-economic orthodoxy by developing new ideas, habits and vocabularies in common with one another. The goal was to call into being a movement in which anyone, regardless of ideological affiliation, could find a place.
This ethos was central to the articulation of OWS’s iconic “We are the 99 percent” slogan. As Graeber wrote in his 2013 book, The Democracy Project, while the slogan was typically attributed to him, it was in fact a “collective creation”: Graeber “threw in the 99 percent part, Begonia and Luis added the ‘we,’ and the verb was ultimately added by Chris, of Food Not Bombs, when he created the ‘We Are the 99 Percent’ tumblr page a month later.” It always struck me as significant that my Spanish friends were the ones who added the “we” to the 99 percent slogan, since it spoke to their belief that Occupy needed to construct as broad and nonpartisan an identity as possible. In an email to the rest of the NYCGA group, Graeber had proposed a “99% movement” as a counterweight to “both parties” in the U.S. political system that “govern in the name of the 1% of Americans who have received pretty much all the proceeds of [recent] economic growth.” Yet it was Begonia and Luis’s decision to attach the first-person-plural pronoun to the slogan in an outreach flyer they began distributing near NYC subways in early September 2011 that cemented the idea that Occupy was a movement that sought to cut through both the partisan dichotomy of Democrat and Republican and the stultifying ideological binary of left and right.
It is worth stepping back for a moment to appreciate just how thoroughly that 99 percent slogan departed from the standard liberal-left accounts of class in the early 2010s. In a country where inequality was discussed almost exclusively through a tripartite division of upper, middle and working class (along with hyphenate distinctions such as “upper-middle” and “lower-middle”), Occupy provided a language to account for the most conspicuous economic development of the previous decades: the dramatic upward redistribution of wealth toward the “one percent” that began in the 1970s. Prominent intellectual critics of Occupy’s legacy, such as Catherine Liu and Musa al-Gharbi, are right to point out that this new class schema could be used to obfuscate the role that the professional-managerial class (Liu) or symbolic elites (al-Gharbi) played in maintaining the political and economic status quo. But this doesn’t negate what the slogan made visible—and possible—in the early days of the Occupy movement. By rhetorically encompassing all but a tiny sliver of the financial elite, “We are the 99 percent” succeeded in calling attention to the staggering percentage of people in the United States whose lives would be better if the one percent were compelled to share a greater percentage of their wealth—and power—with everyone else.
Everyone else included, of course, many who had voted for Republicans in recent elections. This was no accident. In The Democracy Project, Graeber expressed sympathy for the anger that motivated George W. Bush voters in the early 2000s, despite his disapproval of Bush himself. “The militant anti-intellectualism of the populist right is more than merely a rejection of the authority of the professional-managerial class,” Graeber asserts, “it’s also a protest against a class that they see as trying to monopolize for itself the means to live a life dedicated to anything other than material self-interest.” When he goes on to say that “watching liberals express bewilderment that [working-class Americans] thus seem to be acting against their own self-interest … presumably only makes matters worse,” he articulates what I took to be a core belief of Occupy as it unfolded in late 2011 and early 2012: that liberal-left condescension toward working-class people needed to give way to a political framing that genuinely included them.
Although there is no question that most of the original Occupiers considered themselves to be on the left, there were several moments in the organizing assemblies of the NYCGA that spoke to conscious efforts among participants to retain the encampment’s autonomous, nonpartisan structure. The most decisive instance that I witnessed occurred in the NYCGA in August 2011, when there was a debate about whether to hold the next OWS planning assembly on the picket line of a Verizon workers’ strike. Although most assembly members were in favor, a single participant objected, a woman who worried that publicly aligning with a union organization might alienate former Tea Party participants who could potentially be swayed toward the Occupy cause. There was heated discussion about the proposal, and ultimately the woman’s argument prevailed. Some assembly participants were frustrated with her, but her objections struck me as consistent with the rhetoric we had been using in the NYCGA up to that point. If the individuals present at the assemblies were autonomous entities, as many had insisted, it made little sense for Occupy to latch onto an existing organization with its own political priorities and internal hierarchies.
Looking back, it seems to me that the decision to eschew the assembly-line meeting did in fact represent something like the general will, especially insofar as the majority of the assembly members consistently expressed their disappointments with the institutional left. They were well aware that, three years after the 2008 financial crisis, the only organized resistance to the corporate bank bailouts had come from the right. They understood that union membership had declined precipitously over the previous decades, and that unions themselves had increasingly pursued a clientelist relationship with the Democratic Party. And they recognized that existing left organizations in the U.S.—including the DSA and the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party (WWP)—had shrunk and descended to such a degree of sectarianism that their effect on the actual working-class population was virtually nonexistent. As Graeber makes clear in The Democracy Project, during the initial stages of Occupy, many organizers saw such institutions as an obstacle to the creation of a popular movement.
In ensuing years, however, this wariness would fade. To some extent, this was understandable. No movement in a country as big as the United States can hope to sustain itself without engaging with existing political organizations, and there’s no question that the left institutions that emerged or were reborn in the post-Occupy period achieved victories that the pre-Occupy left could scarcely have imagined. In my view, however, their growth would be limited by the very insularity of vision that the early Occupiers had sought to transcend. In the codification of Occupy as a movement by, for and of the left, these institutions abandoned the element of its formation that had made it most promising to me and many others: the faith that a mass movement could only be achieved in the United States by uniting people of different ideological persuasions—as well as many people who did not consider themselves to have an “ideology” at all—around the aim of fundamentally changing our political and financial system.
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Although Occupy groups turned to a range of movements and initiatives in the years following 2011, the dominant strategic framework that emerged within the cultural and intellectual left once the squares had been cleared was “left populism.” Indeed, the first issue of n+1 after OWS’s eviction opened with an editorial titled “A Left Populism,” which argued for converting the political energies unleashed by Occupy into a mass populist movement accompanied by an “intellectual populism” of the creative class. Using this framework, the n+1 editors, who had been among the cultural left’s most fervent supporters of OWS during the movement’s rise, cast the widespread evictions of the Occupy encampments in late 2011 as a victory in disguise. Since the clearing of Zuccotti Park, the editors wrote, the movement “has also arguably entered that phase of growing up that consists of leaving home.” The task of the American left in the post-Occupy era would be to transform the “We are the 99 percent” slogan from a rallying cry into a lived political reality, thereby “rescuing the country in the name of the people by and for whom it’s allegedly governed.”
