OWS and the Tea Party both tried and failed. They failed because every circle needs a center, meaning that any large scale movement needs a leader. You can pretend otherwise, but history is short on successful leaderless movements. Trump is the beneficiary of this chasm. Sanders was too.
I disagree about the tea party. For an insurgent group they sure got a lot of seats of Congress and state houses. They also managed to unseat the speaker of the house and shut down the government. The problem with ows is that it was too heady. Tea party appeals were to base fears and that is always effective. Trump's appeal is along these lines but much more nakedly racist. He found the magic formula, unfortunately. While I hope against hope he won't be president, I also don't think we've seen the last of him.
George Packer broke OWS down pretty effectively through longform narrative essays of several of the people at the heart of it. IT came down to "WHAT DO WE WANT?" "mumblelmumblesomethingcorporatemarginaltaxrates" "WHEN DO WE WANT IT?" "mumblemumbleinalogicalandorderlyamountoftimedeterminedbyacademicwhargarbl" and that was only if you looked deeply. Mostly, OWS was "we're pissed and we have no coherent way forward to satisfaction." The Tea Party, on the other hand, wanted to THROW THE BUMS OUT. And that's one of the reasons they've foundered since; they're an adversarial movement and once they were actually in power they didn't have a whole lot of mandate or knowledge as to how to proceed. I think it's a problem we'll keep seeing: we know what's wrong but we haven't examined the problems deeply enough to come up with what's right. I agree with thenewgreen - Sanders and Trump both benefitted from this, especially as neither candidate fully presented solutions. Sanders was a lot closer but there were some serious leaps of faith in his implementation. Trump is just straight talking out his ass.