but I know ‘Sixties Lefties pretty well and I know organized labor really, really well. You have a strange symbiosis between the two now. As old time trades and crafts work and unions faded away in the private sector, they became stronger and much more militantly leftest in the Third Sector, industries that rely on government funding or are heavily regulated. Then you have the rise of public employee unionism since the late ‘Sixties to become the dominant force in organized labor. If you’re wondering what happened to all those SDS types from the ‘Sixties, look no further than the leadership and, especially, the operatives of the big “industrial” unions like UAW and the Machinists and the big pure public employee unions like AFSCME and SEIU (SEIU is more of a third sector union because of its emphasis on health care workers).

If you want to see teary eyes and hear shaky voices, get some trade unionist types with a few drinks in them talking about what a horror the 1948 Republican Congress and the Taft-Hartley Amendment to the National Labor Relations Act are. They’ve been plotting their revenge since 1948! The aging SDSers have been plotting the takeover of the government since they first cooked it up smoking dope in a college dorm room in 1968. These people are not going to waste a good crisis! They have a pretty good playbook going. Pour a bunch of cash into their interest groups. Let the economy fester some more and talk it down so that everyone beleives that everything is totally broken. Get a little civic unrest going because “not enough is being done.” Blame the fact that not enough is being done on Conservatives generally and talk radio specifically. Pass card check. (Card check is the only solution for the UAW mess. They have to get the transplant costs up to the legacy cost level and there’s only one way to do that; put them on the UAW contract. If they have the votes to pass card check, they have the votes to repeal right to work, and they will – they have to to save UAW.) Muzzle conservative talk radio, which they can do with measures short of re-instituting the Fairness Doctrine. Then, you look around in a couple or three years and you have a huge Democratic-Labor Party financed by compelled dues and a Country in which well over half of the res publica is on the dole in some fashion. Welcome to the United Socialist States of America.