The n+1 editors’ conviction in early 2012 that the former Occupiers should create a cultural and political movement of the left seems intuitive to us now, precisely because Occupy has featured so prominently in the history of the U.S. left’s resurgence in the 2010s. Yet in order to understand why “left populism” became the watchword of the burgeoning post-Occupy left, we must once again shift our attention to the international context that informed the U.S. activists’ decision-making process. By 2012, left populism was well into its second decade as an “actually existing” politics in Latin America, and it had already brought a number of influential theorists, activists and politicians to its cause in various parts of the globe. During the second half of the twentieth century and into the 21st, European and Latin American political theorists had largely imbued the term “populism” with negative connotations, as it was typically linked to notions of “crowd rule” and associated with the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s. In the early 21st century, however, post-Marxist philosophers Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe launched a spirited defense of “populist reason.” Building on their co-authored 1985 work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, they insisted that, following the collapse of the traditional class categories defined by Marx, the left must abandon its focus on the working class as the agent of history in favor of building coalitions among groups with markedly different political demands. As Laclau and Mouffe frequently stressed, their vision for a successful populist movement derived from their experiences in the 1960s and 1970s, when they witnessed both the rise of global social justice movements largely based on identity categories and the inability of existing left politics to channel their energy. In their view, the best hope for the left was to create a “chain of equivalences” among distinct demands (economic equality, racial justice, an end to gender discrimination, etc.) under the aegis of what they dubbed the “empty signifier” of the “people.”
Although Laclau and Mouffe’s defense of a populism of the left was articulated in somewhat abstract terms, it acquired real-world currency with the explosion of Latin American populist governments in the first decade of the 21st century. (Laclau was born and raised in Argentina, and became an advisor of Argentine president Néstor Kirchner.) Hugo Chávez in Venezuela (1999-2013), Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina (2003-15), Evo Morales in Bolivia (2006-19) and Rafael Correa in Ecuador (2007-17) all entered office by uniting previously unaligned “popular” sectors in their respective governing coalitions. As the Argentine sociologist Maristella Svampa has written, the “plebeian” populism of Morales’s Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Toward Socialism) was in many ways the most radical example in the region, in that it brought together farmers, indigenous groups, urban laborers and workers in the informal economy to elect the first indigenous president in the history of Bolivia. Whether they donned the socialist label or not (Morales did, the Kirchners did not), all of these governments adopted significant measures to combat neoliberal governing policies in their respective countries. Even as these populist Latin American leaders took over the state apparatus, they continued to position themselves rhetorically as the defenders of the people (el pueblo) against the oligarchy (la oligarquía) in ways that anticipated Occupy’s own discursive opposition of the 99 percent and the one percent.
In the years after “A Left Populism” appeared, little magazines such as n+1 , Dissent and Jacobin repeatedly invoked the term as a centerpiece of post-Occupy strategy, sometimes pairing it with the designation we more typically associate with the contemporary left, which is to say, democratic socialism. Indeed, while democratic socialism remained to a certain extent the preferred self-description in domestic contexts, virtually any attempt to situate the U.S. left globally implied a turn to the language of left populism. This became particularly true as Western European left-populist movements began to gain steam in the mid-2010s, with the electoral victory of Alexis Tsipras of Syriza in Greece in 2015 and the rise of Podemos’s Pablo Iglesias and La France Insoumise’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon in Spanish and French national politics respectively. John Judis’s 2016 essay in Dissent, “Rethinking Populism,” for instance, draws a clear parallel between the left-populist platforms of Podemos in Spain and Bernie Sanders’s demands for “a national $15-an-hour minimum wage or Medicare for all.” By linking U.S. political figures to the upsurge of global left populism, these writers and academics saw themselves as articulating a potential counterweight to the right-wing populism of Donald Trump.
But the post-Occupy U.S. left didn’t just embrace internationalist left-populist rhetoric; they also sought to translate Laclau and Mouffe’s coalition-building approach into a framework for domestic political organization. Particularly after the success of Sanders’s primary campaign in 2016, each new social movement that arose—Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, #MeToo, the new environmental movement, “new labor” and finally the Gaza encampments—was incorporated into the post-Occupy left’s conception of its own development. Despite notable pushback from elements of the “dirtbag left” and a range of leftist thinkers such as Adolph Reed, Nancy Fraser, Catherine Liu, Walter Benn Michaels, Asad Haider and Vivek Chibber, the prevailing wisdom held that the best electoral strategy was to identify those movements that unambiguously adopted a “left” frame and bring them into the fold.
Institutionally, the most decisive conversion to this “chain of equivalences” politics occurred within the post-Occupy left’s most visible organization: the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). As its membership shot up from six thousand to nearly one hundred thousand from 2016 to 2020, DSA launched a series of working groups oriented around the key demands of the period’s ongoing movements: the Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus, the Queer & Feminist Commission, the Ecosocialist Working Group, the Abolition Working Group, the Disability Working Group and the Mutual Aid Working Group.
It would be easy from the perspective of 2026 to suggest that the formation of these groups was evidence of the left’s “identitarian” turn, and this was indeed a point of contention in the countless internecine battles on the post-Occupy left about whether “race” or “class” had predominated, or should predominate, in organizing efforts. In point of fact, however, nearly every left organization and politician pursued some version of “chain of equivalence” politics during the long 2010s. To cite only one telling example, the unifying feature of the DSA working groups formed during this period was not that they were organized around identity categories (though some of course were), but rather that they could be tied to those popular movements of the 2010s that the DSA itself coded as “leftist.” Mutual Aid spoke to Occupy, Abolition and Afrosocialism to BLM, Ecosocialism to climate activism (School Strike 4 Climate, 350.org, Sunrise Movement, etc.), the Queer & Feminist Commission to the movements for trans and women’s rights (such as the 2017 Women’s March and #MeToo), and the Disability Working Group to the expansion of the disability-rights movement over the past fifteen years.
In electoral politics, the standard-bearer of the progressive populist challenge was of course Bernie Sanders, whose 2016 and 2020 campaigns galvanized the left as well as an extraordinary number of ordinary American voters. Sanders was probably the purest distillation of the U.S. populist tradition, in that, like the Populist Party that arose during the late nineteenth century, he used his electoral platform to relentlessly criticize what he saw as a regression to the monopoly capitalism of the Gilded Age. Yet neither Sanders nor the movement behind him were immune to pressures to adhere to the logic of the “new” left populism espoused by Laclau and Mouffe, which eschewed the singular emphasis on economic demands in favor of what Mouffe described in her 2018 book For a Left Populism as an “approach apt to grasp the multiplicity of struggles against different forms of domination.” In the 2010s, journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates had famously criticized the Sanders campaign for failing to advocate for reparations for slavery, arguing that Sanders viewed “black people not so much as a class specifically injured by white supremacy, but rather, as a group which magically suffers from disproportionate poverty.” In the run-up to the 2020 election, Sanders himself spoke far more directly to the specificities of racial injustice. In an effort to outrun accusations that his principal supporters were straight white men (i.e. Bernie bros), he also spent more time addressing arguments that had surfaced after Trump’s first election about the ongoing violence of patriarchal systems.
