6
Protests
Starting in September 2011, the Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park, New York City, produced the resonant political catchphrases ‘the 1%’ or ‘1 percenters’ to designate the super-rich, and ‘the 99%’ to characterize the rest. Given the form of a political slogan, ‘We are the 99%’ became the rallying call of the protesters, appointing ‘the 1%’ as the targets of the protest or as the agents of inequity. The slogan was widely taken up as the movement spread globally (Pickerill et al., eds. 2015 offered an overview across various contexts, taking in the USA, Canada, Spain, Britain, Israel, and Chile; in 2020 the Wikipedia entry for ‘Occupy Movement’ listed thirty countries). These calls were a direct response against austerity measures following the 2007–2008 financial crisis.
The catchphrases and catchwords discussed so far (‘new normal’, ‘austerity’, ‘resilience’) were introduced and largely promoted from above, by political and commercial authorities and organizations. Catchphrases and slogans emerging from the Occupy movement were meant to mobilize against and counter those—appearing, as it were, from below. Examining their purchase as catchphrases, therefore, takes this study into the distinct, though obviously related, territory of anti-establishment political expression.
The use of statistical figures as slogans has seemed an obvious rhetorical move since the Occupy protests, though nothing similar appeared in their immediate precursors, such as the Movimento 15-M anti-austerity protests in Spain and the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East. In fact, no such earlier usage is found in compendiums of political catchphrases and words (compendiums are discussed in the next chapter). Idiomatic expressions using statistical notations to make pat rule-of-thumb estimations have enjoyed some popular currency. Pertinently here, for instance, the oft-reiterated statement ‘Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration’ (attributed to Thomas Edison, see Rosanoff 1932: 406) comes to mind. As an idiomatic turn, presenting rule-of-thumb estimations as if they are statistically precise is an emphasizing tactic. That makes the reckoning (a loose estimation of what is overwhelmingly weighty) seem like what it is not (a statistical figure indicating precisely how much weightier). This could be regarded as using statistical notation in a metaphoric way. That sort of metaphoric usage was obviously called upon in ‘the 1%’, ‘the 99%’, and ‘We are the 99%’, but, at the same time, there was something more to it here than in the kind of idiomatic usage cited. In fact, there were statistics behind those catchphrases even if the latter were not statistical expressions in themselves. The catchphrases capitalized upon and were pushed according to statistical investigations and methods underpinning the protests, to do with measuring inequality. In this respect, alongside the metaphoric usage of statistical notations there was also a gesture towards actual statistical work. For this study, therefore, these catchphrases offer an opportunity to consider both the language of protest at a specific juncture (the Occupy protests) and, at the same time, to exemplify how statistics bear generally upon political discourse at present.
The following observations are given in three sections: ‘statistics as metaphor’, ‘statistics as basis’, and ‘aftermath’.
Statistics as metaphor
In the service of political mobilization, ‘the 99%’ and ‘the 1%’ and the slogan ‘We are the 99%’ had two obvious metaphorical aspects: scale (large/small, strong/weak) and capacity (inclusive/exclusive).
The metaphor of scale could suggest both the force undertaking protest (big) and the justness of the cause (strong), and thus encourage and reassure those who are mobilized. Correspondingly, the force and agenda of that which is opposed is diminished. Naomi Klein’s 6 October 2011 speech to Occupy Wall Street protesters exemplified this well:
If there is one thing I know, it is that the 1 percent loves a crisis. When people are panicked and desperate and no one seems to know what to do, that is the ideal time to push through their wish list of pro-corporate policies: privatizing education and social security, slashing public services, getting rid of the last constraints on corporate power. Amidst the economic crisis, this is happening the world over.
And there is only one thing that can block this tactic, and fortunately, it’s a very big thing: the 99 percent. And that 99 percent is taking to the streets from Madison to Madrid to say ‘No. We will not pay for your crisis’.
‘The 99%’ is metaphorically ‘a very big thing’, at a scale which reassures, counters ‘panic and desperation’, and builds optimism. The metaphor of the ‘very big thing’, signified as ‘the 99%’, fills in the otherwise uncharacterizable presence of the protesters, which is to say, otherwise the protestors are only available as what they are not, they are not ‘the 1%’. ‘The 1%’ was understood in more substantial terms. ‘The 1%’ stood for a set of abstract principles and interests (‘pro-corporate policies’ producing ‘crisis’) rather than a collective of persons. However, once those principles and interests were named as ‘the 1%’, that could be treated as a person or group, addressed with third-person pronouns (‘their wish list’) and attributed feelings (‘the 1 percent loves a crisis’). ‘The 1%’ was thus, in an immediate way, a personification, somewhat like an allegorical persona of the rich and powerful. Correspondingly, ‘the 99%’ was a negative-personification (‘not-the-1%’) which was also akin to an allegorical figure, not dissimilar to the medieval mystery-play personae ‘Everyman’ and ‘Mankind’. This negative personification did not need to be substantiated because, after all, it spoke as ‘the 99%’ and about the ‘1%’, ‘the 99%’ was the voice that announced itself for the purpose of describing and holding to account ‘the 1%’. ‘The 99%’ substantiated itself by announcing itself and speaking as such, and did not need to be described; in the self-same moment ‘the 1%’ was foregrounded and could be substantively described by ‘the 99%’. Shortly after Klein’s speech, these nuances of the metaphor of scale and concomitant allegorical personifications were evident in The 99% declaration (The 99 Percent Working Group, Ltd. 2011) issued on 15 October 2011, albeit without the sanction of the Occupy Wall Street organizers. This was announced as issuing from ‘we, the ninety-nine percent of the people of the United States of America’. Without naming ‘the 1%’, this sought ‘redressal’ for ‘grievances’ from putatively ‘the 1%’. But the culpable party, implicitly ‘the 1%’, were not characterized as actual persons, and redressal consisted of demands for instituting equitable financial and political arrangements. The closest it came to identifying a core culpable party was in terms of the established legal personhood of corporations:
We, the 99% of the American People, categorically REJECT the concepts that corporations are persons and that money is equivalent to free speech because if that were so, then only the wealthiest people, corporations and entities possessing concentrated wealth would have a meaningful voice in our society.
