The day after ​“Occu­py Wall Street” began on Sep­tem­ber 17, GOP bud­get chief and aus­ter­i­ty ide­o­logue Rep. Paul Ryan (R‑Wis.) warned on Fox News: ​“Class war­fare will sim­ply divide this coun­try more, [it] will attack job creators.”

Though the Occupy movement is only a starting point, it has already animated our political discourse.

The two events were not relat­ed (the media was ignor­ing the pro­test­ers), but their con­trast­ing mes­sages reaf­firmed a real­i­ty of Amer­i­can life: The elites – the real insti­ga­tors of class war­fare – inhab­it a dif­fer­ent uni­verse than the rest of us. In that uni­verse, they have gorged on ill-got­ten rich­es while skill­ful­ly block­ing seri­ous debate about ris­ing inequal­i­ty and wors­en­ing poverty.

What wor­ries Ryan and the 1% is that ​“divide-and-con­quer” might be run­ning its course, and the major­i­ty class might unite around some dan­ger­ous ideas – like tack­ling inequal­i­ty; tak­ing on banks; bring­ing Wall Street crim­i­nals to jus­tice; tax­ing the rich; priv­i­leg­ing job cre­ation over deficit reduc­tion; remov­ing big mon­ey from pol­i­tics; and boost­ing gov­ern­ment invest­ment in infra­struc­ture, health­care, edu­ca­tion and anti-pover­ty programs.

The estab­lish­ment is wor­ried not about the absence of clar­i­ty of mes­sage, as media elites insist, but rather the movement’s poten­tial­ly broad reach. Occu­py is a ves­sel for a spec­trum of griev­ances that could unite hereto­fore divid­ed struggles.

Though the Occu­py move­ment is only a start­ing point, it has already ani­mat­ed our polit­i­cal dis­course. It is now com­mon knowl­edge that in 2010, 400 indi­vid­u­als pos­sessed more wealth than 155 mil­lion of their fel­low citizens.

Giv­en such real­i­ty, Amer­i­cans are weary of the stul­ti­fy­ing obses­sion with deficits – a canard embraced by a Demo­c­ra­t­ic lead­er­ship tone-deaf to pop­u­lar will – and want strate­gies to revive the econ­o­my by tax­ing the rich and ramp­ing up pub­lic investment.

Social move­ments can cor­rect injus­tices through con­scious­ness-rais­ing and mobi­liza­tion. They also cre­ate the space and impe­tus need­ed for pol­i­cy respons­es. Thus, through exec­u­tive fiat in Octo­ber, Pres­i­dent Oba­ma announced new mea­sures to mit­i­gate home fore­clo­sures and mod­i­fy the terms of stu­dent loan pay­ments – small mea­sures, to be sure, but the right pol­i­cy trajectory.

The Occu­py upris­ings assure that pol­i­cy ini­tia­tives will now take place with­in a cli­mate of pub­lic hos­til­i­ty toward elite-cod­dling eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy – a con­di­tion favor­able to pro­gres­sive reform.

This new focus on inequal­i­ty presents an oppor­tu­ni­ty to beat back a 30-year dis­course that blames soci­etal prob­lems on the indi­vid­ual. This has pre­vent­ed a deep­er exam­i­na­tion of causal­i­ty and led to poli­cies that empha­size puni­tive sanc­tions rather than pre­ven­tion and social reform. A nation­al con­sen­sus that inequal­i­ty affects every aspect of dai­ly life could reframe the nation­al debate. For exam­ple, instead of bash­ing teach­ers, we might craft poli­cies that rec­og­nize the role of pover­ty in under­min­ing education.

The ques­tion is: How can this move­ment be sus­tained? Part of the answer lies in the will­ing­ness of tra­di­tion­al pro­gres­sive orga­ni­za­tions – labor, envi­ron­men­tal, women’s, civ­il, human, gay and dis­abil­i­ty rights move­ments and faith-based orga­ni­za­tions – to coa­lesce around it, to turn peo­ple out and to pro­vide resources.

It’s too ear­ly to tell, but these ear­ly vic­to­ries, the steely deter­mi­na­tion of pro­test­ers and high pub­lic sup­port for agi­ta­tion, bode well for pro­gres­sive pol­i­tics. We could be wit­ness­ing the most for­mi­da­ble chal­lenge to neolib­er­al­ism yet.

Editor’s note: This edi­to­r­i­al was writ­ten pri­or to the police raid and evic­tion of the Occu­py Wall Street camp in Zuc­cot­ti Park that took place in the ear­ly hours of Novem­ber 15.