From Occupy To AOC: The Rise Of The New Progressives, Part 3

Entering The Halls Of Power

On January 21, 2017 Donald Trump woke up as president of the United States for the first time. In those morning hours, hundreds of thousands of protesters were making their way to Washington DC for the most significant protest since Occupy Wall Street, which had occurred roughly five years earlier. Donning pink p-ssy hats and dedicated to overthrowing the patriarchy, and Trump, the Women’s March took to the streets.

At the time it was presented as an organic outpouring of anti-Trump emotion. But we now know that it was not only carefully organized, but that the New Progressives were the march’s driving force and leadership. Its manifesto, among other things, promised intersectionality, and to break down systems of oppression.

Suddenly these concepts once limited to a few thousand in Zuccotti Park were being marched on by hundreds of thousands. That is not to say that all of these women and men supported the entire far-left agenda of the Women’s March. Rather, Trump’s election provided the New Progressives the opportunity to cast themselves as his opposite, and if Trump was the ultimate evil, that made them the ultimate good.

Indeed, even the Women’s March itself was accused of insufficient wokeness, as illustrated by a Washington Post headline just three days later that asked, “Was the Women’s March just another display of white privilege? Some think so.”