Before America's Partisan Break-Up: The Birth of the Modern Protest Movement

In December 1999, tens of thousands of Americans descended on Seattle to protest the five-year-old World Trade Organization, which was holding its first summit on U.S. soil.

The fight against the WTO crossed political lines, drawing both left- and right-wing participants over issues ranging from national sovereignty to environmental justice. This kind of unity, built on opposition to a new global economic order, seems almost impossible to imagine in today's political climate.

And yet a new documentary, WTO/99, by the filmmaking duo of Ian Bell and Alex Megaro, makes the compelling argument that those days in Seattle were a crucial turning point that led directly to our current political reality.

From President Trump delivering a stinging rebuke of the global order at the World Economic Forum in Davos this month, to the tactics used by anti-ICE protest networks in Minneapolis, the WTO outrage in Seattle was among the first glimpses of the future we are now living through.

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