Occupy Wall Street could bring disaffected blue-collar workers back into the progressive fold by recasting the left as the voice of the middle class.

When the second Google hit (after Wikipedia) for "corporate cronyism" links to a speech by Sarah Palin, you know why progressives need Occupy Wall Street.

Occupy Wall Street's power lies in the "We are the 99%" theme. The poignant and evocative stories on the Tumblr of that name feature hard-working, settled, middle-class families who have had the rug pulled out from under them by recent economic conditions. A single mom who put herself through college and grad school only to lose her job due to chronic illness, who now can't sell her house and worries that her children and grandchildren don't have much of a future. A 38-year-old cancer survivor, unemployed and with $50,000 in student loans, who can't get health insurance. A 21-year-old making $10.50 an hour at one job and looking for another so she no longer has to choose between paying bills and eating, who sleeps in her car because she can't get approved for an apartment. Her parents can't help because her father lost his job, "the bank took our house," and her mother is sick and can barely afford her medicine.

These are stories of the tremendous toll taken by the Great Recession on middle-class Americans who have done everything right: they work hard, seeking a second job if the first cannot support them; they scrimp and save to buy a house; they pay their bills on time. And then they tumble out of the settled middle class due to illnesses, or a lost job, or an accident -- things over which they have no control.

These are stories of the group that has shifted sharply Republican since 1970. Actually, it's only the whites in this group who have shifted: Blacks of all classes still vote overwhelmingly Democratic. But Democrats have lost many nonunionized whites in what Theda Skocpol has called the "missing middle" -- the middle 50% of Americans, whose median income is $64,000. I will call them blue collar, although the sad fact is that many of the blue-collar jobs that offered a stable middle class life have long since disappeared, leaving many in low-paid pink or routine white-collar jobs that offer very low pay and no benefits.

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Occupy Wall Street's focus on this group is a big change from the Democrats' focus, since about 1965, on the poor -- the bottom third of Americans whose median income is $19,000. While the poor no doubt need help, so do the missing middle. While the standard of living of blue-collar families doubled between the end of World War II and 1973, blue-collar jobs disappeared after that, and the standard of living in blue-collar families stalled out despite the fact that wives entered the workforce. Even more devastating, the cherished stability these families enjoyed in the 1950s and 1960s evaporated due to the "great risk shift" documented by Jacob Hacker. That's the message of the "We are the 99%" movement.

Understandably, Republicans are alarmed. They have launched a counteroffensive called "We are the 53%" -- that's the percentage of Americans who pay federal income taxes. This represents a move that, for Republicans, is tried and true: it seeks to bond the missing middle to the business elite. For once, progressives are contesting this narrative by articulating in very clear and concrete terms what blue-collar families share with newly vulnerable professionals.

So Occupy Wall Street has definite potential. It's worth pointing out, though, that this potential can easily be squandered. Republicans already have begun to malign the movement as composed of "trust fund hippies." This is a smart move. One of the things that drove blue-collar whites out of the Democratic camp was the rise of hippies and yuppies (or trustafarians) whose willingness to take risks were -- unbeknownst to them -- perceived as enactments of upper-middle-class privilege. It didn't help when hippies called the police -- who had good, stable, respected blue-collar jobs -- "pigs."

I hope that Occupy Wall Street avoids all this. If they reinforce the trust fund narrative, their activism will further reinforce the hold of Wall Street Republicans. But if they avoid that, and if the Democrats take the hint and begin to listen to the 99%, Occupy Wall Street could be the beginning of something big.

Joan Williams is the author of Reshaping the Work-Family Debate.

Today's outrage has the potential to be another turning point in American politics.

Frances Perkins, FDR's future Secretary of Labor, was an eyewitness to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of March 25, 1911. It was a tragic day in our history, one in which 143 workers lost their lives due the indifference of their employers.

Triangle was the culmination of licentious economic behavior. Powerful business interests fought on-the-job safety regulations; exit doors that were kept locked to keep out union organizers also kept workers from escaping the building; proposed fire safety standards were fought tooth and nail, all in the name of economic freedom.

But as tragic as the fire was, it was also a turning point. The tragedy of that horrible fire made Americans begin to truly realize that working people were not merely a means to wealth, but ends in and of themselves, worthy of being treated with dignity. On a political level, it was the singular event that transformed Al Smith and Robert Wagner Sr. from Tammany Hall hacks into champions of reform. It caused the Democratic Party to better live up to its moniker, “the party of the people.” It is why Perkins came to say that day of that fire was “the day the New Deal began.”

