I think white liberals are being forced to confront the reality of disproportional representation for the first time. You can say "blacks used to be 3/5ths of a person for purposes of democracy" and we bite their knuckles but you rub our noses in the fact that the vote of some confederate mudflap in Outer Lynchburg counts more than ours and we get salty. We're seeing the lie of liberal ascendancy and it's uncomfortable as fuck.
I think where we differ is I grew fed up with the hypocrisy and opportunism of the Left-left twenty-odd years ago. Seeing "anarchists" smashing a Nike store while wearing Nikes so they could steal some Nikes makes you bitter, and when you see it at 23 it makes you bitter for a long time.
I've heard from a lot of people who were inspired by Seattle in 1999 to get involved in politics, enough that I'm convinced Occupy wouldn't have happened if Seattle hadn't happened first, and silly as it got at points none of the new waves of activism in the last 10 years would have happened without Occupy. It's not about the Nikes, even if it was about the Nikes for the kid stealing them. It's about showing that capitalism isn't invincible, that it's not hopeless. I thought that kind of symbolic gesture was counterproductive for a long time, because it seemed like more people read it the way you did than didn't, but 2020 looks a lot less hopeless to me than 2010 did, and a lot of the people making it that way were dumb kids posting riot porn in 2010.
Six months before WTO there were bills posted on the underpasses and poles where us scum of the earth hung out. Something big was happening, something to organize against, a chance to change the New World Order. WTO happened and it was momentous, it was large, it was working, and then twenty shitheads from Eugene showed up. And from that point forth, it was about spoiled kids and hippies not knowing their place and the whole fucking message got fucked up. The WTO was effectively vaporlocked and unable to meet well before Oregon got involved. Of course, once Oregon showed up the WTO had the moral high ground. And that's why the left-left pisses me off.