This is interesting because ‘the corporation’ is a kind of juridically substantiated allegorical figure with all-too-material agency (see Orts 2013; Kelsen 2006 [1946]: Chapter 9). In a way, the allegorical persona ‘the 99%’ itself assumed a kind of legal personhood at times: for instance, ‘Writers for the 99%’ (2011) appeared as the author of a published volume, thereby both making a collective intellectual property claim and simultaneously eschewing property claims.
As metaphor of capacity (inclusiveness/exclusiveness), ‘the 99%’ and ‘the 1%’ evinced further complexities. ‘The 99%’ suggested not only large scale but an alignment of maximum inclusiveness. However, that also potentially meant downplaying differences, effectively defocusing constituencies which had been powerfully centred in similar protests earlier, such as the working class, minority ethnicities and, especially, the impoverished. In a 24 November article, Paul Krugman (2011) not only suggested scaling up the ‘the very big thing’ (the article was entitled ‘We Are the 99.9%’), but also observed:
‘We are the 99 percent’ is a great slogan. It correctly defines the issue as being the middle class versus the elite (as opposed to the middle class versus the poor). And it also gets past the common but wrong establishment notion that rising inequality is mainly about the well educated doing better than the less educated; the big winners in this new Gilded Age have been a handful of very wealthy people, not college graduates in general.
In this reading, the thrust of the slogan is that the ‘middle class’ and ‘well educated’ are included, needless to say so are ‘the poor’ (the ‘versus’ is removed from between ‘middle class’ and ‘poor’), and only a ‘handful of very wealthy people’ are excluded (‘the 1%’ or even ‘0.1%’). Such inclusiveness had the effect of removing the common expectation that protestors mainly represent their own experiences and grievances, are affected by the conditions they protest against—so to speak, embody their allegiances (e.g. workers protest against pensions cuts, women protest against gender violence). As included in ‘the 99%’, these protesters claimed rather than embodied their allegiance, either as individuals or as a whole, with only blurred or erased differentiations between individuality and near-totality. In fact, the dominant image of ‘the 99%’ was of individuals with stories which gel with the overarching story of exacerbating inequality. Numerous such images—of a person holding a sheet stating something of her or his circumstances and the slogan ‘We are the 99%’ or ‘I am the 99%’—were posted on the ‘We are the 99%’ Tumblr site (now in the Archive page) and collectively stood in as ‘the 99%’ personified. This was set up in August 2011 by Chris (surname withheld) with the help of Priscilla Grim, credited since with being key organizers of the Occupy Wall Street protests (Weinstein 2011). Instructions were issued to ensure that the images could be visually collectivized easily (see Milner 2013: 2372). With these images in sight, Mathijs van de Sande (2020) was later to discern a synecdochical logic at work, where each image is a part which represents the whole:
On this website, thousands of people, mostly from the US, posted pictures of themselves, accompanied by a brief statement that described their individual situation: giving testimonies of debt, unemployment or systematic underemployment, poverty, chronic illness, and war trauma. Their testimonies were all undersigned by the slogan ‘I am the 99%’. Although these were all individual accounts of many different situations and experiences, the slogan suggested that all these stories had something important in common. It seemed that, in a way, every single personal story could embody or encompass all the others—they all represented the entire 99%. Whereas this idea of the 99% suggests that they together constituted a majority, the I in ‘I am the 99%’ also suggested a synecdochal, representative claim: my story is representative for what we all are going through (in spite of the obvious differences between us). (407)
That different metaphorical nuances could lead into allegorical personification and synecdochical representation respectively, speaks to the complexity of the tacit work that analogies do in such catchphrases. The catchiness of these phrases may well be grounded in that analogical richness. In any case, being of ‘the 99%’ was evidently more a matter of declaring allegiance and less a matter of having shared and experienced grievances. Literally, of course, high-profile media intellectuals like Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Naomi Klein, and others, who seemed to become public mediators of ‘the 99%’, may not have been too far from ‘the 1%’, probably squarely within the top decile by income (not irrelevantly, Klein featured in Robbins 2017: Chapter 5, as a ‘well-intentioned beneficiary’). But that did not make their claim as mediators any the less cogent; their articulacy strengthened their claim. The possibilities of claiming allegiance were negotiated in interesting ways thereafter. Some actively blurred the boundary between conviction and embodiment by positioning themselves as belonging to ‘the 1%’ but supporting ‘the 99%’ (see Flock 2011).
With his observations as a participant and ethnographic researcher in view, Jamie Matthews (2019) was later to see the two metaphorical directions cobbled together in ‘the 99%’ as presenting a troublesome schism for the Occupy protests:
The idea of ‘the 99%’ was the locus of a profound tension between contradictory political modes. It articulated a populist orientation, centring on the idea of ‘the 99%’ as the great collective of ‘the people’. However, this tendency, with its dynamics of representation and identity, ran against a contrary orientation for which such dynamics were anathema. Within this anti-identitarian orientation, ‘the 99%’ did not refer to a collectivity at all, but instead named the fact of inequality, seeking not the gathering of a collective subject, but the dispersal of mobilisation along lines of difference. (1019)
The schism radiated fissures and tensions as the protests proceeded, Matthews observed, but nevertheless the catchphrase has held a potential for unifying. However, focusing too intently on the catchphrases and slogan in themselves, as texts, may lead to overlooking important dimensions of their effect in the Occupy protests. The Tumblr site images turned the slogan into multimodal texts, which circulated and proliferated as such on an immense scale through digital networks. At the level of internet circulation, then, the uptake of the slogan was arguably more usefully considered as following the pattern of a ‘We-are-the-99%’ internet meme (see Milner 2013; Shifman 2014: 129–38; Hristova 2014). Meme circulations in the digital sphere could be regarded as analogous to the more diverse and wider circulations of catchphrases in the social and everyday sphere, and in some respects a particular mechanism for disseminating catchphrases among other mechanisms.
The easiest takedown of the catchy metaphorical nuances of ‘the 99%’ and ‘the 1%’ and ‘We are the 99%’ was by taking the statistical notations literally, by playing the metaphorical against the literal. In news commentaries the point was made thus by David Brooks (2011):
Unfortunately, almost no problem can be productively conceived in this way. A group that divides the world between the pure 99 percent and the evil 1 percent will have nothing to say about education reform, Medicare reform, tax reform, wage stagnation or polarization. They will have nothing to say about the way Americans have overconsumed and overborrowed. These are problems that implicate a much broader swath of society than the top 1 percent.