Similarly, today we now endure an economy set on fire by this same perverse notion of “freedom.” Freedom? What many on Wall Street call economic freedom is nothing more than anarchy and license. While workers see wages and benefits taken away, the top one percent live lives filled with conspicuous consumption -- and conspicuous waste. True freedom requires discipline, the structure of regulation, laws of oversight that curb and deflect destructive greed. And yet after thirty years of savings and loan failures, fraudulent CDOs, and Wall Street bailouts followed by million dollar bonuses, economic libertarians still want to tear down the very framework that provides order.

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But something has stirred in the American people. We are witnessing protests on Wall Street demanding that this stilted notion of freedom be revisited and revised. Despite what many free market types claim, a healthy form of capitalism cannot survive by being indifferent to the workers who physically build the products or provide the services. As Paul Krugman put it, “…we may, at long last, be seeing the rise of a popular movement that, unlike the Tea Party, is angry at the right people.”

Just as it was in the wake of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the public is outraged and is demanding change. The rising of a popular movement comes at a moment none too soon. It is an opportunity for the Democratic Party to again turn out its present-day hacks and replace them with advocates of an already proven New Deal capitalism.

Then perhaps one day we will look back at the events of today and be able to say, “that was when the New Deal was reborn.”

Frank L. Cocozzelli writes a weekly column on Roman Catholic neoconservatism at Talk2Action.org and is contributor to Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America. A director of the Institute for Progressive Christianity, he is working on a book on American liberalism.

Occupy Wall Street isn't just a threat to financial elites -- it's a challenge to lazy historians.

Among other intriguing and possibly problematic features, Occupy Wall Street, now in its third week and spreading, seems to represent an inchoate attempt at reviving an American radicalism that has deep roots in our founding period. The Tea Party has of course made its own highly explicit and politically successful claim on that period. Because OWS, like the Tea Party, focuses on national economic and financial issues, the new movement offers a disquieting, potentially illuminating alternative to the Tea Party's right-wing interpretation of America's founding economic values.

I began writing New Deal 2.0's "Founding Finance" series last winter in hopes of shining light both on the financial elitism of the famous American founders, who we often wrongly cast as pioneers (or at least half-conscious seed-sowers) of equality, and on what I see as historical tendentiousness on the part of the Tea Party, whose claims on the founding period are meant to support a low-tax, small-government, anti-debt agenda. I've tried to show that this agenda, which may or may not have its merits as policy, in no way accords with the avowed purposes of the founders across their own political spectrum from Hamilton to Madison.

In the series, I've also tried to bring to the fore some routinely marginalized yet highly resonant 18th century economic thought, as well as the actions of those who sought to obstruct wealth concentration and make cash and credit more readily available to ordinary Americans. It's an unsettling fact that our founding democratic, economic activism was not against England but against the homegrown American investing and creditor class that was leading the resistance to England.

I've explored that founding economic radicalism in the debtor riots and "regulations" of the late colonial period; in the overthrow of Pennsylvania during the run-up to the Declaration; in the period after victory over England, when foreclosed Massachusetts debtors, the so-called Shays Rebels, marched on the armory at Springfield; and in the early Federal period, when the so-called Whiskey Rebels of trans-Appalachia, criticizing the new U.S. Constitution on bases very different from those of antifederalist elites, went so far as to fly their own flag, hoping to launch a new, more economically egalitarian country in what was then the American West.

Throughout those struggles, the activists' goal was to pressure and in some cases to use government to restrain the power of wealth and promote economic equality through legislation. They wanted to outlaw monopolies, build debt relief into currency, institute easy-term, small-scale government lending, and take banking charters away from crony insiders. Some wanted progressive taxation on income; some wanted what we call Social Security. Much later phenomena like the Square Deal, the New Deal, and the Great Society, which can seem hypermodern (and even, to the Tea Party, unconstitutionally anomalous), actually have deep American roots. However, those roots are not in the thinking of the famous founders -- New Dealers' claims on Jefferson possibly to the contrary -- but in grassroots, 18th century movements that, while little-known today, were of immense importance during our founding.

So important in their day were those now-buried radical movements, in fact, that much of the famous founders' behavior can't be understood without the context of elite dedication at times to collaborating uneasily with the economic radicals, at other times to squelching them and pushing back their political advances. Many historians of the period ignore that context. Hamilton's biographers, for example, do not deem the people's movement important. Hamilton did; he spent his career trying to kill it. We therefore learn almost nothing important about Hamilton's purposes by reading his biographies. Much founder biography, and much mainstream history, operates on just such comfortably foregone, ultimately useless conclusions.

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In place of founding radicalism, historians tend to emphasize the emergence, from the Revolutionary period through the Jackson era, of a rowdy, fluid, non-deferential, competitive America. They place developing ideas of American democracy almost solely in that 19th century context. But Thomas Paine, the best-known of the radical 18th century egalitarians, would surely have been crushed if he'd glimpsed the kind of society that passed for a democratic one in Jacksonian America.

