THE MAN ON THE SCREEN HAS A RICH SOUTHERN ACCENT, AND he speaks with pride of his hometown. Ripley, Mississippi, to hear J. D. Meadows tell it, is a great place to live.
It’s just that the economy has gone to hell. “My uncle lost his job up here at Bench Craft, and so did my aunt. Their company shut down and moved to China,” he says to the filmmakers who have come down to Ripley to talk to him and other members of the then burgeoning Tea Party movement.
It’s January 2010. I’m sitting in a TV studio in New York, a long way from Ripley, listening to my boss, Laura Flanders, interview Meadows about the Tea Party and why he has decided to join. The economy collapsed while I was finishing journalism school, and though I was tempted to stay in school, get another degree, and hope that the job market would be better by the time I finished, or at least before I racked up too much more debt, I rolled the dice and got lucky. I found a job during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, working on a small independent TV program, GRITtv.
After Bench Craft left, Meadows is saying, his town’s industrial park started to dry up. “A lot of it has to do with Wall Street,” he tells Laura. “I’ve had a lot of family lose jobs.” He’s a small business owner, a computer repairman, and the loss of jobs in town has hurt his business. “The number one issue right now,” he says, “is the economy.”
Meadows is on today’s show along with filmmaker Rick Rowley, who has coproduced a short documentary on the rise of the Tea Party, and Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates. Rowley met Meadows after he joined the Council of Conservative Citizens and helped organize a Tea Party event in Ripley. The Tea Party was easily caricatured, particularly by people on the left side of the political aisle, but Meadows’s complaints sound like the ones my friends and I make to each other. He expresses distaste for both political parties and their connections to wealthy elites. It’s a refrain I will hear over and over again in the next several years.
Nearly two years later, I walk through Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan. It has been renamed Liberty Plaza by its new “occupants,” and it is ringed with handmade cardboard protest signs. In front, a young woman holds a sign that says “Too Big to Fail? Corruption is Bleeding Our Wealth!” A young man beside her has one that reads “Take Back America . . . Reclaim Democracy!” Meadows’s complaints would not have seemed out of place carefully lettered on cardboard at Occupy Wall Street.
It started on a Saturday in September 2011—the 17th—when a band of activists who’d answered the call from the magazine Adbusters was blocked from taking up residence on Wall Street itself and headed for a park around the corner, where they camped out. I had shrugged the movement off at first; I’d seen a lot of protests since the 2008 crisis, but none of them had seemed to achieve much. The occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol a few months earlier had been a spark, but that energy had faded, at least for those of us not in Madison, and I was faced with a constant grind of depressing news coming out of Washington, where a government shutdown was looming that I was required, as a staff reporter at the independent online news outlet AlterNet, to cover.
But on Day 5, I decide to give Occupy a chance anyway. Walking through the park, I begin to see what has people excited. The “occupiers” are mostly, but not exclusively, young, and there is already a rudimentary infrastructure in the park, including the famous library. The comfort station is stacked with blankets, there for the asking. The kitchen is handing out food, which I don’t take at first. There are guitarists, drummers, dancers. An American flag flies over the information station, which offers a Daily Schedule. “Wall Street is Our Street,” reads a sign leaning against a garbage can.
The movement is spreading across the country; in the course of my reporting on Occupy over the next year, I talk to activists from Kentucky, Ohio, California, Connecticut, and many, many more places. “We are the 99 percent,” is the rallying cry, and people who don’t have a park near their home to occupy—or who can’t take time away from the never-ending hustle to make enough money to pay the bills—take to the Internet. On a Tumblr blog, they begin posting photos of themselves holding up posters or sheets of notebook paper, some handwritten, some typed, telling their stories of economic distress. They write letters to bank CEOs on a website called Occupy the Boardroom. They briefly dominate the news cycle—any story that I write about Occupy gets hundreds of thousands of clicks.
I sometimes think of Meadows while walking through Zuccotti Park. For some reason, his story sticks with me, along with something that Rick Rowley said: that people like Meadows were looking for someone with an answer to why they were so screwed. There was no party, no organization, that had answers to our problems that went beyond the level of the individual. Work hard, roll the dice, like I had, and hope to find a decent job that pays the bills. The Tea Party had given people a place to express their anger, but years later, things are still not getting better, and Americans still have so much to be angry about.