The 2020 Sanders campaign was successful, to a point. Sanders was able to fend off the challenge of Elizabeth Warren’s own populist campaign, which was more popular among the Democratic faithful but less radical in its economic agenda. The reasons for his eventual defeat to Biden in the primaries are still hotly debated; it is well known, of course, that Democratic Party elites played some part in it. What that defeat demonstrated unambiguously, though, was that Sanders had not been able to reshape the Democratic electorate in the way that Trump had managed to do on the Republican side with his right-populist coalition. And it may well be that this failure was related to the divergence between the working-class voters he initially won over to his anti-corporate platform in 2016 and his partial turn, in 2020, to a “left politics” that sought, in Mouffe’s words, to “articulate the struggles about different forms of subordination without attributing any a priori centrality to any of them.”
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One does not have to agree with every aspect of the “chain of equivalence” strategy pursued by the U.S. left throughout the long 2010s to recognize its appeal. The United States has a long history of successful coalitional politics (one might think of the interwar Popular Front, or the civil rights movement in its ascendant phase), and in a country that remains heavily stratified by class and race, one should not overestimate the difficulty of uniting people according to a single cause or demand. As Anton Jäger and Arthur Borriello observe in The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession, a populist insurgency like Sanders’s was always going to run up against the contemporary divisions between “a provincial working class left behind by deindustrialization” and “a new class of service workers in inner cities, plagued by rising rents and falling wages, more ethnically diverse and tied to the politics of urban progressivism.” All of which is to say that, regardless of the theoretical and practical orientation the post-Occupy left wound up taking, it was bound to meet with daunting challenges.
Still, not all of the problems faced by the post-Occupy left were external, and it is important to be honest about the shortcomings of the leading left-populist theory of the period. One of the governing assumptions of Laclau’s model is that the process of building a “popular identity” begins with a series of discrete demands, which later “crystallize” into a chain of equivalences through an act of political mobilization. Yet as demands continue to mount from various popular movements and constituencies, the left eventually faces the challenge of harmonizing them into a single political project. One example of this challenge in the United States, which has received significant attention in millennial activist circles, is how to reconcile #MeToo’s demand for greater accountability from men for sexual abuses of power with BLM’s insistence that the carceral state disproportionately targets black men: If both of these demands are fixed in advance as elements of the left’s equivalential chain, it would seem exceedingly difficult to adjudicate between them.
A bigger problem for the creation of a mass movement, however, is one that transcends internecine debates about how to reconcile competing priorities. Whenever a new demand is added to the chain of equivalences, the movement runs the risk of alienating some portion of those who might have been activated by a more commonsense appeal. This is especially the case when left organizations expect their members to pledge allegiance to an ever-lengthening list of “links.” One of DSA’s founders, Maurice Isserman, has written publicly of his decision to leave the organization after public statements by several chapters of DSA in the immediate aftermath of October 7th that characterized Hamas’s attacks as an act of “anti-colonial struggle.” As someone who has been involved in the Gaza encampments and protests in the wake of 2023, I can understand the logic behind DSA’s decision not to make a statement solely on behalf of the Israeli victims, and its later unambiguous declarations against the Israeli assault on Gaza. The endorsements of Hamas’s actions in that moment lower down in the organization, however, struck me as gratuitous and unstrategic. Inevitably, any political group will be forced to make tough decisions and navigate real differences of opinion and outlook. At the same time, the episode offers a vivid example of how chain-of-equivalence politics can devolve into a series of litmus tests that needlessly fracture coalitions and exclude potential adherents.
In a sense, n+1’s “A Left Populism” editorial of 2012 implicitly recognized the dangers of adopting a political strategy based on the simple aggregation of a set of demands toward which one was favorably disposed: the slogan “We are the 99 percent” does not “want your sympathy,” they wrote, “it wants your identification, and invites you to accept the consequences of that identification.” In the ensuing years, however, many intellectuals and organizations on the left came to promote movement-based demands that ended up narrowing political spaces rather than opening them up.
Indeed, one could go so far as to say that the transition from the Occupy movement to left populism in the U.S. context was governed by the key term that gave coherence to the post-Occupy development itself, that is, “the left.” As I’ve argued above, the majority of Occupy’s organizers did not envision the movement as a contribution to the establishment left; to the contrary, they largely considered the language of left activism to be alienating. (Graeber mostly eschews the left label in The Democracy Project, calling Occupy instead an “opening up of the radical imagination.”) It is thus a bitter irony that the post-Occupy left so often seemed to stake its identity on policing the boundaries around what counted as a left demand and what didn’t, who got to speak for the left and who didn’t. In this milieu, to identify someone or something—a movement, an organization—as “leftist” increasingly stood as a guarantee that “they” were on the right side of the struggle, not to mention of history itself. Conversely, to remove the label, to say that one was no longer on the left because of x or y position, was to effectively negate that person’s political agency.
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Can we imagine a contestatory politics in the United States that doesn’t immediately collapse into our standard left/right dichotomy? In the aftermath of 2011, many of my international friends who helped organize OWS gravitated toward global social movements that were less visible to the establishment U.S. left. My Spanish friends were particularly influenced by the so-called “tide” mobilizations in the mid-2010s in Spain (las mareas), which fended off a number of austerity measures proposed by the conservative People’s Party that was in power at the time. These movements largely avoided making partisan declarations or directly affiliating with established unions. As a retrospective 2024 article in the Spanish outlet El Salto observed, the white tide (marea blanca) that resisted the privatization of a massive part of Madrid’s public health system owed much of its success to its “transversality”—i.e. the fact that “people from all different ideologies participated in it with the same objective: defending public health systems.” The movement’s appeal was “based on the principles of self-organization: no union, party or association organized [it]; the people themselves, the workers themselves, organized their activities and decided on what steps to take.”
Of course, it would be naïve to claim that autonomous organizations without any external partisan or institutional links are a panacea for the left. Horizontalist movements have experienced their own setbacks over the past decade, and there is no one formula for successful political action in our present. Nevertheless, the principle behind the Spanish mareas, namely that the most effective collective mobilizations often break with established ideological categories rather than reaffirming them, comports with what I found so new and invigorating about Occupy in late 2011. As Luis argued in Cultures of Anyone, his book on the legacy of the 15-M in Spain, the international movements that arose in the 2010s didn’t ultimately make “demands” of the system but rather were experiments in alternative forms of thinking and doing. From the perspective of 2026, we can see that this must include alternatives to the rigid left/right binary that we are tempted to apply, often moralistically, to anything that is ideologically ambiguous—as in the Spanish mareas, the French “yellow vests” or the COVID-era protests against school closures in the U.S.
