Reluctant Radicals: How the Labor Movement Moved to the Left Margins of American Politics

This intervention combines a history of ideas and a survey of organizational politics to explain how and why the trade unions and the ideologies that have sustained them have moved so decisively to the left margin of mainstream politics during the era 1975 to the present. In politics and social science trade unions once seemed a bulwark of pluralist stability and center-right partisanship, but their decimation and marginalization in an era of neo-liberalism has forced even the most classically conservative organizations, such as the Teamsters and Carpenters, to adopt postures once occupied by unionists of the late Popular Front. Meanwhile, and ironically, a slice of what we used to know as the “new social movements” spawned by the New Left have, through social acceptance or political moderation, shifted to the center of the political spectrum, often courted by Republicans and business, even as the unions remain anathema to these same conservative elements.