People like Meadows, and like the people I met in the park, are still struggling. The “recovery” hasn’t brought about fundamental change in the way society functions (or even in the way banks are regulated); instead, it has made things worse for the majority of Americans. It has accelerated the decline of wages, spurred the movement of jobs overseas, and increased the concentration of wealth in a few hands.
The Tea Party and Occupy were some of the earliest and most prominent movements to register frustration; they helped usher in a new era of protest and activism that has had a dramatic effect on the way Americans understand their power to disrupt the status quo, to challenge lingering inequality wherever it is found. I was hired at AlterNet to be the labor editor, but these movements quickly become my beat: the troublemakers who are marching through the financial district, occupying bank lobbies, locking arms and refusing to leave a foreclosed home, blocking streets, rising up. The seeds have been planted by a thousand outrages, and that they would sprout has always been a question of when, not if.
THE FINANCIAL CRISIS WAS THE SPARK, THE MOMENT THAT CRYSTALLIZED for people around the country that something was wrong, something that one election couldn’t possibly fix. All of the trends—the slow disappearance of good jobs, the endless cuts to public institutions, the concentration of wealth at the top—that had been underway since at least the Nixon era suddenly seemed to go into hyperspeed. The mechanisms by which the world ran became visible, and it suddenly seemed possible, not that someone would overthrow capitalism, but that it would self-destruct.
In 2008, though, we weren’t ready. Nobody was ready. As the stock market plummeted in the fall of 2008, high-ranking executives who hadn’t shown their faces on the trading floor in years came down to stand and watch a giant screen as the numbers plummeted. The masters of the universe that we had been assured had everything under control had nothing of the sort, but bipartisan consensus had long ago coalesced around the idea that Wall Street was equivalent to the economy itself, that markets were not only the best but the only possible way to arrange things, and there was almost no one left who had access to a microphone of any size offering up answers. Instead, we got shock.
Americans had been losing faith in our elites for some time. The steady erosion that began perhaps with Vietnam had sped up during what political commentator Christopher Hayes called the “fail decade” of the 2000s. The attacks of September 11, 2001, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that spun out of control, and the devastation of the Gulf Coast after Katrina all culminated in the crisis of 2008, and the powerful failed to protect us. After the collapse, we expected someone to have a solution, but none was forthcoming. Instead, we got unemployment that spiked to 10 percent in 2009 and foreclosures that spiraled above 5 million. As the protest chant went, “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out.” We remain, in one estimate, about 3.5 million full-time jobs short of where we need to be. Everywhere I heard a profound dissatisfaction with the way things were, coupled in most people with resignation. Or perhaps it was simply a matter of priorities—everyone was working too hard to stay afloat to have time to think about rebellion. Congress regularly polled below cockroaches, witches, and Nickelback. That dissatisfaction manifested itself in rock-bottom voter turnout rates—falling from 2008’s 62.2 percent to 2014’s 36.7 percent, the lowest since World War II—and rapid electoral swings from party to party among the voters who bothered at all.1
American politics, people realized, had been bought and paid for, and the bank bailouts were just the biggest indication of, by, and for whom. Powerful interests, as political scientists Thomas Ferguson, Martin Gilens, Benjamin Page, and others have been telling us for years, are the ones who pay for elections, and they are the ones whose preferred policies get enacted. The 2012 election was estimated to cost $10 billion—nearly double what was spent on the 2008 race—and 2016 is shaping up to double again. The idea that the United States has a functioning democracy has come to seem, to most people who are not personally invested in the system, laughable.2
We needed something beyond the ballot box, but in 2008 and 2009, it wasn’t clear what that something would be. Slowly, Americans began to find other ways to express their power; the rapid response of a rattled Republican Party to the first actions of the Tea Party showed that disruptive action could have an effect on policy, could drive politicians to court movements. When Occupy Wall Street first took Zuccotti Park, it was laughed off even by those who might have been expected to be supportive—until it began to spread across the country, holding spaces for people to come together and discuss the deep-rooted problems that had created the crisis they still felt, despite all the politicians’ promises of recovery. By the time Black Lives Matter seized the stage, it became clear that something was fundamentally changing. Americans, in short, were getting radical.
