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I’m listening—...

Just, like, it was the first populist political movement following the ‘08 crash, and while Obama was supposed to be the liberal technocratic answer to the failure of neoliberalism, he was not able to create policies that restored the social and economic post-war order in the US. After Bernie Sanders lost the 2016 nomination, the populist left, which still retained a hope of a new kind of society, no longer had a political representative, and Trump managed to clinch the nomination by campaigning in states that had been neglected by the Clinton campaign. Biden was another, more radical but still fundamentally liberal technocratic attempt to save the status quo of America politics, but the largest economic gains were for the educated professional class, and many people in the country felt left behind and ignored—-again, now with the backing of popular support, Trump won the 2024 election with a promise to completely reshape the country. And he has at least in part succeeded.

Yes

Trump told people "you're OK".

It is what people need to hear

How do you get from occupy to the tea party is the link this hypothesis is missing.

Tea party was the clear predecessor to the maga movement, with its nucleation point being simple racist backlash against obama and trump being personally & directly involved in stoking that racism. In retrospect it obviously laid the groundwork for trump's movement, and I can't see any direct link from occupy to tea party other than perhaps some individuals like tunney.

I think the Tea Party is only tenuously connected to Trump. A lot of his policies involve a lot of government spending and federal overreach, and his policies are often opposed by the Freedom caucus. Historically, anyway, right wing populism tends to follow the collapse of the radical left and becomes a dark mirror of those very same movements, attempting to absorb their energies (Steve Bannon’s Leninism, Trump’s workerism). The tea party was, conversely, the last cry of reaganism and the dream of mixing traditional life with libertarian economics, which was flawed from the start as it was that very same deregulation which led to our contemporary technologically inflected society where all social norms are broken for the sake of profit. So the tea party was not the legitimate bearer of world history.

I don't think we're on the same page here, I don't see that trump's policies are particularly central to the appeal or power of his movement. They aren't even important to trump.

The tea party was a right wing populist movement and maga is an extreme right populist movement that emerges a handful of years later, with astounding overlap in membership, and you don't think they're connected? ok.

I really don’t think they are all the same people. Some of the leaders, yes, but you cannot tell me that members of the general public who supported these leaders suddenly shifted from liberterians to authoritarians within a decade.

Why are you assuming they are all fully engaged ideological libertarians? They switched from a political movement significantly based on racial grievance and revanchist social policies to one almost exclusively based on racial grievance and revanchist social policies. I think there might be something other than libertarianism they care about.

Hmm…there has to be more to it though right? The timeline tracks but it looks like there are events missing in between. How do we go from OWS to things like “Drain the Swamp” within a span of roughly five years?

Its a rough sketch. In the end, the viccisitudes of individual history are unable to capture the broader conditions of the events they take place in.

Either no single name/event mentioned in the timeline you provided was remarkable enough to furnish such a vista on its own, or you’re correct.

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