Will Willkinson rattles off an obvious false equivalence:
There's something about the union demonstrations in Madison, and the excitement it has caused on the left, that reminds me of the Tea Party. I think I've figured it out what it is. The advent of the labor movement is at the heart of the left's sacred creation myth. The sense on the left that unions are under siege gives them something to fight for with a bracing sense of historically-rooted identity and moral authority. Similarly, the sense on the right that America's foundational values are under siege gave the Tea Party something to fight for with a bracing sense of historically-rooted identity and moral authority.
One of these groups imagines itself the exclusive heir to the Founding Fathers, the Abolitionists, and The Civil Rights Movement. The other imagines itself to be the successor to the American labor movement. One of these observations is banal. The other is delusional.
Wilkinson also complains that "public-sector unionism has about as much to do with preventing worker exploitation as Eugene Debs has to do with unfireable $100,000 a year public-school teachers," but you actually don't have to destroy collective bargaining to make it possible to fire bad teachers, at least according to some of the people who have actually made it possible to fire bad teachers.
