It was probably 1995 when I tried, briefly and with muted enthusiasm, to become a student activist. I pretended to read Marx and Engels, but my politics were (small w) wobbly and uncommitted. The real problem, though, was that my college years fell in the middle of a triumphalist era, with the Soviet Union smoldering on the ash heap and America exulting in its victory over history. Among the undergrad radicals, the mood was bored and distracted, envious of previous generations.
It had been easy for our parents: a global anti-war movement united Vietnam refuseniks in America, soixante-huitards at the barricades in France, and stone-throwing anti-Fascists in Germany. In an era of unprecedented prosperity and relative political stability, we 90s revolutionary manqués had to make do with comparing Newt Gingrich to Adolf Hitler and letter-writing campaigns on behalf of convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.
But then, almost overnight, itinerant agitators found an enemy in the World Trade Organization. The campus Komsomol was a little fuzzy on the inner workings of the W.T.O., but trade sounded like capitalism, and capitalism was bad. So when the group announced that its 1999 annual meeting would take place in Seattle, more than 40,000 protesters descended on the Emerald City, intent on disrupting the meeting and … well, no one knew what was supposed to happen next.
When a Wall Street Journal reporter questioned one young protester’s motivations, she averred that it was a “general question of oppression” because the W.T.O. “doesn’t care about women’s rights.” Indeed, footage of the protest shows signs opposing G.M.O. crops, supporting the Zapatista rebels in Mexico, denouncing sweatshops, and wishing death upon the entire capitalist system. As President Bill Clinton commented, “Every group in the world with an axe to grind is going to Seattle to demonstrate.”
And they demonstrated, through clouds of tear gas, for four days. The W.T.O. would leave town having reached no significant new deals, and those who attended claimed victory, heralding a new era of anti-globalization activism.
President Bill Clinton commented, “Every group in the world with an axe to grind is going to Seattle to demonstrate.”
While the grizzled veterans of Seattle were patting themselves on the back, however, globalization continued apace. As Ralph Nader is quoted as saying in journalist DW Gibson’s recent book, One Week to Change the World: An Oral History of the 1999 WTO Protests, “the left, they couldn’t get over their giddiness about Seattle.... They keep regaling it as though it were Lexington and Concord. Then they went fishing. That is a trait of the left. They get a big demonstration and they’re so giddy about it, months later, they don’t know how to extend it.”
But Republican tacticians do. The specter haunting the Seattle story is, of course, the most ardent protectionist since Reed Smoot, namely Donald Trump, who understood that while voters couldn’t care less if globalization is bad for sea turtles, they hate free trade when it hurts American jobs.
There have been various attempts to memorialize the Seattle protests, such as the rightly forgotten 2007 movie Battle in Seattle, starring Channing Tatum, Charlize Theron, and Woody Harrelson. The director told an interviewer that his film’s message was “free markets don’t work,” an argument ably refuted by Battle in Seattle’s meager $224,000 domestic ticket sales. And now we have One Week to Change the World, timed to the 25th anniversary of the protests this year.
Looking back on the event, I can’t help but wonder if the activists really understood what they were fighting against. Interviewed less than a year after the event, one of the protest organizers marveled that anti-globalization activism was easier now because “the airline flights are cheaper.... The Internet and cell phones and all those wireless pieces of equipment are really helping to bring a lot of the world together.” Battle in Seattle was filmed in Canada, where labor costs were significantly cheaper. Even Gibson’s sympathetic history comes to readers from Simon & Schuster, a big-five publisher the Biden Justice Department won an anti-trust case against in 2022.
Gibson recounts a concert by a quickly constituted punk supergroup called the No WTO Combo, featuring Dead Kennedys front man Jello Biafra, Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, and Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil. Not mentioned is that a year after the protest, Thayil conceded that he appreciated free trade and that Mexico “may have benefited from NAFTA, as a matter of fact.” Almost two decades later, when asked by journalist Nick Gillespie if globalization was ultimately “a good thing,” Novoselic said that it was, in fact, “a great thing.”
One of the protest organizers marveled that anti-globalization activism was easier now because “the airline flights are cheaper.... The Internet and cell phones and all those wireless pieces of equipment are really helping to bring a lot of the world together.”
As the left got lost in the miasma of identity politics, progressives came to believe that one could be an out-of-work machinist in Appalachia and still be a beneficiary of “white privilege.” And it was around the same time that Democrats seemed to surrender the class struggle that American conservatism was becoming more … left-wing.
There were scattered indications, back in 1999, of a nascent protectionist tendency among Republicans. Reporting on the Seattle protests for The Weekly Standard, journalist Christopher Caldwell complained that free-traders believed “anyone who disagrees with the WTO’s policies is simply stupid” and that “the protesters should just shut up and let bureaucrats rule them.”
Fast-forward to 2020, and an op-ed in The New York Times titled “The W.T.O. Should Be Abolished” carries the byline of Republican senator Josh Hawley. A few months after Hawley’s article appeared, I found myself watching the vice-presidential debate with former Trump campaign manager and self-described “Leninist” Steve Bannon, who expressed an admiration for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and regret that he opposed Barack Obama’s 2008 auto bailouts. When I accused him of sounding more like Noam Chomsky than Ronald Reagan, he didn’t object.
As one activist lamented to Gibson, “The progressive critique of globalization, the WTO, it’s just been totally forgotten. Today, if you do criticize it, you’re quickly viewed as a Trumpist.”
On economics, the left and right might be converging on key issues, but don’t expect the emergence of a popular front. In 2016, in a cigarette-smoke-filled union hall in Indiana, I met a leader of the steelworkers who admitted that with Bernie Sanders out of the race, most of his members would likely vote for Trump. On the way out, in the hall’s bathroom, I noticed that urinating union members were invited to aim their stream at a sticker of Sanders’s friend and supporter Jane Fonda.
Though the Biden administration has retained—and in a few instances increased—most Trump-era tariffs, it’s the Jane Fonda divide that will forever prevent an alliance between politically radical Seattle veterans and MAGA populists who want Trump to build a wall around America to keep out both immigrants and iPhones.
Michael Moynihan is a co-host of the Fifth Column podcast and a correspondent for the Free Press
