What the Walker victory means to America's working class

For the most part Americans managed to convince themselves that there was no such thing as an American "working class".

The working class had become the middle class.

The major American unions, for their part, were happy to go along with the charade.

Unions became more and more identified with social issues that had little resonance with their members.

Even as union membership went on a several decades long decline, the plethora of issues that the union leadership endorsed grew longer and longer and less and less relevant to the rank and file.

The failure of the Walker recall initiative brings this into stark relief.

The recall was from the beginning identified as a union project.

Unions are today identified more as a feature of the public sector rather than a mainstay of the industrial economy.

The fact that America's industrial economy has had the entrails ripped out of it over the past fifty years doesn't help, but where were the unions while that was going on?

Busy lobbying for peace and love and all kinds of beautiful stuff that was never a part of the original organized labor mandate.

I think what the Walker victory shows is that unions, as we have them today, are a spent force in the political arena.

But that's not the end of organized labor. In fact, I think we're on the threshold of a new era.

This new era will be driven by a younger generation who won't settle for two-tier contracts and concessions.

You can see the dawn of this new sensibility in the various Occupy movements and in the student activism in Montreal.

This has the potential to coalesce into a broad-based movement that will once again be relevant to the working/middle class in America.

This has the potential to get those millions of Tea Party supporters onside to support the interests of people like themselves against the interests of the billionaires who currently fund not only the Tea Party but  all the major populist movements in America, and who have funded Scott Walker from the beginning.

Occupy the Unions!