Red Harvest

The past generation of conservative rule in America has, among other things, dislodged the once unquestioned interpretation of American history as a study in the consolidation of liberal power. The shock of Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 initially struck the keepers of the meliorative liberal “consensus” view of our political past as a momentary aberration—half backlash and half tantrum. Liberal scholars argued that Reagan and his backers were engaged in a massive exercise in magical thinking, seeking to blot out the fractious political controversies of ’60s liberalism with an unstable compound

culture Feb/Mar 2012

Field of Schemes

We have grown so accustomed to seeing the American labor movement in a state of decline—and coming under constant attack—that it is easy to dismiss the whole subject as a romanticized legacy of an aging progressive Left. I was reminded of this hazard during a recent conversation with a college student. When he asked what I studied, I said “labor,” whereupon the student replied: “Unions—I read about them once in my history class.”

This detached, antiquarian outlook comes in part from the familiar plotting of much of our writing about labor along a rise-and-fall narrative. The story