A week later, I’m still not sure.
It signals the left’s etiolation, undoubtedly. There are all kinds of caveats and excuses one can summon to explain away the recall results—Barrett was a crappy candidate, Walker had an enormous financial advantage, a not insignificant chunk of voters were recall-averse no matter the target. But more than anything, the failure to recall was a failure of solidaristic politics. Too many voters accepted the fat-cat-public-employees canard, too many bought into the unions-as-interest-group frame. It was a failure on the left’s part, that is, to convincingly make the case for solidarity and workers’ rights. (It is worth remembering that the case can be made—Ohio citizens voted to repeal their anti-collective bargaining law.)
I’m less certain about the strategic takeaways for the future. Absent a radical shift in the labor movement, unions will keep straddling the electoral politics right and “fair economy” middle, to draw on the schema I recently laid out. (These distinct “streams” are already discernible and need limited hypothesizing. A successful left-wing social movement just requires each stream be robust in its on right.)
For his part, Doug Henwood has argued labor was stupid to canalize the vim and vigor of last year’s statehouse occupations into electoral politics.
“Suppose instead that the unions had supported a popular campaign—media, door knocking, phone calling—to agitate, educate, and organize on the importance of the labor movement to the maintenance of living standards? If they’d made an argument, broadly and repeatedly, that Walker’s agenda was an attack on the wages and benefits of the majority of the population? That it was designed to remove organized opposition to the power of right-wing money in politics? That would have been more fruitful than this major defeat.”
It would be boneheaded for labor to completely extricate itself from electoral politics, but it certainly has to be smarter about it. Consider a union like the National Education Association, which not only endorsed Obama despite his corporate education reform agenda, but endorsed him nearly a year and a half before Election Day. If labor seeks electoral emasculation, if they want to be treated like servile apparatchiks, they just have to ape the NEA’s strategy. If unions’ electoral involvement has any utility, it has to be in dragging the Democrats to the left and advancing an expansive pro-worker agenda.
In this age of austerity, it’s also important for unions to tout the vital social goods their rank-and-file provides—even if they’re simultaneously inveighing against policies which threaten members’ interests. While the public is wrong to think of unions as just another interest group, unions often give them no reason to think otherwise. Unions can’t claim to be custodians of the public interest or indefatigable champions of social justice if they’re jealously defending their (ever-shrinking) territory or they’re lobbying for harsher sentencing laws.
A couple months back I was at postal workers union protest against mail delivery cutbacks and the shuttering of post offices. To be honest it was a bit insipid, bereft of even chanting. But there was at least an attempt to link the union’s more self-interested struggle against layoffs to the broader public good: Keep universal service; unions built the middle class; stop the attack on public services.
They understood, at least implicitly, that practicing parochialism is a recipe for self-marginalization.
OH NO! We lost!
Spare me.
If you had written this when important recalls were going down, I would have had other things to say. But, as it is, you’re playing the right’s game.
The devil is in the details, and he don’t play by the rules.
You know that Mr. Gude actually went to jail for all this when they ‘were going down’, right?
*blink* was he in jail when the judicial recalls were going down?
If so, it would appear that I owe him a profound apology.
He got arrested during an Iowa Occupy last fall https://ordinary-times.com/blog/2011/10/10/protests-in-des-moines-league-blogger-arrested/
I don’t like me those public employee unions, and I think Occupy is rather silly and naive overall, (and I probably disagree with half his other politics) but I give mad props to Mr. Gude for believing what he believes and willing to go all in on it. I certainly ain’t going to accuse him of fence sitting or being a bleacher creature when it was time to stand up and be counted.
What does the recall vote say? IMHO, it says that the issue was a loser to begin with as was the candidate but more so the issue than the candidate. The left could have run any candidate and they still would have lost. The issue didn’t affect enough folks directly or indirectly to get them to vote for the recall. Maybe it says something about the decline of unions, though I’ve always though that public sector unions were a different animal from private sector unions and maybe others do as well. Also, Walker did what he said he would do, turn a huge deficit into a surplus without raising taxes.
Has the surplus actually happened yet? A search only brought up projections, including from Walker’s office.
True, the surplus isn’t official yet. Is is quite a feat to go from a 3.6 billion deficit to a projected 90 million surplus without rasing taxes.
Nah, it’s not really that hard. Give me unlimited power to make life horrible for the middle and lower classes and I could balance the federal budget tomorrow.
Jesse:
So Walker is a dictator? I didn’t think dictators were subject to recall votes.
A Governor with a majority in his House and Senate and virtually unlimited amounts of money to fool the public to battling with each other can do pretty much whatever the hell he wants.
But yes, the Wisconsin budget is balanced. On the backs of the poor and middle class.
Jesse
I may not agree with Shawn but he is try to understand what happened while you are just acting like a sore loser assuming that the the only reason Walker won was the money.
It’s all a projection until all the taxes are collected and all the bills are paid.
Yes, given that it is projected, I suppose the amount of the surplus could exceed 90 million.
yeah, selling the farm and saying, “gee, what a profit we made!” is guaranteed to produce a SHORT TERM surplus, at the cost of generations of work.
My experience with Wisconsin recall was the “Joe must go” failed attempt to recall Senator Joe McCarthy in 1953-4 when I was a freshman at UWM. My conclusion was the Wisconsin recall law was a cruel joke on the voters.
What did Gov. Walker win? It appears to me that they are back were they started after spending $30 million plus.