At the discussion I moderated yesterday, Ralph Nader said that the AFL-CIO’s leadership once asked him to get the Occupy movement to press for a raise in the minimum wage. He replied: You mean to tell me that organized labor needs a bunch of 20-somethings in flip-flops to lobby for a living wage? Theda Skocpol explained why: unions represent just 9% of private sector workers.

As we were talking in DC, Wisconsites were voting to retain a governor who had broken the public sector unions. Walker got 37% of voters from union households and more than half of the voters with only high school degrees.

The most obvious interpretation is that labor is dead and we need some kind of functional alternative. I’d qualify that by noting that Walker broke the public employee unions (minus the police and firefighters). Those aren’t blue-collar workers. Many hold masters degrees–and Barrett, the Democrat, won 60% of voters with postgraduate degrees. This wasn’t really a neoliberal attacking the blue-collar unions and the traditional working class. They are split by race and don’t form a coherent political force. (“Non-Whites/No College” voted overwhelming for Barrett, whereas “Whites with No College went” 61% for Walker). This was rather a neoliberal attacking the public-sector professional class.

I’m not a big fan of public sector unions, who are often at odds with the people they serve, but the Wisconsin fight was about political pluralism and countervailing force. As Franklin Roosevelt told Congress in an April 29, 1938 Message:

liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.