Futile
Well, it [the Occupy Movement] should have gone on. It should have built and built. It was a great start that didn’t go anywhere, and that’s also tragic — really tragic. It wasn’t the first massive left-wing thing we have seen in a long time because the progressive people signing up for Obama was a massive thing that also failed. Before that, the protests in Seattle in ’99 — people were enthusiastic about that, and that fizzled, too. There’s a larger problem here about why the left can’t get off the ground, take off, failure to launch…
...There’s a bunch of different problems, but one of the problems is that these movements always — somehow — get sucked into the academy. They get taken over by people who are absolutely determined to not speak in a way that is comprehensible to average Americans. In fact, [these are] people who have enormous contempt for average Americans. The whole idea of the left is about empowering average people, and you can’t do that if you despise them.
- Tom Frank on the irrelevance of the modern Left
