In fall 2011, Occupy Wall Street captured the nation's imagination and launched a platform that would come to define the New Progressives.
...Occupy brought together three ideas for the first time that were formerly on the fringe. First is the idea that group identity bestows differing rights and obligations on individuals, rather than individuals all having equal rights and obligations. Second, OWS created the concept of a battle between the 99 percent and the 1 percent, which replaced a more nuanced approach on the left to how wealth is distributed. Finally, it offered a deep distrust of and desire to silence corporate entities that OWS claimed are not persons and therefore essentially have no rights.
...At the time of OWS the concept of intersectionality was not yet widely well known, but among progressive activists, artists, and academics it was, and it lies at the root of the progressive stack. A hierarchy of oppression, which we now have become familiar with, was just beginning to establish a foothold in mainstream culture. The General Assembly was one of its first physical and non-hypothetical manifestations.
