In the predawn hours of November 15, 2011, New York City police, armed with shields and batons, swarmed Zuccotti Park, rousing slumbering Occupy Wall Street protesters from sleeping bags in their Lower Manhattan encampment, with high-intensity klieg lights illuminating the half-acre plaza in a blinding glare. Police ripped apart tents and arrested 142 people. A viral photograph of 84-year-old Seattle activist and retired schoolteacher Dorli Rainey, her red face dripping white with pepper spray, became the night's most emblematic image—the embodiment of a militarized police state's indiscriminately cruel wrath exacted on everyday people in the shadow of an unperturbed financial industry rife with criminality.

The raid marked the end of the two-month protest, which galvanized satellite protests in cities across America and 80 countries around the world against rapidly expanding wealth inequality, an unregulated banking system and its role in economic collapse, and the ballooning dominance of multinational corporations in the democratic process.

Yet despite its ubiquity, the iconic protest was, in the words of one Occupy Wall Street co-creator, a "constructive failure." Today, with Bernie "99 percent" Sanders driving policy in the Democratic Party, it seems as though the Occupy themes have made their way into mainstream discourse, but the movement had to disband first.

Occupy Wall Street, heavy on theoretical idealism and sketchy on the usual recognizable demands of protest, was confounding to pundits of various political stripes. It started organically and almost inadvertently in June 2011 when Micah White, then a senior editor at Adbusters, and Kalle Lasn, the magazine's founder, decided to send an #OccupyWallStreet e-mail to their subscribers that said: "Are you ready for a Tahrir moment? On September 17, flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street." It rippled through social media and materialized, three months later, in the form of graduate students, anarchists, socialists, and scholars gathering in Zuccotti Park. Occupy became known for its quirkier characteristics: a "leaderless" movement with "horizontal" organizing tactics that allowed decisions to be made by consensus through a series of hand gestures. But the entire production was buttressed by a sophisticated level of activist organizing: Zuccotti was identified because its status as a public-private park meant there was no enforceable curfew.

To remedy the shortcomings of the Obama administration's response to the 2007-2008 global financial crash, White and Lasn, based in the Adbusters office in Vancouver, proposed a manifesto with specific demands: tightening banking-industry regulations, banning high-frequency trading, a presidential commission to investigate corruption in politics, and arresting the "financial fraudsters" responsible for the crash. But the proposal was politely rejected by core organizers on the ground at Zuccotti, who were drafting their own manifesto. The Occupy General Assembly instead adopted a more philosophic "Declaration of the Occupation," which lacked specific policy demands in favor of articulating a more utopian vision.

Today, the same forces the Occupiers were protesting have gained new ground. In the years since the 2007-2008 financial crisis, predatory lending, corporate tax cuts, and dark-money political groups have metastasized. Across all 50 states, inequality, according to the Economic Policy Institute, continues to grow, with the top 1 percent of families earning an average of 26.3 times as much income as the bottom 99 percent in 2015. This year, Bloomberg reported that "subprime auto debt is booming even as defaults soar," and lenders announced that subprime home mortgages will be making a comeback, rebranded as "nonprime." Student debt hit $1.5 trillion, up from $600 billion ten years ago, and the Department of Education secretary, Betsy DeVos, set out to protect debt collectors from state laws meant to protect student borrowers. Last May, Congress voted to roll back key provisions of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. And eight years after Citizens United v. FEC unleashed even more corporate money into the political process, the U.S. Treasury changed its rules so nonprofits don't have to report their dark-money donors to the IRS—right after revelations that the NRA was on the take from Russia.