Occupy Wall Street 10 Year Anniversary

I kind of believed that the powers that be in the US got really scared around 2009-2010 that a populist revolution was going to rise up and slit their throats. People were out in the streets demonstrating against corruption on Wall Street, the post-9/11 police state, and the Iraq War. You had these sentiments generally take the shape up of Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. 

Now, in their early days, OWS and the Tea Party were very different than what they'd be remembered for, but broadly speaking, I'm going to identify them as the precursors to the Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump movements. Both were populist, highly suspicious of elites / institutions, and both seemed genuinely grassroots. Early Occupy Wall Street was very much a mean, blue-collar "fuck bankers" movement (and not the soy hippie commune it later became), and the Tea Party was originally a huge fan of Ron Paul and highly skeptical of state and corporate power (and not the front for state and corporate power it later became). Both movements were opposed to the War on Terror, too. 

The PTB got nervous here and set about to sabotage both movements. They destroyed Occupy Wall Street with woke crap (by getting most of corporate America on board, because after all, corporate corruption is fine as long as Blackstone has a gay pride flag and says black lives matter), and it became a disorganized mess of lunatics and drug addicts. They convinced people that their real enemy wasn't the corrupt state-corporate power nexus, but conservative, working-class white people. 

Meanwhile, the Tea Party quickly became the Tea Party™ and any semblance of Ron Paul libertarianism and anti-government sentiment was quietly purged and replaced with what might as well have been a redressed neoconservative hoodwink. Opposition to immigration was suppressed because it was "bad for business". Non-interventionism was suppressed because they had a bloodlust for Iran and keeping the money flowing to Israel. Being suspicious of corporate power turned into corporate bootlicking where people excused the obviously shitty and illegal behavior of various conglomerates because to do anything about it would be "socialist".

Now that said, I think the decline goes back much further than 2008-2010, but I think that's when the shift became more noticeable. Things definitely became more unhinged right around that time.