The political figure who seems to have best understood both the potential and the limits of post-Occupy leftism is, not coincidentally, the one who has also generated the most enthusiasm since 2024. Without a doubt, Zohran Mamdani emerged out of the institutional ferment of the DSA, but both his tone and his message marked a genuine departure. The most visible difference was his decision to begin his campaign by talking to disaffected Trump voters about the issues that mattered most to them. Although he has taken progressive positions on many key issues, including wealth inequality and U.S. military support of Israel, Mamdani possesses a remarkable ability to describe them in terms of what they mean for New Yorkers, as opposed to what they mean for “the left.” In pre-election interviews, he skillfully rerouted gotcha comments about Israel/Palestine into commonsense avowals for Israel’s “right to exist as a state with equal rights,” and in a notable moment in a primary debate, he dodged a hostile question about where he’d travel first as mayor of New York by insisting that he would stay in the city and get to know its communities better, including its Jewish ones. Crucially, his politics of affordability weren’t just an elaborate form of preaching to the crowd. Exit polls suggested that a full 15 percent of Mamdani voters in 2025 did not vote for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. It is too soon to know how far Mamdani can push his political agenda, but at the very least he has given us a glimpse of what a successful post-Trump politics might look like, as the results of the Democratic primaries this summer have shown.
While growing enthusiasm for figures like Mamdani is undoubtedly welcome, the left should not use it as an excuse to move on without seriously assessing what has and has not worked these past fifteen years. I write as someone who to a certain extent traveled the path of the post-Occupy left that I have described up to this point. Although I never joined the institutions that I discuss here in an official capacity, I was broadly sympathetic to the aims of the social movements of the 2010s and the Sanders campaigns, believing that it was in fact possible to link the many different progressive demands that surfaced during this period. At some point, however, as the battle for hegemony between left and right populisms broke decisively toward the latter—not only in the United States but across the globe—I felt that the moment for collective reflection had come. Instead, what I saw in many sectors of the left was a tendency to attribute the failures of its political project almost entirely to external forces.
It is always difficult to engage in self-criticism, because in doing so we accept the possibility that we may have to dispense with habits of thought and action that we have acquired over many years, and that have become central to our identities. Yet it was precisely this feature of Occupy that was most transformative for me. The movement provided an occasion—and a space—for people to set aside their prior beliefs, listen to others and try to build something in common. To fall into what Bevins calls “teleological self-deception” is one way of denying the risks and responsibilities that comes with this kind of political practice, but so is the totalizing cynicism that some have embraced in the wake of the post-Occupy left’s supposed failures. Ultimately, the greatest lesson Occupy taught me is that real politics are a form of experimentation whose means are never fully given and whose outcome can never be fully predicted in advance. This requires us to accept that things might have turned out differently if we had acted in a different way. And that they still could.
Art credit: Andre Malerba, Occupy Wall Street protesters lock arms in solidarity during a demonstration near Wall Street, 2012. Courtesy of the artist.
Roughly once a week, in August and early September of 2011, I sat in a semicircle in Manhattan’s Tompkins Square Park with eighty to a hundred others to debate how, when and why to “occupy” the financial capital of the world. As a relative newcomer to political activism, I barely said a word in those assemblies. I wish I could say I participated in the New York City General Assembly (NYCGA) because of my convictions, but the truth was I had been dragged to the first meeting by two of my closest friends, the Spanish organizers Begonia Santa-Cecilia and Luis Moreno-Caballud. For most of the summer, they had been telling me about a massive popular mobilization that had erupted in Spain on May 15th of that same year, the 15-M or indignados movement, during which an estimated six to eight million people passed through encampments (acampadas) across their home country calling for an end to the domination of the political system by financial elites. As I sat mostly on the sidelines, viewing the discussions with interest but also with doubt about the prospects for successfully setting up camp anywhere in the Financial District, Begonia and Luis helped form the NYCGA Outreach Working Group, tasked with getting out word of the group’s plan to the public, and in early August, in an email chain involving the anthropologist David Graeber and other assembly participants, they played a decisive role in creating the “We are the 99 percent” slogan that came to define Occupy Wall Street (OWS) in the popular imagination. On September 17th, the date that the culture-jamming magazine Adbusters had somewhat whimsically proposed for OWS, I met up with Begonia and Luis in southern Manhattan, still not entirely convinced that they—that we—could pull off anything other than a publicity stunt. I was wrong. A sizeable group of Occupiers spent that night in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, and then the next. Occupy encampments began to mushroom around the United States, and then around the world.
Like many of my millennial peers, I date my political formation to the heady months surrounding the 2011 Occupy encampments. Occupy initiated a historical cycle on the left that spanned over a decade, despite the fact that its major phase lasted for just over two months from September to November of 2011. To this day, I believe that Occupy not only catalyzed the revitalization of a new “New Left” but also set the paradigm for a series of social movements that, from Black Lives Matter to the Gaza campus occupations, have remade American political culture. My position is hardly unusual among writers on the left. In the 2021 book Generation Occupy, the journalist Michael Levitin took aim at the still-prominent view that the Occupy movement “made no real impact on American political life,” insisting that OWS “revived the labor movement, remade the Democratic Party and reinvented activism” for the 21st century. In a similar vein, labor historian and popular left commentator Gabriel Winant asserted on the tenth anniversary of the 2011 Zuccotti encampment that “Occupy was the critical event in the formation of a new anticapitalist intellectual milieu,” out of whose “ferment” new left media outlets such as Jacobin and the New Inquiry gained visibility and older venues such as n+1 and Dissent “underwent much-heralded generational transformations.”
Arriving as they did in the middle of the Biden presidency, however, evaluations such as these couldn’t help but take on an elegiac quality. Even by then, the “ferment” of the 2010s seemed to have died out. On the international front, the anti-austerity parties that had emerged in the mid-2010s as serious contenders in Europe (Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain) had faded from the scene, while the so-called “pink tide” of progressive governments that dominated the Latin American landscape for most of the 2000s and 2010s had already suffered a series of stinging electoral defeats. Over the next few years, hard-right leaders surged into power in the region, in some instances (as with Javier Milei in Argentina, or José Antonio Kast in Chile) replacing administrations that embodied the resurgence of the 21st-century left. Domestically, the 2024 reelection of Donald Trump, this time with a majority of the popular vote, merely seemed to confirm the final ebb of the social-movement cycle initiated by Occupy, notwithstanding the Gaza campus protests that emerged in the months preceding his presidency. Already in a 2023 episode of the Jacobin-sponsored podcast The Dig, host Daniel Denvir observed, “It feels like we’re at the end of a notable moment in U.S. history that began with Occupy, Ferguson, Standing Rock, and … that reached its peak with the Bernie 2020 campaign and, amid the height of the pandemic, the summer 2020 George Floyd uprising.” In the wake of what journalist Vincent Bevins has dubbed the “mass protest decade” of the 2010s, during which economic and social justice were placed at the center of a civilizational debate, many have joined Bevins in asking whether our belief in a more equal future was a realistic expectation or mere “teleological self-deception”—an unearned conviction, that is, that “our” cause would eventually prevail because it was the correct one.