The issue of inequality came roaring back onto the scene with Occupy Wall Street. It was not simply that so many people just didn’t have enough to get by, from autoworkers who had taken a pay cut to keep their companies afloat to retirees who had seen their savings evaporate, teachers who found themselves blamed for state budget gaps, college graduates serving lattes at Starbucks, and single mothers stringing together two fast-food jobs to feed the kids. It was that there for all to see were the people who had too much. The wealthy recognized it, too: newspaper stories occasionally appeared about $230,000 guard dogs, armored yachts, and luxury bomb shelters to protect the rich from an imagined assault from below. It was no longer a question, for many people, of left or right, of Democrat or Republican, but of powerful and powerless. The two parties, as the Reverend William J. Barber II of Moral Mondays said, offered a choice too puny for this moment.3
It is not just inequality in income or wealth that is setting off protests in the streets, either; it’s the whole set of other inequalities that come alongside them. It’s the way a police officer who shoots or chokes a black man to death can walk away with paid leave, while the man who videotaped the killing winds up in jail on petty charges. It’s the way multibillionaires (or talk-show hosts pretending to be them) can get a personal phone call from the governor of a state, while ordinary citizens seeking redress from him are likened to terrorists. It’s how decisions are made about where to locate a new coal-fired power plant. As South Bronx activist Mychal Johnson told me, it’s the air we breathe: it’s about power, it’s about inclusion, it’s about access, and it’s about who counts as a person.4
Concentrated economic power leads to concentrated political power. Those with the money can buy not just an election, but all the legislating that comes in between; the rich see their policy preferences enacted, and the rest of us see that happen only when our desires align with those of the rich and powerful. As wealth becomes concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller group, it is easier and easier for that group to shape policy, and harder for the rest of us to have any influence. And so Americans are searching for other ways to exercise power, to have their own voices heard. Anger continues to simmer just under the surface, and occasionally, when enough people are angry enough to overcome their reasons for holding back, it explodes.
In writing this book, I wanted to find out what people were angry about, and what they were doing to take their power back. I traveled the country, building on the years of reporting I’d already done by meeting activists where they lived and worked and organized. I attended a people’s assembly in a church gymnasium in Ferguson, Missouri; walked a picket line at an Atlanta Burger King at 6 a.m.; rode a bus from New York to Ohio with student organizers; and sat with airport and home care workers in Seattle as they told stories about their jobs. I danced at a fundraiser for Occupy Homes Minnesota, and I went door to door in Far Rockaway, Queens, days after Hurricane Sandy. I met people who were struggling but were finding ways to make change.
I wanted, too, to provide some historical context for what I was seeing and hearing, to dig into the stories of America’s past rebels and rabble-rousers. My aim was not to weigh and measure today’s troublemakers against their ancestors but to help us understand the threads that these movements picked up and the ones they discarded, the ways they have learned from the past and the bits of the past that many people have forgotten or never knew. The words of abolitionists, populists, teachers, miners, and steelworkers who struggled against the powerful are echoed by the troublemakers of what some are calling the New Gilded Age.
Across the country, people from vastly different backgrounds were coming together to make trouble. People who were often considered—and had considered themselves—on opposite sides of the political spectrum have joined forces to shake up the powerful. Many others who had never considered political action at all have come forward, too, activated by fighting foreclosure or fracking in their communities, or by the difficulty of trying to win a raise in the workplace. From localized, individual fights, they progressed into something else, into engaging in civil disobedience at the Justice Department, or blocking a highway to demand justice for a victim of police violence. Many of the movements discussed in this book come from what would have been considered the political left—but for the people taking part in them, it is not a question of left or right, but of the powerless against the powerful.