And, with a slightly different emphasis, Jonah Goldberg (2011):
The top 1 percent is a funny thing. If you got rid of all the 1 percenters tomorrow, a new top 1 percent would take its place. There will always be a top 1 percent. […] That’s why the sloganeering about the top 1 percent is simultaneously brilliant and daft. It dehumanizes the villains of the tale by turning them into a permanent mathematical abstraction. No reform will ever go far enough because there, on the horizon, like a moon you can sail toward for all eternity without ever getting any closer to, will remain the 1 percent looking down on the lumpen-ninetyniners with cold disdain.
Though these comments seemed to play out the absurdity of the catchphrases by taking the statistical notations literally, they did little more than reveal the metaphoric bent of the slogans. These were made in a spirit of opposing the Occupy protests and their agenda, to diminish their rousing effect and discourage mobilization. More substantially, such conservative commentators variously argued that inequality is a necessary condition for economic growth. And, moreover, that the very rich contribute disproportionately already to existing redistributive mechanisms (e.g. pay enough taxes), and are particularly socially productive (e.g. are ‘employers’) and deserve their vast incomes. The linguistic sleights and statistical ploys involved in these arguments are not my immediate focus here. From the other side, for instance, there was Alain Badiou (2017 [2016]) addressing ‘the young’ about ‘why it is absolutely necessary to change the world’ (1), with a lifetime of espousing emancipative political commitments behind him:
Today, 10% of the world population own 86% of the available capital. 1% own 46% of that capital. And 50% of the world population own exactly nothing, 0%. It is easy to see why the 10% who own practically everything don’t want to be lumped together with those who have nothing, or even with the less prosperous of those who share between them the scant remaining 14%. What’s more, many of those who share that 14% are very roughly split between passive resentment and a ferocious desire to hold on to what they’ve got, in particular by the support they give, with racism and nationalism playing their parts, to the countless repressive barriers against the terrible ‘threat’ they perceive in the 50% who have nothing.
All this, incidentally, means that the supposedly unifying slogan of the Occupy Wall Street movement, ‘We are the 99%’, was totally meaningless. The participants in the movement, full of good will that they should be commended for, were probably for the most part young people from families somewhere ‘in the middle’, neither truly poor nor really rich—the middle class, in a word, which is hyped as loving democracy, as being a pillar of democracy. But the truth is, the affluent West is full of people from that ‘middle’, that middle class, who, even though they’re not in the 1% of the wealthy elite or in the 10% of well-off property owners, nevertheless fear the 50% of complete have-nots, and, clinging to the tiny 14% of resources that they share among themselves, provide globalized capitalism with the petit-bourgeois troop of supporters without which the ‘democratic’ oasis would have no chance of surviving (31–2).
This took the statistical notation so seriously that the metaphoric nuances of using that as a slogan were entirely erased (‘totally meaningless’). There was no perfunctory regret here about the misconceived metaphorical promises. For Badiou, there were no metaphorical promises there, only uncomprehending misconception and possibly culpable misconception. Badiou’s approach points to two preconceptions. First, that statistical notations predominantly signify descriptive truth, allowing precise description of a given field. They are difficult to dislocate from that function, even as signifiers. This is so despite the fact, as is well known, that such expressions are often used idiomatically for rule-of-thumb estimations or to actively manipulate. Second, in identifying protesters, the rationale of embodiment is more material and relevant than claims of commitment. For Badiou, who the protesters are makes sense of the act of protest.
In catchphrases and slogans then, statistical notations could work in paradoxical ways: shifting back and forth according to contextual emphasis between precision and rule-of-thumb estimation, description and appeal, truth claim and suggestion, abstraction and reality, summation and breakdown, literally and metaphorically. Amidst the Occupy protests, the connotations of the catchphrases and slogan were severally tested. A conservative move was to propose the statistical counter-slogan ‘We are the 53%’ on Tumblr and Twitter sites, which was fleetingly reported (Khimm 2011; Memmott 2011) and flared briefly as a contestation of memes in digital forums (Milner 2013: 2373–75). The counter-slogan purported to represent the proportion of the population paying income tax, 53 per cent, against the protestors claiming to represent the 99 per cent, suggesting that by paying taxes and contributing to redistributive measures this 53 per cent occupy a higher moral ground. As a slogan it had less of the persuasive advantages of ‘We are the 99%’, with neither a corresponding suggestion of scale or capacity. Of course, paying taxes is not a matter of conviction but of being within a tax-collecting agency’s jurisdiction and abiding by establishment rules. But as a counter-slogan it was reasonably effective: its effect was conditional to the catchiness of ‘We are the 99%’, both in appearing responsively moderate and temperate and in numerically appearing to falsify ‘the 99%’.
Notably, some advocates of the Occupy protests tried to build bridges between the contrary pulls of statistical notations as catchphrases by giving the metaphorical statistical expression a literal turn: that is, by seeking to convert the loosely estimated appeal into a material description. ‘The 1%’ as a catchphrase, seemingly designating those culpable for the grievances of ‘the 99%’, naturally aroused a desire to give flesh to the top ‘1%’, to identify its constituents as specific persons with visualizable features, to locate them as agents with trackable interests and behaviours who actually do something iniquitous. In the course of the Occupy New York protests, the question of who they are appeared occasionally in the news media (e.g. Luhby 2011; Cox 2011), but the grounds for mulling this question had been laid before the protests. In fact, it may be argued that the possibility of imagining ‘the 1%’ as concrete persons and agents, with describable lifestyles and backgrounds, was already imbued in the catchphrases and slogans. The more the phrase ‘1%’ caught on, the more material its substance seemed to subsequently become, but equally the phrase caught on because there was a sense of substance in it already. In this regard, a May 2011 feature by Joseph Stiglitz (2011), which appeared somewhat earlier than the protests, is often cited as the point where the catchphrase emerged—that is, as a catchphrase. It was entitled ‘Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%’. While drawing attention to the evidence for spiralling inequality in the USA and its deleterious consequences, Stiglitz tried to give some flesh to the top ‘1%’ as wilful agents of inequity:
The top 1 percent may complain about the kind of government we have in America, but in truth they like it just fine: too gridlocked to re-distribute, too divided to do anything but lower taxes. […] But one big part of the reason we have so much inequality is that the top 1 percent want it that way. […] The personal and the political are today in perfect alignment. Virtually all U.S. senators, and most of the representatives in the House, are members of the top 1 percent when they arrive, are kept in office by money from the top 1 percent, and know that if they serve the top 1 percent well they will be rewarded by the top 1 percent when they leave office. By and large, the key executive-branch policymakers on trade and economic policy also come from the top 1 percent. […] The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live.
