The bottom gets on top

NOVEMBER 30th could be the start of a beautiful relationship or it could be a one-night stand; either way, it was something to behold. Hard hats met hippies, and they partied in the streets. The remarkable turnout at Tuesday's demonstrations put flesh on the bones of the slogan "It's not right versus left anymore, it's the bottom versus the top."

The radical left crowd assembled by the Direct Action Network took over the streets at 7am sharp in numbers no one had dared dream of: the ubiquitous sea turtles, the anarchists with black bandannas pulled over their faces, Earth First! treesitters with their arms locked inside canisters of concrete, dreadlocked dancers gyrating wildly, and earnest young college students. By 11am, they numbered an estimated 10,000.

Meanwhile, a crowd drawing more heavily from middle America assembled at Seattle Center's Memorial Stadium. They filled it to capacity and spilled out—yellow-jacketed Teamsters, baby blue-jacketed machinists, steelworkers in hard hats—they kept coming in numbers that surpassed organizers' most optimistic predictions.

Marching down Fourth Avenue, this crowd was met at Virginia Street by union marshals who locked arms and directed their marchers back toward Seattle Center, away from a downtown already crammed with demonstrators. Quite a few of the marchers just ignored the orders and slid by—most of them looked like seasoned protesters. Other marchers, mostly middle-aged, working-class Joes and Janes, took offense and started arguing vociferously. "Are you going to back down from the WTO?!" screamed an irate steelworker, throwing his hard hat on the pavement, his bald pate flushing with rage. Others formed wedges and burst through the marshals' arms dramatically.

This passionate solidarity showed just how broad a coalition has been built around something as arcane and complicated as trade policy. The American economic system is supposedly functioning at its highest and best capacity. Unemployment is as low as it's ever been. Inflation barely registers. Our political and economic leaders would have us believe that removing all barriers to the movement of capital and transnational corporations will spread this bounty worldwide. Yet dissenters keep pointing out that real wages are stagnant, the number of uninsured keeps rising, families are working two, three, or four jobs to make ends meet, and insecurity among ordinary working people runs quite high.

Of course environmentalists, human rights activists, religious groups, and anarchists all have their own concerns with the way the global economy is developing. On Tuesday, they showed what a new American movement for a more just economy could look like. It was dazzling indeed.