As the global tides have continued to shift rightward, I’ve found myself going back to those initial days of Occupy, looking for clues. What was it about the movement that captured the imagination of an entire generation? Where did it come from? How did it lay the foundations for the contemporary American left? And, equally important, what can we learn, fifteen years on, from a movement that promised so much and yet ultimately failed to deliver a political project strong enough to counteract the ensuing surge of right populism?
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Occupy materialized against the backdrop of the so-called Arab Spring of 2011, whose most notable achievement was the resignation of longtime Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, as well as the Greek and Spanish movements that exploded that same spring and summer. The defining feature that linked these movements was their concentration around large public encampments: Tahrir Square in Egypt, Syntagma Square in Greece, Puerta del Sol in Madrid, Zuccotti Park in New York City. In his brief consideration of Occupy in his 2023 book If We Burn, Bevins rightly suggests that the “North Atlantic” Occupiers split in their conceptions of what those camps should achieve. “For anarchists,” writes Bevins, “they were self-governed communities operating autonomously from society, a seed that could grow into a world of its own; for others, they were a temporary rallying point, a stage from which to blast out their claims.” And indeed, once officials in cities across the United States cleared out the encampments in November and December of 2011 (the Zuccotti Occupiers were evicted in mid-November), the lines of division were drawn between those who saw the occupation as the launching pad for the birth of a new institutional left, and those, like Graeber, who saw the camps as a “horizontalist” experiment that built on models of direct democracy rooted in the radical wings of the post-World War II civil rights and anti-nuclear movements.
An overemphasis on the split between horizontalists and institutionalists can, however, be misleading. For the Spanish contingent that I got to know through Begonia and Luis, the key concept was not horizontality but inclusivity. A “leaderless” structure was important to them not only because it established a protocol for nonhierarchical assemblies, but also because it blurred the lines between those inside and those outside of the movement. When the Spanish group Democracia Real Ya (Real Democracy Now) had first announced their plans for the May 15th march in Madrid, they deliberately eschewed affiliations with the existing left political parties, most notably Izquierda Unida (the United Left). The Spanish contingent of Occupy was impressed by the extent to which activists had ceded authority and agency to newcomers just arriving at the acampadas, and they were adamant about the need to frame their message in a vocabulary that non-activists and nonacademics could understand. (“Real democracy now” and “No house, no job, no retirement, no fear” are only a couple of the everyday phrases that caught fire during the 15-M movement.)
This group’s rejection of the “left” label and the specialized vocabulary typically associated with it was much more than a debate over semantics. From the earliest days of the NYCGA, tensions emerged among OWS planners and participants about what the movement should be that would set the stage for many of the most intense intra-left debates over the ensuing decade. On the one hand, there were those who had spent much of their lives in left activist circles, and who felt that, if OWS were to have any impact, it would need to implement political strategies that had already been developed elsewhere. On the other, there were those who believed that Occupy needed to break with the existing attitudes, institutions and languages of the left. To a large extent, the standard histories about Occupy have prioritized the former, which is to say, the narratives of people who have seen the movement as a rebirth or rearticulation of the U.S. left. And it is hard to argue with the fact that this was the effect that Occupy ultimately had on politics in this country.
Yet the strain of the movement that most persuaded me, and that to my mind gave Occupy its singular and (at the time) singularly resonant character, was the one that believed in activating ordinary people through ordinary language. Those who adhered to this strain of OWS had faith that most people in the country intuitively understood how skewed post-2008 U.S. economic policy had been toward the financial elite (“they got bailed out, we got sold out,” as the popular chant had it), and could communicate that message in their own words. In this conception, the encampments that arose around the country during the Occupy movement (like all the squares that arose in the Movement of the Squares in 2011) were not merely springboards for protests against neoliberal capitalism, though many of the organizers were strong critics of the capitalist system. The camps were also physical spaces for people to challenge the reigning politico-economic orthodoxy by developing new ideas, habits and vocabularies in common with one another. The goal was to call into being a movement in which anyone, regardless of ideological affiliation, could find a place.
This ethos was central to the articulation of OWS’s iconic “We are the 99 percent” slogan. As Graeber wrote in his 2013 book, The Democracy Project, while the slogan was typically attributed to him, it was in fact a “collective creation”: Graeber “threw in the 99 percent part, Begonia and Luis added the ‘we,’ and the verb was ultimately added by Chris, of Food Not Bombs, when he created the ‘We Are the 99 Percent’ tumblr page a month later.” It always struck me as significant that my Spanish friends were the ones who added the “we” to the 99 percent slogan, since it spoke to their belief that Occupy needed to construct as broad and nonpartisan an identity as possible. In an email to the rest of the NYCGA group, Graeber had proposed a “99% movement” as a counterweight to “both parties” in the U.S. political system that “govern in the name of the 1% of Americans who have received pretty much all the proceeds of [recent] economic growth.” Yet it was Begonia and Luis’s decision to attach the first-person-plural pronoun to the slogan in an outreach flyer they began distributing near NYC subways in early September 2011 that cemented the idea that Occupy was a movement that sought to cut through both the partisan dichotomy of Democrat and Republican and the stultifying ideological binary of left and right.
It is worth stepping back for a moment to appreciate just how thoroughly that 99 percent slogan departed from the standard liberal-left accounts of class in the early 2010s. In a country where inequality was discussed almost exclusively through a tripartite division of upper, middle and working class (along with hyphenate distinctions such as “upper-middle” and “lower-middle”), Occupy provided a language to account for the most conspicuous economic development of the previous decades: the dramatic upward redistribution of wealth toward the “one percent” that began in the 1970s. Prominent intellectual critics of Occupy’s legacy, such as Catherine Liu and Musa al-Gharbi, are right to point out that this new class schema could be used to obfuscate the role that the professional-managerial class (Liu) or symbolic elites (al-Gharbi) played in maintaining the political and economic status quo. But this doesn’t negate what the slogan made visible—and possible—in the early days of the Occupy movement. By rhetorically encompassing all but a tiny sliver of the financial elite, “We are the 99 percent” succeeded in calling attention to the staggering percentage of people in the United States whose lives would be better if the one percent were compelled to share a greater percentage of their wealth—and power—with everyone else.
Everyone else included, of course, many who had voted for Republicans in recent elections. This was no accident. In The Democracy Project, Graeber expressed sympathy for the anger that motivated George W. Bush voters in the early 2000s, despite his disapproval of Bush himself. “The militant anti-intellectualism of the populist right is more than merely a rejection of the authority of the professional-managerial class,” Graeber asserts, “it’s also a protest against a class that they see as trying to monopolize for itself the means to live a life dedicated to anything other than material self-interest.” When he goes on to say that “watching liberals express bewilderment that [working-class Americans] thus seem to be acting against their own self-interest … presumably only makes matters worse,” he articulates what I took to be a core belief of Occupy as it unfolded in late 2011 and early 2012: that liberal-left condescension toward working-class people needed to give way to a political framing that genuinely included them.