It is often assumed that activism is powered by young people, and I did find many uprisings powered by those much-maligned “millennials,” the people British journalist Paul Mason called “graduates with no future,” and who Trish Kahle, historian, labor activist, and member of that generation, deemed “the Left Out generation.” But I also met quite a few older people, those retired or near retirement whose savings had been wiped out in 2008, or grandparents worried about the world they were leaving their grandchildren. I met Barbara Smalley-McMahan in Raleigh, North Carolina, who gave up her pastoral counseling practice of thirty years in order to become a full-time activist, and who told me about the “theology of disrespect” that she’d learned from young people in St. Louis. I met Martha Sellers, who by age fifty-seven had spent twelve years working at Walmart in Paramount, California, and who after the death of her husband had decided she’d had enough.5
The movements I cover in this book are often figured as discrete phenomena, analyzed as if they had each happened in a vacuum. But in fact, as I followed them through the years, I would find similar patterns and even direct connections between them. They were all, in one way or another, responding to elite failure and inequality; they were powered by and shaped by social media and the network—both technological and human communication networks—but relied on public space to make their impact felt. They went “viral,” spreading horizontally across the country, rather than being led by a single person or even a single organization, which made them hard to corral and sometimes hard to decipher, for a media and a country used to power structured in hierarchies. They embraced the power of disruption. And especially as they began to overlap and to connect, they became intersectional movements, wrapping up issues as seemingly disparate as mortgage debt and climate change into one.
“Intersectionality” is a term coined by legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw to explain the way that social inequality has many layers that overlap—intersect—with one another and shape the way different people experience oppression. To Diamond Latchison, from the Ferguson movement, this meant that she could not separate the fact that she was black from the fact that she was a woman and that she was queer, and that the abuses she faced in her life were often not because of one or the other facets of her identity, but of multiple facets at once.
The technologies that the movements used influenced how they were structured: a movement spreading virally across the country has less need for the charismatic leadership that Americans seem to expect from social movements. No one had to wait for permission, which made the movements harder to stamp out. One individual, or one group, could fail and others continue without them; the eviction of one occupation, or one protest called where no one showed up, was not the end of anything. This “horizontal” structure seems to suit something about the twenty-first century and about the particular set of outrages, frustrations, and grievances that brought people together, but it also tells us something about the values of the movements. The ability to be heard is deeply important to many people today. We are in a world that feels like it is powered by elites who pay little attention to the rest of us. So in movements that are responding to the failure of elite leadership, it makes sense that there is resistance to the idea of a “movement elite,” even as leaders emerge and fade.
Horizontal structures also recognize that the power of these movements stem from their broad base; while the vast majority of Americans, of course, are not becoming activists, these movements rely on the power of many people to break through the walls that hold individuals back. When people talk to one another about their problems, and come to the realization that their struggles are not their fault, they become more likely to take action. People are drawn to movements that appear to already have support, in part because they are simply more visible, and in part because they feel like they can win. Solidarity—a value that, in recent decades, had fallen out of favor in the face of the glamour of the free market and the promise that, individually, we could all get rich—has come back in these movements, often in surprising ways.
The ideal of horizontalism is connected to the sense that democracy, in this country, is failing, or perhaps, as some are coming to believe, that it never really worked. The general assemblies of the Occupy movement were perhaps the most obvious experiment with other forms of democracy, flawed but fascinating in their particular procedures: the twinkling fingers of assent, the voices repeating one another through the “people’s mic.” At the same time, these movements have fraught and complicated relationships with electoral politics. Many of the troublemakers write off voting as irrelevant, impossible; others aim to influence the political process through action and have had some success, converting politicians like New York governor Andrew Cuomo from opponents to proponents of their cause in the space of a year. Collective action is seen as a way to influence politicians who might otherwise simply listen to their well-heeled donors, a way to build change that goes beyond what happens at the ballot box.
Today’s movements might be spawned on the Internet, but they come together in public space. They challenge contested political locations—Tea Partiers gathered at congressional “town hall” meetings, Moral Mondays committing civil disobedience at the state assembly—and they hold symbolic spaces, like occupying Zuccotti Park or holding a sit-down strike at Walmart in California. Instead of quietly voting and going home to shout at the television, people who seemed to have very little in common are coming together in such spaces to reclaim the power of public protest, of communicating directly with one another, of being together.
Most importantly, today’s activists have discovered the power of making trouble, of causing disruption. Disrupting things, says longtime labor organizer Stephen Lerner, is the best way for regular people to exercise some power. It isn’t about winning everyone over to one’s side; it is, instead, about finding a way to disrupt the day-to-day existence of those who do have power, to make them feel the crisis that they have inflicted on millions of people. Disruption, whether it be blocking a street, going on strike, or occupying a space, is a way to ensure that the message—that something has got to give—gets across.
