It's Globalization, Stupid

Which party will champion the defining issue of our political era?

In November of 1999, when the World Trade Organization met in Seattle for its Third Ministerial meeting, thousands of activists formed a human blockade to shut down the trade negotiations. They faced down riot police dumping tear gas on them by the barrelful. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of union members marched through the streets protesting the WTO, lending mainstream, working-class credibility to the radical direct action downtown.

The activists were almost uniformly left-wing, but their causes ranged from environmental protection to human rights to Third World liberation. What united them was their disdain for the neoliberal global free market agenda, which they blamed for impoverishing workers, destroying nature, and violating the democratic sovereignty of national electorates.

The anti-globalization movement was scuttled by 9/11 and George W. Bush’s War on Terror. For the better part of a decade following the collapse of the Twin Towers, the left was preoccupied with resisting war, torture, and government surveillance, as well as with rising alarm around climate change. During that time, the trade liberalization agenda that the activists in Seattle fought against would march forward without meaningful resistance, until the 2008 financial crisis forced a national reckoning with it.

It was only then that the political establishments on both sides of the aisle learned that the fury animating the defunct movement had never gone away — in fact, it had percolated from the political fringe into mainstream American life. Now, it found its expression principally in the political right. Two years before the left-wing Occupy Wall Street movement pitched their tents in public plazas all over the country, the right-leaning Tea Party had emerged in strident opposition to the bank bailouts. Indeed, the anti-Wall Street grassroots outrage that fueled the emergence of the Tea Party was much more potent among Republicans than among Democrats. A majority of Republicans in the House voted against George W. Bush’s bailout plan, while nearly three-quarters of Democrats voted for it; in the Senate, Democrats’ support for the plan dwarfed that of Republicans by 11 points.

Right-wing anti-globalization — or anti-“globalism,” in their lexicon — didn’t emerge out of whole cloth. In the ‘90s, Pat Buchanan ran for the Republican presidential nomination on an anti-free trade platform, and the ideology that fueled the far-right militia movement had long been predicated on a deep distrust and even paranoia about global elites and transnational institutions. But these were marginal forces in conservative America.

Now things were different. Even before the financial collapse obliterated the credibility of neoliberal economics, a great re-sorting of the two political parties was underway. After being eviscerated by Reagan and exiled from the White House for 12 years, in the 1990s, the Democrats, in a desperate attempt to remain a viable national political party, re-made themselves into the party of enlightened capitalism. They embraced the free market utopianism and government austerity crusade of the Reagan administration, but without its rougher edges. They, too, would offshore American manufacturing, but a little more gradually, and with plenty of worker re-training programs. They would dismantle the welfare state, but with increased child care subsidies and a touch of sadness. They would continue policies of mass incarceration, but with Midnight Basketball leagues.