Although there is no question that most of the original Occupiers considered themselves to be on the left, there were several moments in the organizing assemblies of the NYCGA that spoke to conscious efforts among participants to retain the encampment’s autonomous, nonpartisan structure. The most decisive instance that I witnessed occurred in the NYCGA in August 2011, when there was a debate about whether to hold the next OWS planning assembly on the picket line of a Verizon workers’ strike. Although most assembly members were in favor, a single participant objected, a woman who worried that publicly aligning with a union organization might alienate former Tea Party participants who could potentially be swayed toward the Occupy cause. There was heated discussion about the proposal, and ultimately the woman’s argument prevailed. Some assembly participants were frustrated with her, but her objections struck me as consistent with the rhetoric we had been using in the NYCGA up to that point. If the individuals present at the assemblies were autonomous entities, as many had insisted, it made little sense for Occupy to latch onto an existing organization with its own political priorities and internal hierarchies.
Looking back, it seems to me that the decision to eschew the assembly-line meeting did in fact represent something like the general will, especially insofar as the majority of the assembly members consistently expressed their disappointments with the institutional left. They were well aware that, three years after the 2008 financial crisis, the only organized resistance to the corporate bank bailouts had come from the right. They understood that union membership had declined precipitously over the previous decades, and that unions themselves had increasingly pursued a clientelist relationship with the Democratic Party. And they recognized that existing left organizations in the U.S.—including the DSA and the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party (WWP)—had shrunk and descended to such a degree of sectarianism that their effect on the actual working-class population was virtually nonexistent. As Graeber makes clear in The Democracy Project, during the initial stages of Occupy, many organizers saw such institutions as an obstacle to the creation of a popular movement.
In ensuing years, however, this wariness would fade. To some extent, this was understandable. No movement in a country as big as the United States can hope to sustain itself without engaging with existing political organizations, and there’s no question that the left institutions that emerged or were reborn in the post-Occupy period achieved victories that the pre-Occupy left could scarcely have imagined. In my view, however, their growth would be limited by the very insularity of vision that the early Occupiers had sought to transcend. In the codification of Occupy as a movement by, for and of the left, these institutions abandoned the element of its formation that had made it most promising to me and many others: the faith that a mass movement could only be achieved in the United States by uniting people of different ideological persuasions—as well as many people who did not consider themselves to have an “ideology” at all—around the aim of fundamentally changing our political and financial system.
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Although Occupy groups turned to a range of movements and initiatives in the years following 2011, the dominant strategic framework that emerged within the cultural and intellectual left once the squares had been cleared was “left populism.” Indeed, the first issue of n+1 after OWS’s eviction opened with an editorial titled “A Left Populism,” which argued for converting the political energies unleashed by Occupy into a mass populist movement accompanied by an “intellectual populism” of the creative class. Using this framework, the n+1 editors, who had been among the cultural left’s most fervent supporters of OWS during the movement’s rise, cast the widespread evictions of the Occupy encampments in late 2011 as a victory in disguise. Since the clearing of Zuccotti Park, the editors wrote, the movement “has also arguably entered that phase of growing up that consists of leaving home.” The task of the American left in the post-Occupy era would be to transform the “We are the 99 percent” slogan from a rallying cry into a lived political reality, thereby “rescuing the country in the name of the people by and for whom it’s allegedly governed.”
The n+1 editors’ conviction in early 2012 that the former Occupiers should create a cultural and political movement of the left seems intuitive to us now, precisely because Occupy has featured so prominently in the history of the U.S. left’s resurgence in the 2010s. Yet in order to understand why “left populism” became the watchword of the burgeoning post-Occupy left, we must once again shift our attention to the international context that informed the U.S. activists’ decision-making process. By 2012, left populism was well into its second decade as an “actually existing” politics in Latin America, and it had already brought a number of influential theorists, activists and politicians to its cause in various parts of the globe. During the second half of the twentieth century and into the 21st, European and Latin American political theorists had largely imbued the term “populism” with negative connotations, as it was typically linked to notions of “crowd rule” and associated with the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s. In the early 21st century, however, post-Marxist philosophers Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe launched a spirited defense of “populist reason.” Building on their co-authored 1985 work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, they insisted that, following the collapse of the traditional class categories defined by Marx, the left must abandon its focus on the working class as the agent of history in favor of building coalitions among groups with markedly different political demands. As Laclau and Mouffe frequently stressed, their vision for a successful populist movement derived from their experiences in the 1960s and 1970s, when they witnessed both the rise of global social justice movements largely based on identity categories and the inability of existing left politics to channel their energy. In their view, the best hope for the left was to create a “chain of equivalences” among distinct demands (economic equality, racial justice, an end to gender discrimination, etc.) under the aegis of what they dubbed the “empty signifier” of the “people.”
Although Laclau and Mouffe’s defense of a populism of the left was articulated in somewhat abstract terms, it acquired real-world currency with the explosion of Latin American populist governments in the first decade of the 21st century. (Laclau was born and raised in Argentina, and became an advisor of Argentine president Néstor Kirchner.) Hugo Chávez in Venezuela (1999-2013), Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina (2003-15), Evo Morales in Bolivia (2006-19) and Rafael Correa in Ecuador (2007-17) all entered office by uniting previously unaligned “popular” sectors in their respective governing coalitions. As the Argentine sociologist Maristella Svampa has written, the “plebeian” populism of Morales’s Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Toward Socialism) was in many ways the most radical example in the region, in that it brought together farmers, indigenous groups, urban laborers and workers in the informal economy to elect the first indigenous president in the history of Bolivia. Whether they donned the socialist label or not (Morales did, the Kirchners did not), all of these governments adopted significant measures to combat neoliberal governing policies in their respective countries. Even as these populist Latin American leaders took over the state apparatus, they continued to position themselves rhetorically as the defenders of the people (el pueblo) against the oligarchy (la oligarquía) in ways that anticipated Occupy’s own discursive opposition of the 99 percent and the one percent.
