The extent to which George McGovern, who died in late October, was identified with American liberalism itself can be seen in headlines of his various obituaries. CNN’s headline called him an “unabashed liberal voice”; PBS went with “Liberal Icon”; the New York Times chose “Prairie Liberal” (though the online edition dropped the word “prairie”); and the Nation called him a “Touchstone of Liberalism.” The Nation obit, written by John Nichols, proclaimed McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, “the most progressive nominee ever selected by the Democratic Party.”
McGovern, then, possessed unimpeachable liberal credentials. Yet four years before McGovern passed, the liberal blog site Firedoglake was ready to send him packing, and used the occasion to call McGovern perhaps the nastiest insult in the liberal lexicon: “Wal-Mart Lover.” What could have prompted such spite? McGovern, though a committed liberal through and through, was concerned about the growing and coercive power of unions. He felt the need to speak out against the Democrats’ proposed anti-choice legislation, card-check. McGovern chastised his party for its extremism in the Wall Street Journal:
The key provision of EFCA is a change in the mechanism by which unions are formed and recognized. Instead of a private election with a secret ballot overseen by an impartial federal board, union organizers would simply need to gather signatures from more than 50% of the employees in a workplace or bargaining unit, a system known as “card-check.” There are many documented cases where workers have been pressured, harassed, tricked and intimidated into signing cards that have led to mandatory payment of dues.
Under EFCA, workers could lose the freedom to express their will in private, the right to make a decision without anyone peering over their shoulder, free from fear of reprisal.
Anyone who doubts that such “reprisals” were and are a serious danger might have been convinced by what they saw yesterday in Michigan, where Governor Rick Snyder signed right-to-work legislation, which allows people to work without forced unionization as a condition of their employment, into law. Earlier in the day, the Democratic contingent in the state legislature promised violence if the bill went through. The bill did, and Democratic violence and death threats from unions and their Democratic allies emerged immediately. Union leader Jimmy Hoffa then went on CNN and promised more “war.”
It is a testament to the disappearance of moderate Democrats that George McGovern was concerned enough about the party’s growing anti-Democratic extremism to speak out. That aforementioned blog post at Firedoglake made it explicitly clear that “McGovern is the one who is out of step.” Union coercion, according to the left, is mainstream; moderation was long gone.
This has long been a challenge for modern liberalism: how to keep the violence that is always brimming just below the surface of leftist protest movements from getting out of control. But in order to do that successfully, the Democratic Party must have leaders who, like McGovern, are willing to take a stand against it. You’ll search in vain for such leaders today; the White House wouldn’t condemn either the threats of violence or the actual violence yesterday. Perhaps they didn’t want to draw attention to President Obama’s appearance at a pro-union rally the day before.
Democratic leaders might want to admit–even if just to themselves–that McGovern was right. McGovern might have recognized recent events as the natural outgrowth of the unchecked extremism of a Democratic Party too liberal for its “liberal icon.”
I remember during the depression of the 1930s how my father could not get work because of the unions. Our family was almost literally starving. Yet while he was highly skilled, he was denied employment by the unions, not the employers. The unions would not grant him membership. Perhaps it was because he was Jewish. More likely, it was the practice of at least some unions to limit membership so as to enhance the possibility of employment of existing members. In my eyes an evil crime. And during, and after, WWII, the denial of Jewish refugees from Europe to a haven in the USA was partly responsible for their murder, women, children, and workers. The liberal whitewash of unions as 'protectors' of the workers, is somewhat far fetched.
Directly contrary to the rhetoric of the Democratic Party and its media, the Democratic Party is not about “the poor” or “the little people” or whatever, for the sake of the little people, but for the sake of the party big shots in power. How this works, as far as unions are concerned, is that the unions provide campaign money and “volunteers” (sometimes paid), and voters, via union members who get ever better and better benefits (but not so much salaries, because that would be too conspicuous) at the expense of the taxpayer. And this scheme works again and again to re-elect and entrench the Democrat ruling class, until the unfunded benefit liabilities (crookedly projected with absurdly unsustainable growth projections) are categorically no longer sustainable. Then the whole Ponzi scheme goes bust, and the whole municipal, state, county or Federal government goes bust. All the little people get is campaign rhetoric, BS, and in the end huge debt. The programs that the ruling class excretes are for the sake of looking as if they are doing something for the good of the little people; to the extent that they do anything for the little people, it is to make them dependent upon the government dole and ensure that they remain impotent little people. n nCalifornia and Michigan (and Illinois and other states) are in the early stages of going bust. All of this probably could have been avoided if the media had not decades ago shifted their priorities from watching out for corruption locally and nationally to picking out and protecting their favorites, at the expense of all else. n nPart of how this works with teachers unions was slightly subtly portrayed in the recent movie “Won’t Back Down.” A sub-theme of the movie is how real leadership on behalf of the little people is targeted, undermined, and subverted by unions for the sake of maintaining their power.
“This has long been a challenge for modern liberalism: how to keep the violence that is always brimming just below the surface of leftist protest movements from getting out of control.” n nUmm, would you be referring to the so-called #OWS movement, engineered in the first place by radical Van Jones and Co. and supported explicitly by Elizabeth Warren and tacitly by the whole Democratic Party? n n“But in order to do that successfully, the Democratic Party must have leaders who, like [the completely dismissed] McGovern, are willing to take a stand against it” n nMy bet is that the power leadership within the Democratic Party signed off on the creation of the #OWS movement. It had Acorn traces all about it. Looking for leadership in the Democratic Party to stand against mob action??? Forget about it. Like Gresham’s Law, bad leadership always drives out [literally in this case] good leadership. And at this point, the Republican Party is mostly Democrat wannabes, who are actively driving out the principled conservatives. n nMy guess is that ultimately a variant of the Tea Party will emerge, but only after the country has suffered a certain amount of grief. How much grief? My guess is: we “ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” n
You have to wonder at the efficacy of it all. Michigan? About 8 or 9% of the total manufacturing cost of a car is labor. So clearly the trend is to go increasingly robotic. And the flat or decreasing union payrolls is proof that no one's eager to hire PEOPLE to do those jobs. And not because of unions either, since plenty of cars in the US are built with non union labor in Tennessee, Alabama and so on. No the issue is that car companies are playing a waiting game with the unions until the can do without them at all. Not the unions per see, but people altogether. That's the real insanity. We have unions fighting for workers rights in industries that are doing away with people or, in the public sector which is under no burden to do anything well or efficiently. So in the end the Ed Schultz brigade will be able to declare victory for the 60 million civil servants who shuffle papers. America will produce few 'things' that people buy or use but we'll sure have us some powerful unions overseeing the functionaries in the Department of Who Knows What.
The use of "liberal" as a euphemism for "socialist" should be avoided. The unions in Michigan are not at all liberal, but anti-liberal, hating liberty.