CAN THE CROWD SPEAK?

In the rotten summer of 2020, the scale and persistence of Black Lives Matter protests—unfolding against centuries of racial injustice and the immediate life-and-death threat of state-sanctioned violence—could make Occupy Wall Street look somewhat quaint, antiquated, and maybe even a bit self-indulgent. Yet we should not be too quick to forget the experience and, just as important, the form of Occupy Wall Street. In a time when the very survival of the American republic seems at stake, Occupy’s regenerative vision of direct democracy challenges us with the possibility of imagining and practicing democracy beyond the representative forms it