Our future is center-left not far-left. The business community and DLC, not OWS

[Azathoth]

24. OWS didn't fail because they were radical and anti-business, they failed because they were a joke

The first part of your second paragraph basically sums it up. OWS is/was a caricature of 60's era hippyism: slogans, drum circles, peeing in public places, all for the purpose of "justice" and "equality" and fighting "the system." While progressives masturbated furiously over the fantasy of an organic revolution of disenfranchised people rising up against the corporate class and whatever else, the average Joe was turning on the TV and watching a bunch of unemployed hippies camping out in the local park. Apart from a handful of reasonable-sounding but wholly amorphous slogans, OWS had no explicit goals or agenda to offer people, no leadership, no spokesmen, no organization or infrastructure, and most importantly, no desire to participate meaningfully in the political process. People watching at home saw a freight train to nowhere that ultimately got itself ushered ignominiously off the public stage when police finally chased it out of the local parks like common vagrants.

We can have the radical vs. moderate debate when a serious and genuinely effective political movement emerges to take up OWS's message. Personally, I think such a movement would be beneficial for the country. Right now, our political debate is between right-wing extremists and centrists. The left side of the isle is almost entirely absent from the discussion; it's so bad the average American now thinks Obama is a "socialist" and that moderately conservative ideas like the insurance mandate are "far-left." The business community has no motivation to compromise in such an environment. They will be a lot readier to cut deals and make concessions and work in good faith with moderates to fix this country's problems when there is a vibrant, populist left-wing movement getting politicians elected to office on a platform of raising the corporate tax rate to 80%.