In this, Stiglitz’s characterization of the top ‘1%’ as a group of specific persons depended more on assertive syntax than considered argument. Elaborate statistical exercises in concretizing the constituency of the ‘1%’ appeared afterwards, in terms of occupation, education, race, religion, conjugal relationships, possessions, and consuming habits (Keister 2014 discussed and gave figures for these in the USA; Breau 2014 for Canada). Sophisticated statistical analysis unsurprisingly suggested that concentration of wealth in the top ‘1%’ came at the cost of deprivation lower down, and that active exploitation is the mechanism of concentration. In the concluding words of Thomas Lambert and Edward Kwon’s (2015) paper:
[This] paper finds strong statistical support for radical contentions that income share gains to the top one percent are extracted from workers and that the marginal product of capital theory or concept does not hold much validity, especially in trying to justify greater income going to the top strata of U.S. society. The findings herein also make a contribution to the literature by using different measurements of exploitation to predict successfully the gains and losses of the top one percent and put radical concepts and measurements on an equal footing with the mainstream ones in a statistical sense. (473)
Such arguments were variously valid, but insofar as ‘the 1%’ were thereby presented as a characterizable group, material persons, there was good reason to be sceptical. Such claims seemed to describe the ‘1%’ as if it were a body being observed, whereas it was more the case that if it were assumed that there is such a body then those were some of the things that could be said about it. But whatever could be said about it after assuming that it was materially there, could also be said about others outside the top 1 per cent by income. By income it could be stated that such-and-such persons were definitely in the top 1 per cent, but insofar as occupation, education, consuming habits, exploitative actions, ideological proclivities, culpabilities, etc. went there was no combination of these that could be considered as peculiar to or definitive of those persons that were ‘the 1%’.
So, such attempts to concretize and give flesh to the top ‘1%’ with seemingly sound statistical expertise nevertheless appeared as being little more than an accentuation of the metaphorical use of statistical notations in catchphrases. These appeared as statistically informed persuasive devices which work irrespective of statistics. But it is interesting that strong statistical ability was invested in this. This recalls one of the oldest pitfalls of statistical reasoning: an inclination to give any point or range (not much difference between point and range) in a scale of social statistics a normative emphasis, as presenting a particularly significant and rounded human/social reality. It was the path through which Adolphe Quetelet’s early nineteenth-century researches into the ‘average man’ came to misdirectedly construe this average as a normatively real person, with lasting sociopolitical consequences even after becoming irrelevant as statistics (Desrosières 1998 [1993]: Chapter 3; Cole 2000: Chapter 2; Mosselmans 2007: Chapter 3; Donnelly 2016). Analogously, since its appearance as a political catchphrase, ‘the 1%’ and ‘the 99%’ have offered a resonant normative point with seeming statistical weight and have imbued statistical notations with normative connotations.
Statistics as basis
Though the Occupy protest catchphrases, with their normative bent, have had some after-the-fact bearing upon statistical analysis, it was statistical analysis which propelled the catchphrases in the first place. The statistical reckonings of inequality which led towards and then undergirded the catchphrases are the focus of this section. Those reckonings grounded and foregrounded an analytical shift in academic circles where rhetorical calculations were not obvious. That is to say, the rhetorical ploy was implicated in the statistical analysis rather than obtrusively inserted there. The shift also involved downplaying statistical reckonings which had been centred in anti-establishment and protest discourses earlier, especially with regard to measures of poverty.
With the wide spread of the Occupy protests, their statistical basis—in concert with the now familiar catchphrases ‘the 1%’ and ‘the 99%’—surfaced out of academic circles into the public sphere. The catchphrases thus fed the remarkable market and media success of publications by economists whose statistical analyses had been the impetus for the catchphrases to begin with, effectively keeping the catchphrases alive and relevant for the remainder of the decade. With the resonances of ‘the 1%’ and ‘the 99%’ backing them, such publications included: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014 [2013]); Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality (2012), which began with the chapter ‘America’s 1 Percent Problem’; Paul Krugman’s End This Depression Now! (2012), especially Chapter 5, ‘The Second Gilded Age’; and Anthony B. Atkinson’s Inequality: What Can Be Done? (2015). A couple of years earlier Atkinson had collaborated with Facundo Alvaredo, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez (Alvaredo et al 2013) on a scholarly paper entitled ‘The Top 1 Percent in International and Historical Perspective’, which came with friendly circumspection about the Occupy catchphrases while substantiating them:
We should start by emphasizing the factual importance of the top 1 percent. It is tempting to dismiss the study of this group as a passing political fad due to the slogans of the Occupy movement or as the academic equivalent of reality TV. But the magnitudes are truly substantial.
(Alvaredo et al 2013: 4).
Atkinson’s contribution was noteworthy because his earlier work on measuring inequality had a somewhat different normative approach.
Jiggar Bhatt (2012) made a reasonable attempt to track the immediate spur for the catchphrases ‘the 99%’ against ‘the 1%’ before Stiglitz (2011) gave those proportions their catchy turn. There are notable older instances of such usage which were not mentioned during the Occupation protests, such as in the Black Liberation Month News (1984: 6) and the documentary film The One Percent (dir. Jamie Johnson 2006). More immediately inspiring, Bhatt found, were the scholarly work of Piketty and Saez—citing two of their papers (2003 and 2006)—and Edward Wolff—nothing by him was cited—which presented the basis for highlighting these proportions. He also tracked their passage into popular forums via Senator of Vermont Bernie Sanders’s eight-hour speech in the US Senate on 10 December 2010 objecting to continuing tax cuts under President Barack Obama’s administration:
We cannot give tax breaks to the rich when we already have the most unequal distribution of income of any major country on Earth. […] The percentage of income going to the top 1 percent nearly tripled since the 1970s. […] The top 1 percent now owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. That is not the foundation of a democratic society. […] The fact is, 80 percent of all new income earned from 1980 to 2005 has gone to the top 1 percent.
