To this day, my iPhone still changes the word ‘too’ to ‘TPP,’ a reminder that about five years ago I must have texted frequently about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Although my phone still can’t figure out that I’ve never once intended to write the word ‘ducking’, this annoying correction happened again the other day when I happened to be watching old footage from the 1999 World Trade Organization riots in Seattle.
The scene looked nearly identical to antifa’s summer of discontent just a few months ago, with largely Caucasian, black-clad, masked-up youth throwing a temper tantrum in one of our nation’s central business districts. Even those rioters’ chants were identical to today’s far-left. ‘Whose streets? Our streets,’ they bleated in the video.
In 2016, the Trans-Pacific Partnership was so reviled by both the Bernie Sanders left and the Trumpian right that ahead of their convention the Democratic National Committee warily removed support for the trade deal from the party’s platform, a rare concession to the Bernie bros who had chosen this hill to die on — and won. The bros remained vigilant throughout the convention, which became a cacophony of boos and jeers from the populist-left delegates, so disruptive the networks regularly cut the audio.
That may have proved to be the last gasp of the old-school economic Marxist — the original progressives, the union guys, the pro-worker, anti-corporation labor Democrat. A voter that may also be called the Trump Democrat, those who flipped the Rust Belt and immediately got branded as knuckle-dragging white supremacists, despite those very people probably having the least racial hang-ups of anyone in America.
spectator.us/topic/what-happened-populist-left-occupy-trans-pacific-partnership/