Richard Greenwald
Mural of Cesar Chavez at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Academic Middle School, San Francisco, 2010. 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 […] 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 of supply-side dogma and family-values nostalgia. It was a