For its 2011 “Person of the Year,” Time Magazine named “the protester.” In so doing, this venerable media institution celebrated the “Occupy Wall Street Movement,” launched in September of that year, alongside the Arab Spring, which had brought down long-standing dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Unlike the Arab Spring, however, the Occupy Wall Street Movement has had few meaningful repercussions. Its vague incantation “We are the 99 percent” was not accompanied by any robust policy platform. As columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote dismissively, the movement was nothing more than “a fad” (Sorkin 2012).

Why did the Occupy Wall Street Movement fail to reform America's banking system, much less tackle its growing level of income inequality? That question brings us back to the heart of this book, which was motivated by our interest in why some advocacy campaigns succeed, while others wither. In our effort to address that question, we elaborated a theory of strategic moral action and a related set of hypotheses, which emphasize market structure, framing, movement coherence, costs, and institutional frameworks. We provided some preliminary “tests” of that theory beyond the AIDS case in the previous chapter. In this concluding chapter we return to the issue of movement success but examine it from an inter-temporal or forward-looking perspective. That is, we seek to understand the extent to which even “successful” advocacy movements, like the one for universal access to AIDS treatment, become embedded as “permanent” features of the global economic landscape, transforming markets in fundamental ways.