Political “Frenemies”: White Nationalism, America First, and the 1999 World Trade Organization Protests

• In Event: 3520 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 6. Politics and the State

Abstract

The 1999 “Battle of Seattle” outside the World Trade Organization ministerial meetings have long been cited as a key moment in the evolution of the U.S. and global Left. Yet left-wing political actors were not the only ones cheering after protesters forced the cancellations of many of the meetings. The white nationalist right, including Reform Party presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, saw the World Trade Organization not as a corporate threat to democracy, as the left did. Buchanan, who ran for president with the slogan “America First” sixteen years before Donald Trump did, was accompanied by a vast range of white nationalists who saw the U.S. entrance into the WTO as part of a long-term, globalist scheme to dissolve U.S. sovereignty. Sociologist Nancy Whittier has dissected the dynamics of “strange bedfellows” in politics with her book Frenemies (2017), and this paper explores the ways the “anti-globalization” politics of the 1990s not only galvanized the Left, but also catalyzed the white nationalist right. Given the rise of Trumpism in recent years, this paper uses the work of Whittier and others to explore the complicated ways the U.S. left helped lead to the rise of Trumpism and U.S. populist-nationalism. In focusing on a single protest but situating it in a larger cycle of protests and political campaigns, this research concentrates on the ways anti-corporate ideologies subtly reinforced and energized right-wing formulations of sovereignty and democracy.

Author

• Eric Larson, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth