Domestic Left #85: The Battle of Ohio
Twenty-five years ago yesterday, in what became known as the “Battle of Seattle,” 80,000 demonstrators shut down a meeting of the World Trade Organization.
The demonstrations became famous for a sign that read “Teamsters and Turtles, United at Last,” and for the co-operation between labor and environmental movements, which are too frequently at odds. Both unions and mainstream environmental groups helped mobilize the mass participation that brought tens of thousands of people into the streets. But the real drama was provided by the Direct Action Network, a radical group of mostly young people (which at that time meant Gen-Xers), who blockaded intersections in the city, preventing ministerial delegations from reaching the meeting place.
As network organizer gabriel sayegh explained in a recent book review:
Though most people in the streets that day arrived to take part in permitted marches and rallies, a subset of activists planned, trained for, and executed coordinated acts of nonviolent civil disobedience that surrounded and shut down the first day of the WTO meeting. The lines between the permitted marches and the disruptive civil disobedience melted away, transforming the energy in downtown Seattle into what many activists dubbed a “festival of resistance.”
That “festival” forced the WTO to cancel the first day of meetings, and the “Millenium Round” of negotiations which was supposed to take place in Seattle was scuttled as delegates from developing nations, buoyed by the resistance in the streets, stood up against the agenda being pushed by international finance capital.
I was not in Seattle that day; I was in Vermont, at home with a thirteen-month-old. But the next day, I drove down to Windsor, Vermont, for a meeting of the “Vermont Labor Forum.” The Labor Forum was once a vibrant alliance of independent unions (e.g., those not in the AFL-CIO), made up of my own union (the United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, commonly known as “UE”), the Teamsters, and the Granite Cutters Association, an independent union which traces its history back to the late 19th century, and which took in the children of the famous “Bread and Roses” strikers in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912.
But by the late 90s, the Granite Cutters had long stopped participating in the Labor Forum, and the Teamsters participation consisted solely of their one statewide local’s Secretary-Treasurer, who would come to the meetings and drone on about all the contracts he had bargained “for” his members.
And, to be honest, the UE participation was often kind of sad as well. Vermont was one of the places where UE had first begun organizing workers outside of our traditional base in manufacturing, in the 90s — I was, at the time, a part-time customer service representative at the Flynn Regional Box Office and an officer of UE Local 221. But I was often the only person from any of the new service-sector locals to participate in the Labor Forum.
In 1999, UE still represented workers at six factories in Vermont; within half a decade all but one of them would be closed. The delegates who came to Labor Forum meetings from Locals 218, 234, 258 and 295 were mostly white men in their late 50s and 60s. They lived and worked in small, dying Vermont mill towns: Windsor, Springfield, Bennington, St. Johnsbury. They had fought valiant battles in the past, but they always seemed tired, and the main topics of their shop reports were layoffs, and the companies they worked for moving work to Mexico or China.
The meeting in Windsor, in particular, promised to be especially dreary. It was almost winter, and we were meeting in a poorly lit room in the local train station. Our host local, Local 258, had fought a successful battle to keep their plant open earlier in the decade, but the writing was on the wall, and the plant would close for good in a couple of years.
But the mood of that meeting was electric. These older men, many of them probably future Trump voters, were ecstatic about what these young, radical activists with weird hair had done.
At the time, there was solid bipartisan support for “free trade.” The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was negotiated by Republican President George H.W. Bush and passed by Democrat Bill Clinton in the 1990s, Republican George W. Bush signed free trade agreements with South Korea and a group of Central American countries in the 2000s, and Democrat Barack Obama negotiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) with a group of 11 Pacific Rim nations in the mid-2010s.
