When Occupy Wall Street emerged a decade ago, pundits derided it as an unfocused, inchoate movement that made too many demands (or not enough demands) and lacked the kind of organization that could feasibly force policy change. No single leader was at the forefront. Soon the police would clear the park, and what would happen then? For certain elites, it was easy to caricature the occupiers as a collective of privileged, overeducated millennials camping out on public property.

It was true that Occupy, in the short term, seemed to peter out. The horizontal organizing structure did it no favors. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire oligarch himself, deployed his hyper-militarized police force to flush out the encampment. In a few months, it all seemed to be over. By 2012, Obama was winning reelection, no one from Goldman Sachs had been sent to prison, and Zuccotti Park was back to being an unoccupied space in the cradle of neoliberalism.

But in New York, Occupy’s legacy would prove to be far greater than what cynical pundits had forecast; it just took longer — almost a decade — to bear fruit. When the occupation of Zuccotti Park began, under the banner of a radical critique of capitalism’s failures, the left flank of the Democratic Party was fairly moribund. Bloomberg was mayor and another corporatist, Andrew Cuomo, was governor. Bloomberg-friendly Democrats controlled the city council and Republicans, funded in part by Bloomberg’s millions, held the majority in the state senate.