(Quoted in Bhatt 2012)
Thereafter, it was eye-catchingly highlighted in Stiglitz’s (2011) Vanity Fair article before finding its way as the logo of the Tumblr site ‘We are the 99%’.
The two papers by Piketty and Saez (2003 and 2006) just mentioned were relevant to the catchphrases in question insofar as addressed predominantly to the situation in the USA. They presented long runs of data on income (with breakdown into capital income and labour income tracked)—for 1913–1998 in the 2003 paper and 1913–2002 in the 2006 paper—based on individual income tax returns in the USA. This data was tabulated according to deciles and centiles of the population by individual income, thus offering a measured view of unequal distribution of wealth. The explanatory focus in these papers was put on the top 10 per cent and the top 1 per cent, so as to answer the question: what factors explain the patterns of income across time evidenced thus at the top of the table? The 2003 paper focused exclusively on the USA, and the 2006 paper provided comparative figures (with similar income tabulations from Canada, United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, and Japan) with the USA centred. In short, these tabulations showed an accelerating concentration of income—both capital and labour—in the top decile and especially in the top centile, mainly from 1970 onwards, and particularly in the USA (and later the UK) compared to other countries, though also generally in all countries studied. Where available, corresponding tabulations of other data with shorter runs (such as household income and consumption) seemed to fit the pattern shown by income. Explanations for such concentration were partly based on statistical corroboration from other data tabulations, and often based on ‘instinctive’ connections. Here ‘instinctive’ meant that the explanations were not inferred from the data but plausibly suggested by comparing data shifts with the timings of policy changes, historical events, etc. or by connecting geopolitical differences in income data to differences in regimes and environments. The foregrounding of these two papers was relevant insofar as the slogans of the Occupy Wall Street programme went, but these were part of a larger project following the same methods of income tabulation and analysis in different contexts which appeared concurrently (such as, Piketty 2003 for France, Saez and Veall 2005 for Canada), and which continued to appear in and after 2011 (those with Piketty and Saez in authorial roles included Atkinson et al. 2011; Piketty and Saez 2013; Alvaredo et al. 2013; Piketty et al. 2016). The explanations offered in all these took in the deleterious social consequences of income concentration in the top decile and centile, and consistently recommended redistribution by increased taxation of the wealthy—not just in scholarly papers but also in journalistic writings (some of Piketty’s appeared in a 2017 volume). Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014 [2013]) gave full scope to the methods of income tabulation, and analysis sketchily outlined here by synthesizing the longest data runs that could be plausibly harnessed (eighteenth century onwards), across geopolitical contexts on a continental or global scale.
There were several notable elements in this mode of delineating and approaching inequality measurements compared to those centred prior to that.
First, there was the nature of this data, drawn mainly from individual income tax returns. Inequality gauging prior to that had been predominantly concerned with household income and consumption based on household surveys, on the assumption that neither individual incomes nor individual contributions to redistributive mechanisms sufficiently conveyed a sense of a condition of life, which is what measuring inequality should be concerned with. Piketty, Saez, and their collaborators’ tabulations seemingly directed the lens squarely on individuals and taxes. The ‘individual’ in these terms is actually an abstract entity. Noting that household surveys in the USA were not available before the 1950s whereas income tax returns were available from the beginning of the twentieth century, the method of placing the individual in the new database was described thus by Piketty and Saez (2006: 200):
Those [tax] statistics generally report the corresponding number of taxpayers for a large number of income brackets, as well as their total income and tax liability. The statistics usually provide the breakdown by income source: capital income, wage income, business income, etc. Using population census data, one can estimate the total number of tax units, had everybody been required to file a tax return, and determine the number of returns in top fractile groups such as the top 10 percent, 1 percent, etc.
The collation with population census data and the assumption of total returns (by everybody) rendered this individual more a mathematical reference point than a person. But, of course, behind all the mathematical reference points there were persons—and if even with these assumptions the income concentration at the top proved heavy, in practice it would probably be heavier. Similarly, tax returns are (as the publications that have been cited noted variously) notoriously limited since much may not be declared (be legally withheld or illegally hidden). However, if even the returned tax data shows such concentration, the reality was probably of even higher income concentration at the top. Those who mooted the ‘We are the 53%’ slogan in response to ‘We are the 99%’ might have suggested that the problem of concealment of income was more at the bottom, the 47 per cent that pays no tax, but, as Khimm (2011) observed:
Altogether, about 23 percent of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes because their incomes are too low […]. The other 23 percent of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes mostly because of tax breaks given to the elderly, low-income working families, government welfare recipients, and students.
At any rate, the point is that this mode of sourcing data for tabulation invited a normative emphasis on individuals and taxes rather than on households and conditions of life.
Second, there were the advantages of the scale of income-based data with which inequality of distributions were charted thus, compared to previously dominant studies of inequality distributions. It is a general axiom of statistical research that the larger the scale of data tabulated and analysed, the more robust the inferences are likely to be. In principle, the horizon to be aimed for is comprehensive data collection on whatever is being examined. In practice, since that is rarely possible, especially in social tabulation, adjustments need to be made in reading tabulations of limited scales of data so as to approximate comprehensive data—that is, by removing biases and errors that may arise from limitations (e.g. by randomizing data sources, adjusting by weightings and for calculable error margins). From this perspective, the scale of data with which Piketty, Saez, and collaborators could populate their income-centred database had several advantages. Since income tax returns are legally enjoined on all with an income (like census declarations, but more frequent), data drawn from this source have a reasonable claim to being close to comprehensive, and render meaningful shifts trackable. Further, as observed already, there were longer runs of such data than, for instance, data based on household surveys, so that the database could offer a picture which was chronologically extensive. It seemed possible to track changes with a historical perspective and obtain more persuasive charting of tendencies and instinctive explanations of causes. Moreover, since such data can be found in a significant number of international contexts, with comparable differences, the database could also offer a picture that was spatially extensive, enabling explanations referring to different political and economic regimes.
