We had a movement right before that was caused by a lot of the same things that actually went places because of the way they handled their concerns and took advantage of their momentum. That would be the Tea Party. They came along right after the bailouts and the debt ceiling getting raised again (after Obama himself had run on that being irresponsible) and connected with a lot of people. If you would have asked me in early 2009 if the Tea Party was something I could get behind I would have said yes. Then they were co-opted by the religious right and completely get off track by out-crazying mainstream Republicans. And I'll remind you that one mainstream Republican is orange.

So yeah, there will be another movement, but if you ever want to get it past camping in a park and into making actual change occur, you're going to need to get permission from the rest of your citizens; not just the ones who are sitting around your camp fire with you. That's how democracy works. And I don't mean to sound patronizing, but clearly that lesson was overlooked in the Occupy movement.

If you want to make change, you have to convince people. If you can't convince people, you get kicked out of Zuccotti Park after a very generous month long campout. The Occupy Movement had no goals and no coherent movement. You can't convince anyone if you don't have anything to say as a group. It didn't collapse because of the state or anything else, it collapsed because no one took the reigns. What would Socialism be without Lenin? Or Stalin, or Gorbachev? I mean it's not much now but a joke among Capitalists, but it had a good run for most of the 20th century because leaders led.

I mean, that's what this article is about right, the perils of a great masse of people not willing to be led. It's a cautionary tale for anyone who wants to give it another go.

But this is all from Lambert Strether's point of view. It could all be a little skewed. Perhaps no one wanted to follow him because he wasn't a good leader, not because the group couldn't be led. The absolute greatest gift a revolution can be given is a group of people willing to suffer for a cause, and here you had a couple thousand people in the streets in October surrounded by media and cops because they were pissed off! Yet it didn't go anywhere because no one united them. Everyone was too afraid or incapable.

Where the Tea Party grew the ability to influence the entire Republican party, the legislative impact of the Occupy Movement is nothing. If you would have run in 2012 on an Occupy Ticket in some of those neighborhoods, you might have made a dent. But they didn't, because they didn't give them selves permission to. No one said, "You know, you should run. You'd be good for people" like the friends of the Tea Party candidates did.

This was never about sitting in the park forever to be mean to Wall Street, but it could have been about something.