Wisconsin and the Left » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

Wisconsin and the Left » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
"Emma Goldman had it right when she stated, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.” Labor and the left in Wisconsin committed suicide when it demobilized a legitimate grassroots movement and turned it into an electoral campaign. It has been a long, slow death.

Grassroots activists with righteous indignation gave up their agency to do that which was deemed “acceptable” to the powers that be, namely the “Union Bosses” and the Democratic Party apparatchiks. Why was a general strike never considered? Why not creative tactics to “kill the bill,” Act 10, the reason for the “Uprising” and recall to begin with? How’d this all morph into what it’s morphed into?

In the main, the left has failed to understand that what populist right-wing activists hate more than anything else is the Democratic Party and unions, two pillars of what Hedges defines as the “Liberal Class.”  Their hatred is justified, given that, as Hedges points out, these institutions abandoned working class people long ago. Thus, the left confused real grassroots power with the Liberal Class and are now paying the consequences." Steven Horn