Third, and of some importance in contemplating catchphrases, there was a shift of analytical focus here to the top of the income scale, whereas previously the focus had been predominantly on the bottom. As economist Charles I. Jones (2015: 44) put it: ‘Piketty and Saez and their co-authors have shifted our understanding of inequality in an important way. To a much greater extent than we’ve appreciated before, the dynamics of top income and wealth inequality are crucial.’ Correspondingly, we may say that Piketty, Saez, and their collaborators have defocused poverty—bottom income—in understanding inequality, where the focus used to predominantly rest earlier. This defocusing was amply evident in the political catchphrases of interest here. Krugman (2011) was not mistaken in observing that the slogan ‘We are the 99%’ ‘correctly defines the issue as being the middle class versus the elite (as opposed to the middle class versus the poor)’. The defocusing resulted from putting aside the dynamics of ‘the middle class versus the poor’ and locating the conflict at ‘the middle class versus the elite’. Or, since ‘the middle class’ has ever been a bit vaguely articulated in inequality research and analysis, the perspective shifted from ‘the poor versus the rest’ to ‘the super-rich versus the rest’. That may be understood in different ways: possibly poverty thereby became a blurred bottom line of the rest, or perhaps features of poverty were understood as diffuse and seeping upwards into the rest. The implications of this shift of analytical focus—which was effectively a shift in the understanding of inequality—calls for a considered pause here; it lay at the heart of the catchiness of ‘the 1%’ and ‘the 99%’.
Let me attempt a pared-down account of the shift in question: a shift from what to what? Prior to the post-2000 work of Piketty, Saez, and collaborators, very little investment in inequality measurement had taken place without some cognisance of poverty measurement alongside. These two kinds of measurement are obviously different and not immediately relatable. In a given population, measuring inequality involves putting the distribution of wealth on a relative scale. For a given population, poverty measurement mainly involves setting markers in terms of access to wealth beneath which the condition of life is unsatisfactory in the extreme. Measures of inequality and of poverty, separately or concurrently, have generally been undertaken with some conviction in progressive egalitarianism through redistribution. Such conviction has been espoused on both sides of the shift in approaching inequality of interest here: that is, those considering inequality and poverty alongside each other (such as, Amartya Sen, James Foster, Martin Ravallion, Sabina Alkire) and those focusing on income inequality with the top decile and centile in focus (Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, Facundo Alvaredo, and others; Anthony Atkinson seemed to move more or less seamlessly between). The egalitarian conviction could be based on an ethical idea of reasonable equality being a good in itself (in the nature of equality in law, equality in opportunity, etc.), or, negatively, because reasonable equality is necessary to avoid conflict. Interestingly, in their early self-locating overviews of inequality analysis, Amartya Sen (1973 [1997]), a strong advocate of focusing on the bottom, and Thomas Piketty (2015 [1997]), key popularizer of focusing on the top, began with the causal connection between economic inequality and political conflict. Thus, on both sides of the shift, egalitarian conviction which conceptualizes redistributive measures accordingly has had a motivating role. However, the former and older approach had a particular interest in poverty and its measurement while the latter and increasingly dominant with the Occupy protests did not.
Considering inequality measurement and poverty measurement side by side, with a commitment to reasonable redistributive measures, has been regarded as welfare driven (‘welfarist’). That is what an analytical focus on the bottom entailed in inequality measurement. There were two important considerations here: first, the mechanics and principles of redistribution; and second, the manner in which the bottom could be targeted to reasonable egalitarian ends, that is, for poverty alleviation. Thus, Atkinson’s earlier work on inequality measurement (especially Atkinson 1970) effectively worked in a proportional welfare coefficient in inequality measurement with effect on the lower rungs of distribution, and considered the different ways in which redistribution could factor in poverty measurement with or without a commitment to social change (particularly Atkinson 1987). These were, in the main, clarifications of the manner in which inequality measurements could bear upon redistribution such that the bottom rungs—the low income—may be benefitted with more or less disturbance in the upper. Atkinson’s was a cautious welfarist modelling approach in this respect, and primarily addressed to the first consideration, the mechanics of redistribution. Sen’s understanding of inequality measurement was similarly welfarist and attentive to the mechanics of redistribution, but with a stronger interest in the second consideration, how the bottom can be targeted for poverty alleviation. That naturally involved a firm focus on understanding what the needs of the bottom are, that is, what poverty consists in. Poverty thus needed searching exploration. To consider how to target the poor in welfare terms, it was not enough to simply know what their income was. A cluster of factors needed to be grasped as the content of poverty, and then measured to the extent of being rendered targetable in economic terms (from basic needs to being equipped to participate in society, to being content with circumstances). So, the condition of life in poverty needed to be understood in all its complexity and given an economically targetable character. Sen’s stronger investment in this meant a more complex understanding of inequality measurement itself (laid out in Sen 1973 [1997]); the development of a ‘capabilities approach’ to social development (Sen 1979, and numerously thereafter); endorsement of realistic poverty-line measurements (remarkably in an abrasive exchange with Peter Townsend—Sen 1983; Townsend 1985; Sen 1985); and contribution towards conceiving the Human Poverty Index (UNDP 1997) and Multidimensional Poverty Index (UNDP 2010: 94–100; Alkire and Santos 2010).