In the years after “A Left Populism” appeared, little magazines such as n+1 , Dissent and Jacobin repeatedly invoked the term as a centerpiece of post-Occupy strategy, sometimes pairing it with the designation we more typically associate with the contemporary left, which is to say, democratic socialism. Indeed, while democratic socialism remained to a certain extent the preferred self-description in domestic contexts, virtually any attempt to situate the U.S. left globally implied a turn to the language of left populism. This became particularly true as Western European left-populist movements began to gain steam in the mid-2010s, with the electoral victory of Alexis Tsipras of Syriza in Greece in 2015 and the rise of Podemos’s Pablo Iglesias and La France Insoumise’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon in Spanish and French national politics respectively. John Judis’s 2016 essay in Dissent, “Rethinking Populism,” for instance, draws a clear parallel between the left-populist platforms of Podemos in Spain and Bernie Sanders’s demands for “a national $15-an-hour minimum wage or Medicare for all.” By linking U.S. political figures to the upsurge of global left populism, these writers and academics saw themselves as articulating a potential counterweight to the right-wing populism of Donald Trump.
But the post-Occupy U.S. left didn’t just embrace internationalist left-populist rhetoric; they also sought to translate Laclau and Mouffe’s coalition-building approach into a framework for domestic political organization. Particularly after the success of Sanders’s primary campaign in 2016, each new social movement that arose—Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, #MeToo, the new environmental movement, “new labor” and finally the Gaza encampments—was incorporated into the post-Occupy left’s conception of its own development. Despite notable pushback from elements of the “dirtbag left” and a range of leftist thinkers such as Adolph Reed, Nancy Fraser, Catherine Liu, Walter Benn Michaels, Asad Haider and Vivek Chibber, the prevailing wisdom held that the best electoral strategy was to identify those movements that unambiguously adopted a “left” frame and bring them into the fold.
Institutionally, the most decisive conversion to this “chain of equivalences” politics occurred within the post-Occupy left’s most visible organization: the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). As its membership shot up from six thousand to nearly one hundred thousand from 2016 to 2020, DSA launched a series of working groups oriented around the key demands of the period’s ongoing movements: the Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus, the Queer & Feminist Commission, the Ecosocialist Working Group, the Abolition Working Group, the Disability Working Group and the Mutual Aid Working Group.
It would be easy from the perspective of 2026 to suggest that the formation of these groups was evidence of the left’s “identitarian” turn, and this was indeed a point of contention in the countless internecine battles on the post-Occupy left about whether “race” or “class” had predominated, or should predominate, in organizing efforts. In point of fact, however, nearly every left organization and politician pursued some version of “chain of equivalence” politics during the long 2010s. To cite only one telling example, the unifying feature of the DSA working groups formed during this period was not that they were organized around identity categories (though some of course were), but rather that they could be tied to those popular movements of the 2010s that the DSA itself coded as “leftist.” Mutual Aid spoke to Occupy, Abolition and Afrosocialism to BLM, Ecosocialism to climate activism (School Strike 4 Climate, 350.org, Sunrise Movement, etc.), the Queer & Feminist Commission to the movements for trans and women’s rights (such as the 2017 Women’s March and #MeToo), and the Disability Working Group to the expansion of the disability-rights movement over the past fifteen years.
In electoral politics, the standard-bearer of the progressive populist challenge was of course Bernie Sanders, whose 2016 and 2020 campaigns galvanized the left as well as an extraordinary number of ordinary American voters. Sanders was probably the purest distillation of the U.S. populist tradition, in that, like the Populist Party that arose during the late nineteenth century, he used his electoral platform to relentlessly criticize what he saw as a regression to the monopoly capitalism of the Gilded Age. Yet neither Sanders nor the movement behind him were immune to pressures to adhere to the logic of the “new” left populism espoused by Laclau and Mouffe, which eschewed the singular emphasis on economic demands in favor of what Mouffe described in her 2018 book For a Left Populism as an “approach apt to grasp the multiplicity of struggles against different forms of domination.” In the 2010s, journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates had famously criticized the Sanders campaign for failing to advocate for reparations for slavery, arguing that Sanders viewed “black people not so much as a class specifically injured by white supremacy, but rather, as a group which magically suffers from disproportionate poverty.” In the run-up to the 2020 election, Sanders himself spoke far more directly to the specificities of racial injustice. In an effort to outrun accusations that his principal supporters were straight white men (i.e. Bernie bros), he also spent more time addressing arguments that had surfaced after Trump’s first election about the ongoing violence of patriarchal systems.
The 2020 Sanders campaign was successful, to a point. Sanders was able to fend off the challenge of Elizabeth Warren’s own populist campaign, which was more popular among the Democratic faithful but less radical in its economic agenda. The reasons for his eventual defeat to Biden in the primaries are still hotly debated; it is well known, of course, that Democratic Party elites played some part in it. What that defeat demonstrated unambiguously, though, was that Sanders had not been able to reshape the Democratic electorate in the way that Trump had managed to do on the Republican side with his right-populist coalition. And it may well be that this failure was related to the divergence between the working-class voters he initially won over to his anti-corporate platform in 2016 and his partial turn, in 2020, to a “left politics” that sought, in Mouffe’s words, to “articulate the struggles about different forms of subordination without attributing any a priori centrality to any of them.”
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One does not have to agree with every aspect of the “chain of equivalence” strategy pursued by the U.S. left throughout the long 2010s to recognize its appeal. The United States has a long history of successful coalitional politics (one might think of the interwar Popular Front, or the civil rights movement in its ascendant phase), and in a country that remains heavily stratified by class and race, one should not overestimate the difficulty of uniting people according to a single cause or demand. As Anton Jäger and Arthur Borriello observe in The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession, a populist insurgency like Sanders’s was always going to run up against the contemporary divisions between “a provincial working class left behind by deindustrialization” and “a new class of service workers in inner cities, plagued by rising rents and falling wages, more ethnically diverse and tied to the politics of urban progressivism.” All of which is to say that, regardless of the theoretical and practical orientation the post-Occupy left wound up taking, it was bound to meet with daunting challenges.
Still, not all of the problems faced by the post-Occupy left were external, and it is important to be honest about the shortcomings of the leading left-populist theory of the period. One of the governing assumptions of Laclau’s model is that the process of building a “popular identity” begins with a series of discrete demands, which later “crystallize” into a chain of equivalences through an act of political mobilization. Yet as demands continue to mount from various popular movements and constituencies, the left eventually faces the challenge of harmonizing them into a single political project. One example of this challenge in the United States, which has received significant attention in millennial activist circles, is how to reconcile #MeToo’s demand for greater accountability from men for sexual abuses of power with BLM’s insistence that the carceral state disproportionately targets black men: If both of these demands are fixed in advance as elements of the left’s equivalential chain, it would seem exceedingly difficult to adjudicate between them.
