Oh, there are still lots of “liberals,” especially liberal women, they form the cohort of useful idiots for the hard Leftists, many indeed capital C Communists, that are the Democrat apparatchiks and officholders. Pretty much the entire leadership and apparatchik of the big public employee and industrial unions are outright, avowed Communists.
In my early days in labor relations the public employee unions I dealt with were either independent employee associations or old-time trade unions. Both were “liberal,” but decisively anti-communist and did a good job of tamping down the college-educated lefties in their membership, a problem public employee associations all struggled with since they represented a large white-collar, college-educated cohort. The Earth shifted under my feet when our largest association was decertified and replaced by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). At first I really didn’t understand them; they were absolutely terrible at true labor relations. They made crazy demands in negotiations but almost never made actual proposals. They grieved everything, took every grievance to arbitration, and usually lost. They filed unfair labor practices weekly, sometimes daily, took most of them to the labor board, and usually lost. I was actually able to make tremendous gains on behalf of the employer in limiting union rights and scope of the bargaining duty by turning their own claims on them as I beat them before the labor board. By ’94, we had them racked and stacked for decertification after the General Election and it was inconceivable that a Democrat could win the Governorship in Alaska. Then, with the help of some “true conservative” fratricide on the Republican side, AFSCME bought themselves a Democrat Governor. My new appointee boss stode into our office and told us that he’d campaigned with the unions for the job and one of the things he’d promised them was that he was going to fire us all and replace us with people acceptable to the unions. It began to dawn that we’d won every battle and lost the war. They never got to fire me; nobody’s that good, but I got my affairs in order and quit in ’96 and worked for the Republican-controlled Legislature until the Democrats couldn’t stand their union friends any more and hired me back to clean up the mess they’d made. Along the way I became a serious student of Saul Alinsky.
The communists aren’t that hard to deal with if you understand that you’re dealing with communists and understand that they don’t want solutions; they want a process of continual conflict and they want to use that conflict to disparage and embarass their opposition. You just have to learn not to give them what they want and you have to learn to be very, very tough with them. They’re like adolescent boys; they only respect those who they know can and will hurt them, really hurt them. Only when they’re made to hurt do they stop the chaos. This is where most Republicans fail; they still talk about “my friends” on the other side of the aisle. Sorry, fellows this ain’t the damned Rotary and those aren’t your friends! That’s whey the Rs never tough it out against the slime machine; the greatest sin in Republican circles is to be the source of controversy. It doesn’t matter that you’re right, that the conflict is necessary, and your enemy is evil and must be defeated; they CANNOT stand conflict and controversy and thus are doomed to failure until they develop a leadership cohort who isn’t afraid to mix it up, but since he or usually better she is a Republican, it has to be done stylishly. It isn’t that hard to learn how to deal with them. It is hard to get Republican officeholders to allow the job to be done or to be seen with the kinds of people who can and will do it.
Even the KGB and CIA stopped exchanging dead agents eventually. But until we start hurting Democrats, we’re going to keep burying Republican candidates and officeholders.