In understanding inequality, when the analytical focus was firmly put on the top fractiles of wealth distribution by individual income, quite a lot of this complexity could be put aside and a relatively simplified picture appeared. Since targeting of welfare was out of focus, the complexities of conditions of life could be disregarded (we do not need to ask what it means to be poor and how to alleviate that condition). The rich could be described by the one factor of income, and every other dimension of their life could be assumed to be conditional to that one factor (we already know that the rich can set any condition of life they wish to for themselves). If abnormal patterns of wealth concentration at the top became evident, the key question then was: what features of the existing economic regime enables wealth to gravitate and accumulate upwards? Corollary to that, there is another question: what effects are evident downwards? But this became generally downwards, not particularly at the bottom. In focusing on the upper rungs there was no immediate need to go to the bottom, the upper rungs came into focus in terms of a generality of other rungs beneath them. If those effects downwards proved deleterious, and were aggregated, the overall picture settled somewhere in the middle and not at the level of poverty. No specific measurement of poverty seemed necessary any longer to understand deleterious effects of maldistribution. The redistributive mechanism also appeared correspondingly simplified from this perspective. It was now not so much a matter of targeting a social stratum or a certain range of social strata: it became a matter of taking away from the top to alleviate the deleterious effects beneath the top in a general way, at the level of aggregates. It was not the least well-off who needed to be especially targeted any longer; in that sense, John Rawls’s (1971 [1999]: 65–73) ‘difference principle’ (‘maximin’), which provided a horizon within progressive liberal economics, became largely irrelevant. Now it was mainly a matter of pulling wealth downwards such that the deleterious consequences of excessive wealth concentration at the top could be addressed. As observed already, Atkinson, whose welfarist approach to inequality measurement had a circumspect interest in poverty measurement, made the shift to focusing on the top income rungs effortlessly. Some of the fifteen proposals he offered at the end of his book Inequality (2015: 303–4) gave a reasonable summary of the targets that need to be met to alleviate deleterious consequences of income concentration at the top: guaranteed employment, minimum wage, positive interest on savings and maximum holding per person, universal child benefit, renewal of social insurance, and a minimum target in aid from rich countries. These had little to do specifically with poverty; the poverty-stricken would benefit from such measures as much as other strata. From this perspective, the mechanics of redistribution also became simplified: it comes down to taxing the rich more (for a scholarly treatment, see Diamond and Saez 2011; Saez and Zucman 2019; for a lucid summary of the instruments through which redistributive revenue can be obtained, managed and targeted, see Piketty 2015 [1997]: Chapter 4). There were, of course, complexities in the mechanics of taxation and redistribution from this perspective. Larger shares of tax, after all, do not come from individuals but from firms—so fiscal rather than direct redistribution is arguably more effective—but those details, it was felt, could be modelled once the progressive direction is set. Effectively, though, poverty was defocused. Seen thus, the catchphrases ‘the 1%’ and ‘the 99%’, and the slogan ‘We are the 99%’, were popular crystallizations of the statistical defocusing of poverty in inequality measurement.
In saying poverty was defocused, I do not mean to suggest that poverty disappeared from all reckonings. Though a degree of consecutiveness is suggested here in describing the shift as taking place from focusing on the bottom to focusing on the top, the former approach to inequality analysis did not get replaced. It was more the case that the top-focused approach appeared later, and thereafter both kinds of analytical foci have been pursued. However, the popular uptake of the top-focused approach through the Occupy protests following the 2007–2008 financial crisis, through crystallization and easy adaptability via the statistical catchphrases ‘the 1%’ and ‘the 99%’, through the complexities of how statistical notations are received, through the means and interests with which advocacy was undertaken … through all that, arguably, a general defocusing of poverty in the wider sociopolitical sphere occurred.
While Piketty and Saez (2003 and 2006) were presenting their analysis of income distributions in the USA for the period between 1913 and 2002 (a long run of data) with an eye on the top rungs, Edward Wolff (mentioned earlier) and co-authors were also focusing on income distributions in the USA for shorter periods (1984–1999 in Caner and Wolff 2004; from the 1940s to 1970s and 1970s to 2000 in Wolff 2004) with an eye on the bottom rungs and a firm interest in poverty. Insofar as poverty was focused, that involved more than simply taking account of income. In one of the papers, measures were drawn from various sources to obtain an understanding of ‘asset poverty’ for households (rather than individuals): ‘a household is considered to be “asset-poor” if its access to “wealth-type resources” is insufficient to enable the household to meet its “basic needs” for some limited “period of time”’ (Caner and Wolff 2004: 496)—obviously, terms designed to capture an impoverished condition of life. However, this research evidently had a weaker purchase in popular discourses, whereas Piketty, Saez, and their collaborators’ perspective had a considerably stronger appeal, to the extent of feeding into and legitimizing the Occupy protest catchphrases and slogan.
No doubt the wider defocusing of poverty was helped by energetic conservative arguments in favour of abandoning the existing poverty line based on income, and poverty lines generally, on the grounds that it misrepresents material progress (such as, Eberstadt 2008). But those arguments are countered by poverty measures such as the Multidimensional Poverty Index adopted by UNDP (2010), replacing the earlier Human Poverty Index, and also including inequality adjustments in the Human Development Index. Evidently, in institutional reckonings, poverty measurement and its association with inequality measurement have not only stayed strong, but have been honed in their sensitivity to real circumstances. It is possible that such fine-grained poverty measurement may speak in some new way to top-focused approaches to inequality measurements based on income. In any case, that such defocusing of poverty has taken place is also suggested in some research which attends to academic linguistic usage rather than the minutiae of measurement. For instance, examining definitions of poverty in 578 documents from the 1970s to the 2000s in decadal segments, Misturelli and Heffernan (2008: 260) found:
Not surprisingly, during the 1970s, the focus was on physical and material needs. […] By the 1990s, economic and institutional factors rose to match those relating to physical and material needs, which had dominated the themes since the 1970s. The $1 a day cut-off point was introduced to the definitions during this time, as was the UN’s notion of ‘human poverty’. Thus, during this time, two of the most powerful players produced two opposing notions of development, both of which competed for legitimacy. Indeed, the UN’s notion of human poverty was largely based upon Sen’s capability approach and directly acknowledged the social dimension of poverty. Conversely, the World Bank offered a purely quantitative, money metric measure that was easily translatable across cultures, actors and communities.
However, during the 2000s, the division became somewhat blurred. Indeed, definitions tended to list criteria that included both social and more quantitative factors. Further, the focus of the definitions became the poor rather than poverty in general. The heavy use of juxtaposition, however, revealed that listing the features of poverty were more important than detailing the causes. Thus, by the 2000s the definitions had returned to the descriptive and largely unproblematic concepts of the 1970s.
Definitions in themselves do not say much about the measurements and their analysis, and yet definitions do indicate what is ostensibly measured and may prefigure how the results would be analysed.
The shift in approaches to analysing inequality reflected in popular attitudes and expressions has had obvious implications for contemporary anti-establishment political mobilizations. The liberal welfarist approach to analysing inequality with a strong sense of the bottom, targeting redistribution accordingly, has often become aligned with establishment interests. It could blur the part played by the upper rungs of income in social organization and suggest that if only the bottom were targeted properly all would be well, and the bottom can be targeted by well-measured policies and criteria determined from above. Understandably, this offers little encouragement for political mobilization with a view to large-scale or wide-ranging change. Mobilization may only be encouraged to the extent that it is confined within and confirms stable establishment arrangements: for instance, it occurs within the structures of multiparty electoral contests, takes the form of single-issue policy activism, engages in temporary protest-as-performance/spectacle style events, and seeks change in institutional directions/leadership rather than of institutions themselves. The approach to analysing inequality with a focus on the top, foregrounding taxation as the core for redistribution downwards, has rather more to offer for political mobilization seeking large-scale and wide-ranging change. Insofar as establishment structures are perceptibly controlled by elites, this mode of challenging their dominance could portend a desire for restructuring establishment arrangements such that the elites are decentred and perhaps de-elitized—the very systems that produce elites could be targeted. That potentially implies a comprehensive ideological transformation.
