Everything you know about Occupy Wall Street is wrong. The criticisms you heard the media repeat over and over again - "the protesters don't know what they want!", "why don't they just rally around a leader?" - come from a fundamental misunderstanding of who the occupiers were and what they sought to accomplish. In this lively mix of memoir and analysis, writer-activist Travis Mushett takes you inside Occupy and demystifies a movement that was difficult for even its supporters to get a handle on. Pushing past the bromides, Mushett locates the source of this confusion.
We've come to expect that our politics will be mediated by slick advertisements, corporate cash, and elected officials who may or may not represent our interests, but Occupy Wall Street embodied something different, something highly unusual in postmodern America: A politics of authenticity.