Twenty-five years ago this week, the streets of Seattle erupted into the kind of militant protest rarely seen in the US. Over the course of five days, thousands of street activists counterpunched the global managers of neoliberalism in the face at their own confab, humiliated Bill Clinton and took the ruling class entirely off guard. The battle in Seattle became a kind of operational template for the popular protests of the both the right and left that followed in its wake: Code Pink’s anti-Iraq war demos, the Occupy Movement, the Tea Party, Black Lives Matter and, even, MAGA. The populist right certainly absorbed more lessons from the Battle of Seattle than the liberal elites of the Democratic Party–to their peril and ultimate doom. More
