Gloria Steinem, Pat Buchanan and the Anti-WTO Warning Washington Ignored

The death of Gloria Steinem at 92 has brought the usual flood of tributes to a feminist icon, a founder of Ms. magazine, and one of the most recognizable figures of America’s cultural left. But buried beneath the predictable memorial language is a political lesson Washington would rather not revisit: even Steinem once stood on the same side of a historic economic fight as Pat Buchanan.

That fight was not about abortion, feminism, culture, or party labels. It was about sovereignty.

In 1999, as the World Trade Organization gathered in Seattle, an unusual coalition came together against the rising power of global trade bureaucracies. Labor unions, environmental activists, farmers, religious groups, anti-globalization organizers, Ralph Nader supporters, and Buchanan-style economic nationalists all saw the same warning sign from different directions: American workers, local communities, and national governments were being asked to surrender power to a global system run far from the reach of ordinary voters. Buchanan was in Seattle denouncing the WTO as a threat to American self-government, saying Americans should decide matters of national destiny and security for themselves.

That moment looks very different in 2026 than it did in 1999.

Back then, the ruling class treated opposition to the WTO as backward, emotional, unserious, or extremist. The bipartisan trade establishment insisted that global integration was inevitable, that factory losses were the price of progress, and that Americans who worried about sovereignty simply did not understand the new economy. Wall Street cheered. Corporate lobbyists celebrated. Washington kept signing away leverage.

Then came the hollowed-out towns, the shuttered plants, the broken supply chains, the fentanyl routes, the China dependency, the border chaos, and the ugly realization that “free trade” was never really free. It was managed trade — often managed against the American worker.

That is why the Steinem-Buchanan overlap matters. Steinem was no nationalist firebrand from the right. She was a central figure of the left-wing feminist movement, a writer and activist whose political career was built around women’s rights, abortion access, and progressive social causes. She helped co-found Ms. magazine and the National Women’s Political Caucus, and her death this week has been marked by major outlets as the passing of a defining voice of second-wave feminism.

And yet, on the question of the WTO and global corporate power, even figures from the left could see what Washington’s trade class refused to admit: a nation that cannot defend its workers, borders, laws, and industries is not fully sovereign.

That was Buchanan’s argument long before it became fashionable again. He warned that unchecked globalization would hollow out American manufacturing, weaken the middle class, and make the country dependent on foreign production. His 1990s campaign message centered on protective tariffs, national industry, and economic sovereignty — themes that now sit much closer to the center of the America First economic agenda.

The Seattle protests were chaotic, and not every faction involved had the same vision. Some wanted labor protections. Some wanted environmental conditions. Some wanted anti-capitalist revolution. Some wanted national sovereignty. But the larger target was clear: the WTO had become a symbol of rule by distant institutions, corporate lawyers, and unelected panels that could pressure nations to reorder domestic policy around global trade commitments.

For the modern right, the lesson is not that every protester in Seattle was correct. Many were not. The lesson is that the old trade consensus was weaker, more arrogant, and more destructive than its defenders ever admitted.

The Clinton-era globalists promised prosperity through openness. The Bush-era globalists doubled down. The Obama-era globalists dressed the same system in technocratic language. The pre-Trump Republican establishment treated tariffs like heresy and economic nationalism like a dirty phrase. Meanwhile, America’s industrial base was stripped down, its workers were told to “learn to code,” and its political leaders acted surprised when voters finally revolted.

President Trump’s rise did not create that revolt. It gave it a vehicle.

The MAGA economic argument, stated plainly but rarely fairly by the press, is that a country is more than a consumer market. It is a homeland. It needs factories, steel, energy, borders, farms, workers, and the ability to say no to international systems that benefit global managers while punishing domestic citizens. Tariffs are not just taxes in that worldview. They are leverage. Industrial policy is not nostalgia. It is survival.

That is why the old Steinem-Buchanan overlap is so uncomfortable for today’s establishment. It reminds people that skepticism toward global trade bureaucracy was never just a right-wing obsession. It crossed ideological lines because the threat crossed ideological lines. A foreign tribunal or global trade body does not only weaken right-leaning towns. It weakens democratic control itself.

The tragedy is that Washington ignored the warning until the damage was obvious.

The same elites who mocked Buchanan now quietly admit supply chains must come home. The same corporate media that ridiculed tariffs now reports on China dependency as a strategic crisis. The same political class that dismissed sovereignty concerns now speaks of “resilience,” “reshoring,” and “industrial security” as if those ideas appeared out of thin air.

They did not. America First was early. The old trade establishment was late.

Steinem’s passing will be remembered mostly through the lens of feminism and cultural politics. That is understandable. But history is more complicated than slogans. On the WTO, she represented something the modern left has largely abandoned: suspicion of corporate global power when it operates above the heads of ordinary people.

Today’s Democratic leadership is far more comfortable with multinational institutions, corporate-approved activism, and borderless economic rhetoric. Its populist language often disappears the moment real power is at stake. That leaves the right — especially the Trump-aligned right — carrying the argument that national sovereignty is not negotiable.

The Seattle moment should be remembered not as a curiosity, but as a warning flare.

A country that cannot control its trade policy cannot control its future. A government that answers to global institutions before its own citizens has already lost the moral basis of self-rule. And a political class that sends factories abroad while lecturing workers at home should not be surprised when those workers finally choose a movement willing to fight back.

Pat Buchanan saw it early. The WTO protesters, for all their contradictions, sensed it too. Even Gloria Steinem stood close enough to that fight to expose the deeper truth.

Globalism was never destiny. It was a choice.

And for America, it was the wrong one.