It is not due to tactics, though, that I refer to today’s troublemakers as “radicals.” I use the word here to mean those who seek to understand and change problems at their root. As civil rights icon and organizer Ella Baker put it, to think in radical terms “means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.” For really changing a society where a small elite controls most of the power and resources will not be easy. There will be a lot of resistance, and tinkering at the surface is unlikely to last. It is that understanding that drives the people I spoke to for this book, and that gives me hope that they might have an effect.6
THE IDEA FOR THIS BOOK WAS PERCOLATING IN MY MIND FROM THE moment I heard J. D. Meadows speak, but it took shape over the course of the years of reporting that came afterward. Hundreds of conversations, interviews, and arguments—and a lot of shoe leather—brought me to a place where I thought I could write a book that sheds some light on why people from Oakland to Raleigh and from Miami to New York were willing to put their bodies on the line in order to insist that things are unfair and must change. In the midst of that work, I sat down with a former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader, Congressman John Lewis (D-GA), fresh from the publication of a rendition of his life told through comics, and asked him for advice for the Dream Defenders, who at that time were occupying Florida’s Capitol building in protest after the death of Trayvon Martin. The words he spoke gave this book its title and epigraph.
I set out to put these movements in context—both in the context of one another and in the context of the history that laid the groundwork for them to emerge. This book necessarily omits some of that context—the United States was erupting in protests at the same time that countries around the world were, and organizers in the United States drew heavily from their overseas counterparts. In fact, one of the first people I met at Occupy Wall Street was a visitor from Spain, who had been part of the indignados protests there and came across the Atlantic to help Occupy set up. But other books have been written that explore those connections.
This is mostly not a book about electoral politics, with a few significant exceptions when candidates sprang directly from movements, rather than claiming the mantle of one or the other in order to capture press attention, as so many did when the Tea Party arose. Nor is it a book about cheap populism spouted by posturing elites. Rather, it is about the way people discover their power together. Other movements, in particular the vibrant immigrant rights struggle that reached its apex in the “Day Without an Immigrant” general strike on May Day 2006, fed into the ones I wrote about as well, and other moments besides the financial crisis no doubt contributed to the anger and momentum that launched the new radicals into the streets. But to cover every possible spark is beyond the scope of one book.
Few writers have explored the connections between the post-2008 movements within the United States. In fact, many people seem determined to pretend that there have been none, a fact that never ceases to surprise me, as the marches, demonstrations, and occupations of this decade have drawn more people, perhaps, than any other protest movement in this country’s history. But as historian Robin D. G. Kelley reminded me, “having numbers in the streets is not an automatic measure of success.” We have an image in our heads of what a movement looks like, and often nostalgia allows us to misunderstand both the past and the present. Getting people into the streets is simply a start; it matters what those people do once they are activated, how they manage to exert power—whether that is shutting down a shopping corridor on the busiest shopping day of the year, stopping the foreclosure on a home, or blockading a pipeline.
It matters to get this story right. It matters because, as Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant told me, if we continue to assume that change happens because benevolent leaders at the top hand it down, then we will continue to ask nicely, and to be disappointed, frustrated, and disempowered when asking nicely does not do the trick.
This book is not about me, and yet I have to admit that reporting it and writing it changed me, that every person I spoke with, marched with, and stood with as they were arrested changed my understanding of how the world works. They also changed the world around them, forcing new political possibilities to exist when there were none and shaking up the comfort of the so-called “one percent.”
I did my best to tell their story in their words. In many cases, I deliberately sought out those whose stories had not been told, whose voices had not been heard, because even in a “leaderless” movement, there will be those whose voices are louder, and there are social and political reasons why this is so. I could not hope to tell the entire story of any one movement or even any one event; there have been and will be books that will delve deeper and uncover stories that I did not find.
Instead, what I have tried to do is to bring you an understanding of today’s new radicals, the troublemakers who refuse any longer to sit on the sidelines and wait for things to improve, for the electoral process to offer us up the lesser of two evils, and for the people who sign our paychecks to decide to grant us a raise. They are coming together and presenting a significant challenge to the status quo; indeed, they have already changed it.