Brazil’s Middle-Class Anxiety

It is tempting to liken this week’s surprising protests in Brazil, which have attracted huge crowds in the country’s biggest cities, to another movement a couple of years ago in the Northern Hemisphere. But there are important differences between Brazil’s unrest and the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Both succeeded in organizing the discontent of the middle class. Both started with specific complaints -- in Brazil, a 20-centavos (9 cents) rise in bus fares; in the U.S., the excesses of Wall Street after the bailouts of the financial crisis -- and soon grew to include a long list of amorphous and unrelated grievances. For Occupy Wall Street, it was everything from the cost of health care to Israeli-Palestinian politics; in Brazil, it includes health care as well as schools, crime, official corruption and public spending on the World Cup in 2014 and the Summer Olympics in 2016.