This is another blog for future historians.
A year ago there was a movement among young people called 'Occupy Wall Street'. The term Occupy was then used in other locations in the United States and around the world
This movement has been grossly mischaracterized by journalists of my era. I went and looked at several encampments on several dates in Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The number of people was very small in each instance, in the hundreds at the peak. The people were disheveled dirty and resembled everyday homeless people. The encampments were dirty, littered and squalid.
The movement was elevated far beyond its physical reality by the fawning adoration of all the prominent Democratic politicians, academics and clergy in every city.
I can only speculate on the reasons for this fawning adoration that was repeated and exaggerated by the press.
I suggest that among the Left there was wishful thinking in hoping that the Occupy movement in some way was a rebuttal or response to the Tea Party. It may have been but it was infinitesimal, ineffective, chaotic and irrelevant. The Tea Party was probably the most significant democratic movement in the history of the world.
The Occupy movement was astro-turf ginned up by an angry anti-American president.