However, to see the top-focused approach thus courts overestimating its potential. Despite the possibility of large-scale mobilization, this approach has built within it several mechanisms which ultimately also render it confirmatory of liberal establishment structures. On the one hand, it conceives of the elites as individuals in income terms, at the least as abstract individuals within a statistical demarcation. On the other, the arrangements which gravitate and concentrate wealth towards the top are largely institutional, themselves embedded in political and financial systems underpinned by ‘rule of law’. The foregrounding of abstract individuals tends to downgrade attention to the institutional and systemic underpinnings, or to render them after-the-fact. Further, the strong focus on taxation for redistribution effectively reiterates the position of the elites and the legitimacy of the establishment authorities charged with tax collection, policing, and redistribution.
Insofar as the conditions of impoverished life go, little is promised in mobilizations with the top-focused approach. Where a loose apprehension of poverty was implicated in the Occupy protests, that involved associating certain terms with the statistical catchphrases and slogan—such as, ‘precarity’ or ‘precarization’, ‘crisis’, ‘unemployment’ and ‘employment insecurity’, ‘casualization’, ‘depreciating standards of living’, ‘privatized welfare’, ‘indebtedness’, and ‘low credit access’. These terms worked as linked or conditional catchphrases and words in the midst of anti-establishment mobilization and protests. These suggest that, insofar as poverty is considered, that is not as a condition of life but a seepage of variegated experiences from the lower rungs upwards. A kind of osmosis of drops and drips of impoverished experiences across the quantiles of the chart from the bottom upwards appears to be at work, through systems at the behest of elites. It is probably fair to think of the impetus of such political mobilization as more to do with fear of poverty than with actually existing poverty (on this point, Gupta 2019: 206–8). There are several possible reasons why this impetus may seem stronger now than it has been in the past. That may be because of the actual reduction of existing poverty, or because of the reduced significance of existing poverty, or perhaps due to the near monopoly of the middle rungs in anti-establishment political mobilization (as Badiou argued in the quotation earlier). In this regard, the effectiveness of mobilization on the back of catchphrases like ‘the 1%’ and ‘the 99%’ or slogans like ‘We are the 99%’ is likely to be contextually variable, depending on the extent of actual poverty. It is likely to be quite different, for instance, in the USA or UK compared to India or Nigeria.
Aftermath
By 2015 the worldwide Occupy protests had largely fizzled out. The circulation of the catchphrases ‘the 1%’ and ‘the 99%’ and the slogan ‘We are the 99%’ also diminished, but not entirely. They remained associated with activism against extreme inequality, centred on the metaphorical suggestiveness of the statistical notation. Retrospection on the Occupy protests examined the catchphrases at regular intervals, as has been noted. They also continued to appear as catchy anchors for ongoing investigation into growing inequality and ways of addressing its effects (e.g. Hardoon 2017; Adler 2019; Azmanova 2020: Chapter 6). A manifesto, Feminism for the 99% (Arruzza et al. 2019), called for the alignment of feminist commitments with an anti-neoliberal agenda, foregrounding the interwovenness of identity-based prejudices and the exploitation of workers: ‘This feminism does not limit itself to “women’s issues” as they are traditionally defined. Standing for all who are exploited, dominated, and oppressed, it aims to become a source of hope for the whole of humanity. That is why we call it a feminism of the 99%’ (14). A collection of essays on what studying Shakespeare means amidst precarious employment prospects and underfunded educational provision, brought ‘the 99%’ into the somewhat rarefied space of literary scholarship (O’Dair and Francisco, eds. 2019). Needless to say, the catchphrases and slogan entered everyday exchanges, featuring seriously, playfully, and ironically in conversations.
After the Occupy protests, the slogan ‘We are the 99%’ also engendered a kind of slogan-template for other contexts. The potential for this was demonstrated by the ‘We are the 53%’ counter-slogan during the Occupy protests mentioned earlier. After the Brexit referendum of June 2016 confirmed by a majority of 51.9 per cent that the UK would withdraw from membership of the EU, a ‘We are the 48%’ slogan, putatively representing those who opposed that result, gathered momentum for a while in digital forums (Change.org, Twitter, Facebook; for an admonitory article on this, see Katwala 2016). When the far-right nationalist Alternative für Deutschland party received 12.6 per cent of the popular vote in the September 2017 Bundestag elections, the slogan ‘Wir sind 87 Prozent’ was raised and flared for a brief period, mainly in social networking forums (Bell 2017).
With the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020, ‘the 99%’ and ‘We are the 99%’ saw a decisive downturn in usage, at least in the spirit of the Occupy protests. The pandemic sharpened the visibility of the bottom and undermined the unifying appeal of ‘the 99%’. The impoverished condition of life surfaced again in this ‘new normal’, drawing attention to the challenge of containing the contagion in congested localities and housing, the devastating consequences of losing employment amidst straitened circumstances, the difficulty of accessing online education on the wrong side of the digital divide, and so on. The undertaking of vaccination programmes in 2021 quickly divided the world into rich and poor countries, and demonstrated the advantages of the former. As investigations into the effects of the pandemic on poverty and inequality proliferated (too numerously to offer citations meaningfully), the optimism of ‘the 99%’ seemed misplaced. Accusatory attention to the advantages of being among ‘the 1%’ amidst the pandemic appeared occasionally instead; there was some talk (with little follow through) of taxing ‘the 1%’ more to pay for the costs of the outbreak; it was variously noted that ‘the 1%’ had become relatively wealthier in the course of the pandemic (Stebbins and Suneson 2020; Al Jazeera Staff 2021; Collins 2021). It was left to the anti-restriction or anti-hygiene protestors in Britain and elsewhere, associated with libertarian and nationalist right-wing organizations promoting ‘conspiracy theories’, to chant ‘We are the 99%’ in some of their public gatherings (Murphy and Weston 2020; Langfitt 2020), ringing more as a mockery of the slogan than as a rallying call.