This bipartisan political consensus was shored up by a media environment in which the benefits (and inevitability) of free trade were simply taken as a given. Ross Perot, the eccentric multi-millionaire who ran for President as an independent in 1992 warning of NAFTA creating a “giant sucking sound” of jobs moving to Mexico, was widely ridiculed. Anyone who questioned the consensus, who warned that destroying nearly a million high-paying manufacturing jobs was maybe a bad thing, was dismissed as at best as naive and misguided, at worst backwards-looking and borderline racist. Even, one might say, as “deplorable.”1
A couple of weeks ago Politico published an in-depth interview with Ohio Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown, who lost his re-election bid in November. “I go back to Democrats over the last 30 years — essentially since NAFTA,” Brown told Eugene Daniels, who conducted the interview for the podcast Playbook Deep Dive. “Democrats have historically been the party of workers, but I’ve seen that support erode from workers because Democrats haven’t focused on workers the way that we should over the last 30 years.”
Brown helped lead the opposition to NAFTA during his first term in Congress, when approximately 160 Democrats and 40 Republicans voted against the trade deal. Brown explained:
So, more Democrats voted against NAFTA than for it. More Republicans voted for it than against it. But it was seen [as a mark against Democrats], because we had a Democratic president, even though it was negotiated by a Republican, but that’s all background noise now.
But what really mattered is: I still heard in the Mahoning Valley, in the Miami Valley, I still heard during the campaign about NAFTA.
I’ve seen that erosion of American jobs and I’ve seen the middle class shrink. People have to blame someone. And it’s been Democrats. We are more to blame for it because we have historically been the party of [workers].
The Trans-Pacific Partnership, negotiated by Obama, was abandoned after the pro-free trade Democrat Hillary lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump. As the late historian Mike Davis pointed out following that election, the counties which swung most sharply from Obama to Clinton were overwhelmingly the sites of mass layoffs in the year before the election:
In almost all of these flipped counties, a high-profile plant closure or impending move had been on the front page of the local newspaper: embittering reminders that the “Obama boom” was passing them by.
Six of these counties were in Ohio, more than in any other state. From 1916 to 2016, Ohio was the quintessential swing state — there were only two elections (1944 and 1960) in which the winning presidential candidate did not win Ohio. It is no longer considered one.
One of the things I most appreciated about the interview with Brown was his resistance — even when prodded by the interviewer — to engaging in the kind of psychological explanations for voting patterns that have been running rampant on the internet in the past few weeks:
I’m not an expert in psychoanalyzing how voters get to Donald Trump, but I know that we’ve let them get to Donald Trump by not focusing on them and listening to them and showing we’re on the side of workers all the time.
If you haven't signed up yet to support the excellent Fragile Juggernaut podcast, about the history of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (the “CIO” half of the AFL-CIO, which for twenty years was an independent, progressive alternative to the AFL), now is the time. They just published a piece I wrote for their newsletter about how UE maintains our rank-and-file character and commitment to aggressive struggle through the transmission of history, but the newsletter is only available to folks who support them financially on Patreon.
The magazine n+1, which I just subscribed to, published a couple of good pieces online recently (which are available to non-subscribers). Historian Joel Suarez, in “As Good as It Gets,” looks at the disconnect between the Democratic pundit class’s insistence that “The US economy is currently near perfect” and the lived reality of low- and medium-income voters. Housing organizer Charlie Dulik, in “The Renters’ Republic,” points out that in the most recent election, “the counties that saw the largest vote shift toward Trump were those with the toughest housing markets — where inventory is constricted and home prices have far outpaced average incomes.”
You’re my blue sky, you’re my sunny day...
Like hundreds of thousands of other people, I set up a Bluesky account last month at, you guessed it, @domesticleft.bsky.social. So far I’m mostly just reposting wholesome content from the Frog and Toad Bot and stuff about dogs and labor musicals. Anyway, give a follow if you’re in the new neighborhood and I’ll follow you back — I’d love to “meet” more of my readers, virtually at least.
FWIW, I’m also occasionally on threads and haven’t deleted my X account yet.
I saw this happening in real time during the 2016 election in a Facebook group of people who went to the same fancy liberal-arts college that I attended. People making six figures working as corporate lawyers trying to paint themselves as the victims of laid-off steelworkers.