A bigger problem for the creation of a mass movement, however, is one that transcends internecine debates about how to reconcile competing priorities. Whenever a new demand is added to the chain of equivalences, the movement runs the risk of alienating some portion of those who might have been activated by a more commonsense appeal. This is especially the case when left organizations expect their members to pledge allegiance to an ever-lengthening list of “links.” One of DSA’s founders, Maurice Isserman, has written publicly of his decision to leave the organization after public statements by several chapters of DSA in the immediate aftermath of October 7th that characterized Hamas’s attacks as an act of “anti-colonial struggle.” As someone who has been involved in the Gaza encampments and protests in the wake of 2023, I can understand the logic behind DSA’s decision not to make a statement solely on behalf of the Israeli victims, and its later unambiguous declarations against the Israeli assault on Gaza. The endorsements of Hamas’s actions in that moment lower down in the organization, however, struck me as gratuitous and unstrategic. Inevitably, any political group will be forced to make tough decisions and navigate real differences of opinion and outlook. At the same time, the episode offers a vivid example of how chain-of-equivalence politics can devolve into a series of litmus tests that needlessly fracture coalitions and exclude potential adherents.
In a sense, n+1’s “A Left Populism” editorial of 2012 implicitly recognized the dangers of adopting a political strategy based on the simple aggregation of a set of demands toward which one was favorably disposed: the slogan “We are the 99 percent” does not “want your sympathy,” they wrote, “it wants your identification, and invites you to accept the consequences of that identification.” In the ensuing years, however, many intellectuals and organizations on the left came to promote movement-based demands that ended up narrowing political spaces rather than opening them up.
Indeed, one could go so far as to say that the transition from the Occupy movement to left populism in the U.S. context was governed by the key term that gave coherence to the post-Occupy development itself, that is, “the left.” As I’ve argued above, the majority of Occupy’s organizers did not envision the movement as a contribution to the establishment left; to the contrary, they largely considered the language of left activism to be alienating. (Graeber mostly eschews the left label in The Democracy Project, calling Occupy instead an “opening up of the radical imagination.”) It is thus a bitter irony that the post-Occupy left so often seemed to stake its identity on policing the boundaries around what counted as a left demand and what didn’t, who got to speak for the left and who didn’t. In this milieu, to identify someone or something—a movement, an organization—as “leftist” increasingly stood as a guarantee that “they” were on the right side of the struggle, not to mention of history itself. Conversely, to remove the label, to say that one was no longer on the left because of x or y position, was to effectively negate that person’s political agency.
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Can we imagine a contestatory politics in the United States that doesn’t immediately collapse into our standard left/right dichotomy? In the aftermath of 2011, many of my international friends who helped organize OWS gravitated toward global social movements that were less visible to the establishment U.S. left. My Spanish friends were particularly influenced by the so-called “tide” mobilizations in the mid-2010s in Spain (las mareas), which fended off a number of austerity measures proposed by the conservative People’s Party that was in power at the time. These movements largely avoided making partisan declarations or directly affiliating with established unions. As a retrospective 2024 article in the Spanish outlet El Salto observed, the white tide (marea blanca) that resisted the privatization of a massive part of Madrid’s public health system owed much of its success to its “transversality”—i.e. the fact that “people from all different ideologies participated in it with the same objective: defending public health systems.” The movement’s appeal was “based on the principles of self-organization: no union, party or association organized [it]; the people themselves, the workers themselves, organized their activities and decided on what steps to take.”
Of course, it would be naïve to claim that autonomous organizations without any external partisan or institutional links are a panacea for the left. Horizontalist movements have experienced their own setbacks over the past decade, and there is no one formula for successful political action in our present. Nevertheless, the principle behind the Spanish mareas, namely that the most effective collective mobilizations often break with established ideological categories rather than reaffirming them, comports with what I found so new and invigorating about Occupy in late 2011. As Luis argued in Cultures of Anyone, his book on the legacy of the 15-M in Spain, the international movements that arose in the 2010s didn’t ultimately make “demands” of the system but rather were experiments in alternative forms of thinking and doing. From the perspective of 2026, we can see that this must include alternatives to the rigid left/right binary that we are tempted to apply, often moralistically, to anything that is ideologically ambiguous—as in the Spanish mareas, the French “yellow vests” or the COVID-era protests against school closures in the U.S.
The political figure who seems to have best understood both the potential and the limits of post-Occupy leftism is, not coincidentally, the one who has also generated the most enthusiasm since 2024. Without a doubt, Zohran Mamdani emerged out of the institutional ferment of the DSA, but both his tone and his message marked a genuine departure. The most visible difference was his decision to begin his campaign by talking to disaffected Trump voters about the issues that mattered most to them. Although he has taken progressive positions on many key issues, including wealth inequality and U.S. military support of Israel, Mamdani possesses a remarkable ability to describe them in terms of what they mean for New Yorkers, as opposed to what they mean for “the left.” In pre-election interviews, he skillfully rerouted gotcha comments about Israel/Palestine into commonsense avowals for Israel’s “right to exist as a state with equal rights,” and in a notable moment in a primary debate, he dodged a hostile question about where he’d travel first as mayor of New York by insisting that he would stay in the city and get to know its communities better, including its Jewish ones. Crucially, his politics of affordability weren’t just an elaborate form of preaching to the crowd. Exit polls suggested that a full 15 percent of Mamdani voters in 2025 did not vote for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. It is too soon to know how far Mamdani can push his political agenda, but at the very least he has given us a glimpse of what a successful post-Trump politics might look like, as the results of the Democratic primaries this summer have shown.
While growing enthusiasm for figures like Mamdani is undoubtedly welcome, the left should not use it as an excuse to move on without seriously assessing what has and has not worked these past fifteen years. I write as someone who to a certain extent traveled the path of the post-Occupy left that I have described up to this point. Although I never joined the institutions that I discuss here in an official capacity, I was broadly sympathetic to the aims of the social movements of the 2010s and the Sanders campaigns, believing that it was in fact possible to link the many different progressive demands that surfaced during this period. At some point, however, as the battle for hegemony between left and right populisms broke decisively toward the latter—not only in the United States but across the globe—I felt that the moment for collective reflection had come. Instead, what I saw in many sectors of the left was a tendency to attribute the failures of its political project almost entirely to external forces.
It is always difficult to engage in self-criticism, because in doing so we accept the possibility that we may have to dispense with habits of thought and action that we have acquired over many years, and that have become central to our identities. Yet it was precisely this feature of Occupy that was most transformative for me. The movement provided an occasion—and a space—for people to set aside their prior beliefs, listen to others and try to build something in common. To fall into what Bevins calls “teleological self-deception” is one way of denying the risks and responsibilities that comes with this kind of political practice, but so is the totalizing cynicism that some have embraced in the wake of the post-Occupy left’s supposed failures. Ultimately, the greatest lesson Occupy taught me is that real politics are a form of experimentation whose means are never fully given and whose outcome can never be fully predicted in advance. This requires us to accept that things might have turned out differently if we had acted in a different way. And that they still could.
Art credit: Andre Malerba, Occupy Wall Street protesters lock arms in solidarity during a demonstration near Wall Street, 2012. Courtesy of the artist.
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