Ezra Klein on the meaning of Wisconsin

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Ezra Klein today reiterates some of the points I made in the previous post. Wisconsin recall shows labor isn't coming back. So what's next?:

[T]he Wisconsin recall does have implications beyond 2012. Public-sector unions are a key part of the Democratic Party's coalition. They provide money, manpower, and votes. Which is why Henry Olson, a vice president at the American Enterprise Institute, frames Walker's legislation as a "defunding of the Democratic-party shock troops."

Wisconsin's new law won't, on its own, radically change the power of public-sector unions. But Walker's ability to withstand the recall will likely spur other governors to follow suit, and likely drain the enthusiasm of the opposition in other states. And even if it doesn't, labor's inability to win the recall is more evidence of their inability to reverse their own structural decline. They're not winning on worksites, as the share of the labor force that's unionized has been dropping for decades, and they're not winning at the ballot box.

If you step back, then, two things are happening simultaneously among the key interest groups in American politics. Labor is getting weaker. And corporations, in part due to Citizens United, are getting much stronger. The electoral effect of that is obvious: It favors Republicans. But the legislative effect is, perhaps, more significant: It favors corporate interests in Congress, as Democrats will have to be that much more solicitous of business demands in order to keep from being spent into oblivion.

For a long time, a lot of the energy has been devoted to the question of "how do you revive the labor movement?" The truth is, at this point, you probably can't. You can slow decline. And you can score isolated wins. But it's hard to see a real turnaround in labor's fortunes.

But if you take labor's decline as a given, then another question presents itself: How do you limit the resulting corporate power over elections and legislators? And that's much more possible, even in a post-Citizens United world. There's legislation, like the Fair Elections Now Act, that could publicly finance elections. There's legislation, like the DISCLOSE Act, that could force so much transparency on corporate spending that it ceases to be an attractive option.

Republicans have had great success arguing that organized labor has too much political power. So much success, in fact, that it seems clear that labor will soon have too little. But last night showed that Democrats aren't going to get very far simply disputing Republican claims on this point. Rather, they should argue that all interest groups have too much political power, and unite behind legislation that would weaken them.