Time Magazine Wednesday announced that its 2011 Person of the Year would be "The Protester." In the feature by Kurt Anderson, Time charts the wave of protests that defined 2011, from the Middle East to Europe to the United States and even, lately, to Russia.

By way of prognosticating where from here, Anderson confesses that "as long as government in Washington - like government in Europe - remains paralyzed, I don't see the Occupiers and Indignados giving up or losing traction or protest ceasing to be the defining political mode. After all, the Tea Party protests subsided only after Tea Partyers achieved real power in 2010 by becoming the tail wagging the Republican Party dog. When radical populist movements achieve big-time momentum and attention, they don't tend to stand down until they get some satisfaction."