Via Nick Baumann, some empirical support for what I’ve been saying ever since Scott Walker’s union-busting exploded onto the scene—crushing organized labor won’t kill the Democratic Party’s financial prospects, it’ll just make it more dependent than ever on corporate money which is very much available to Democrats:
That’s not by any means to assert that one should just be sanguine about this, it’s just to clarify what exactly the stakes are. In strict partisan terms, they’re relatively low. If union money goes away, Democrats can and will shift in order to get the cash they need. But in exchange, they’ll be making policy concessions of various kinds. To offer an example, in the Affordable Care Act debate the Obama administration steered clear of any initiatives that would stick it to the pharmaceutical industry and drug companies were happy to offer support for a measure that would give more people health insurance and thus the ability to buy prescription drugs. But if both parties are utterly in hock to corporate interests of one flavor or another, then nothing that damages the interests of rich businessmen as a class will be able to pass.
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