Big Labor’s Decline and Left Turn: Causes of the Long Decline
By 1979, when Lane Kirkland succeeded George Meany as head of the AFL-CIO, fundamental changes to the economy had led to a decline in the unionized share of the private…
Taft-Hartley Act
Big Labor’s Decline and Left Turn: A Trade Unionist in the White House
Precisely one former national labor union president has been elected to the presidency of the United States: Ronald Reagan. Before his political career, he was already a notable figure, perhaps…
Big Labor’s Decline and Left Turn: Membership Decline
Lane Kirkland, leadership of the AFL-CIO from 1979 through 1995, was defined by the Long Decline in union membership and union density, the proportion of the workforce consisting of organized…
On the Question of Right Fights: Factions on the Right
The conservative intellectual movement has been blown apart by a combination of factors, including the political, economic, and foreign policy failures of the second term of President George W. Bush…
On the Question of Right Fights: Dueling Manifestos
In 2022, a working group commissioned by the Edmund Burke Foundation, the organization behind the periodic National Conservatism Conferences, published “National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles.” The statement amounts to…
On the Question of Right Fights: National Conservatism at Arms
For their part, nine signers of the National Conservatism statement and 10 allies put forward a collection of essays denouncing the “generation of decay” in right-of-center politics and promoting a…
On the Question of Right Fights: Postliberals for American Liberalism
Sohrab Ahmari’s Tyranny, Inc. is not the “manifesto” of the Postliberal-Integralist faction, but Ahmari provides a glimpse into the motivations and prescriptions that faction would bring about if given power.
On the Question of Right Fights: “Grill Dad Republican”
What all this right-fighting ignores (on all sides) is the “Grill Dad Republican,” the ordinary voter who supports Republicans and professes some sort of conservatism. Exit polls suggest he (in…
“Hot Labor Summer” Was a Bust
Last year, we noted that the well-publicized march back to relevance of union organizing was not supported by the facts on union membership when the federal government released them in…
BEST OF 2023: In Defense of Taft-Hartley
In 1947, organized labor reaped the whirlwind from the massive disruptions it inflicted on the American economy in 1945–46. The Labor Management Relations Act, better known as the “Taft-Hartley Act”…