Paine's intensity gives both liberals and radicals a problem. It was a widely held view in the Washington administration -- and it's been widely held in more or less liberal American history ever since -- that Paine's awful experiences in the French Revolution give us cause to celebrate the failure of Paine-ite radicalism in America. Fair enough: Today, as every day, it would be wise to recall not only crimes against humanity committed by bankers but also those committed on behalf of a supposedly collective, supposedly revolutionary "People," from the French Terror to the Stalinist mass murders and well beyond.

Still, the French Terror, which almost killed Paine, has served as a convenient pretext for exercising historical complacency about the suppression of his and others' fervently democratic visions for America in 1776. Without those visions, anathema as they were to the famous founding elitists -- anathema as they were, for that matter, to Jacksonian capitalism and are today to high-finance "neo-liberalism" -- we might never have declared independence at all.

So from a certain historical point of view, I think Occupy Wall Street rebukes, even more sharply than it rebukes rightist Tea Party claims on the founding, a familiar and complacent history of American democracy -- especially that history's failure to confront our long struggle over the relationship between high finance and government. Occupy Wall Street may be going about things all wrong, as some on what remains of the American left have asserted. I find those assertions hard to dispute. I've been critical of what I suspect may turn out to be a cultural premium, part and parcel of objections to elitism, on intellectual sloppiness and incoherence. That mode was never adopted by the activist 18th century working class, whose objections and demands (pace the lazy snobbism of Hamilton's biographers) took the form not only of action but also of crystal-clear, deeply informed, published resolutions. The 18th century activists remind us that resolutions don't have to be handed down from above; they can filter up and be adopted by majority or by consensus.

The very concept of "up" may be anathema to the new movement. We'll see.

But the most honest answer to any and all objections to Occupy Wall Street may be "So what?" Criticism often comes down to no-cost fantasizing about more appealing actions that nobody has actually bothered to take. When American high finance takes over America, "occupy" is what some American people do, and have always done.

William Hogeland is the author of the narrative histories Declaration and The Whiskey Rebellion and a collection of essays, Inventing American History. He has spoken on unexpected connections between history and politics at the National Archives, the Kansas City Public Library, and various corporate and organization events. He blogs at http://www.williamhogeland.com.

Despite critiques, they've already deployed strategic tactics and put important issues on the radar.

"What do they want?" "It won't last." "They're just a bunch of hippie kids."

Everybody is now weighing in with their take and critique of the Occupy Wall Street protesters, which is threatening to develop into a national and global movement. But at week three, many of those criticisms are unfair. From my experiences actually being among the protesters and talking with them, what they're building is an important movement that's already putting issues on the political map.

The Occupy Wall Street grievances that are motivating people to take action are based on the facts of growing inequality in the United States over the last 30 years. And contrary to sociologist Nina Eliasoph's contention that there's an "emptiness of the message itself so far," all of the protesters' complaints point to an overarching set of demands that fall under the themes of greater democracy in our plutocratic and oligarchic political system and greater equality and opportunity in the economy for the "99 percent" of Americans.

The criticism that they have no demands is also pretty ridiculous at this early stage. Protestor Hero Vincent points out the double standard of the charge: "Our constitution took a year to make. We've been here for three weeks and we're supposed to have an agenda? That makes no sense." Even if the protestors never came up with specific demands, they've already won by garnering media attention and putting the issue of economic inequality on the national agenda. This, in fact, is what movements do best: put issues on the political agenda that the two parties and our political institutions would much rather ignore. And this charge, as Betsy Reed points out, is beside the point. There are plenty of specific demands and policy proposals offered up by progressive and liberal groups, only to be ignored. It takes a social movement to put them on the agenda and in the national political discourse.

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This critique is also a bit hypocritical, especially when compared with the Tea Party. Remember that when the Tea Party first emerged, they had no clear demands. And what few demands they came up with weren't even based in fact: "President Obama is a socialist" or "Get your government hands off my Medicare."

The media isn't giving the protesters their fair due, either. It is striking that the coverage of Occupy Wall Street has underplayed how nonviolent and peaceful the protests are. Contrast that with the coverage of the Tea Party rallies in 2009 and 2010, where angry and older white Americans were showing up strapped with guns at town hall meetings. Can you imagine what would happen if any of the Occupy Wall Street protesters had any weapons on them? I can. (See, for an example, the vilification and outright repression by the police and FBI of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s and 1970s.) When old, angry white guys show up to public places with guns, they are patriots taking back America. When a diverse group of young, angry, yet fun protestors show up to public places unarmed and nonviolent, they are "hippies" and dismissed for two weeks before police overreaction sparks more media coverage.

Their tactics may seem unconventional to the establishment, but they threaten to have a lasting effect. Ignore them at your own risk.

Dorian Warren is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.