Seen over at The Corner:
So the question is, can you have a liberal, progressive America without unions? History says no. For 200 years the existence of the union movement has been wedded to the rise of democracy, to the rise of liberalism. We saw this here, in South Korea, in Spain, in Africa. But now America is moving toward an experiment with whether it can have liberalism without unions. I think the answer is no. But we’ll see.
Interesting thought. Certainly we have seen, more and more, the major unions (especially the SEIU) forming alliances with Progressive / Socialist organization that are certainly in step with Obama’s “fundamentally transforming” the United States. Their stated goal is to move away from the democratic Republic of the Founders and to that Progressive version of ruler-ship first begun by Von Bismarck as he rolled up the Germanic city-states into a unified Germany (and in the process, creating the foundations of the trappings of the modern welfare state to “sidestep” the real Socialists). The unions, once focused on improving unsafe working conditions, have gone well beyond that to the acquisition of power and the enrichment of a few relative to the many.
