That WTO week in Seattle twenty years ago was exhilarating. It felt like extraordinary events were happening and a new left politics had been born. Maybe after all the defeats of the 1980s and 1990s — first Reagan leading the class war from above, then Clinton consolidating capital’s gains — things were turning. During a rally outside the city jail, where a few hundred protesters were kept on ice — the first place I ever heard the chant “this is what democracy looks like” — fellow boomer Marc Cooper of the Nation said to me, “They’re smarter than we were.” I had to agree, though in retrospect I’m not clear on just why.

I went because I thought it would be interesting but had no idea what to expect. I fell in with Cooper, John Nichols (then of Capital Times), and Peter Rothberg of the Nation, and we wandered around together, wrote it up for the magazine, and reported on it for its radio show. I also roamed around doing daily photojournalism.

The occasion for the counter-gathering was a ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization. The WTO had been founded five years earlier, to replace the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). As their names suggest, GATT was a loose framework for periodic trade negotiations, known as rounds, which were named after the city they opened in. With the neoliberal exuberance characteristic of the mid-1990s, the WTO was created as a formal body with powers to adjudicate trade disputes according to principles established during those rounds.