Where Have All the Pro-Labor Republicans Gone?

In the rare hours when I’m not slaving over a hot Slog post, I’ve also been known to write for Campus Progress, the youth wing of the D.C. think tank The Center for American Progress Next week I’ve got an article going up on their website about the fate of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), a pro-union bill I blogged about here last week.

While prepping the article, I interviewed David Madland, the Director of CAP’s American Worker Project. He provided some interesting insights about the partisan politics of labor, which I was unable to include in my Campus Progress piece. So I’ll enlighten Slog readers with them instead!

In our interview, Madland found the chief impediment to labor law reform in the world’s most obnoxious deliberative body: The United States Senate. (Since the 1935 Wagner Act no major pro-labor bill has passed the upper chamber.) He also touched on the lack of pro-union Republicans, and the reasons most of the party vote so consistently against labor: ideology, moneyed interests, and lack of political incentive.

I’ve already written about the reasons behind Republican voting patterns elsewhere, but I’d like to highlight one point Madland made.

When he described the Republicans’ business backers as an aspect of their anti-union sentiment, I objected that those same business interests support Democrats too.

Madland: “There is no doubt the business community has influence in the Democratic Party. But within the Democratic Party there is an actual debate between labor and business. The influence isn’t all on one side.”

Good point. When pro-labor Republicans do pop their heads up, they are immediately bashed down by the corporate-friendly mainstream. (See: the initial Republican candidate for the special election New York’s 23rd District this year where moderate, pro-labor Dierdre Scozzafava was run out of town on a rail by the teabagger movement.) There is no discussion, just beat-faced old men shouting down dissident voices, as in so many Republican intra-party disputes these days.

There also aren’t that many occasions when a labor-business debate could crop up in the contemporary Republican Party. Madland, again: “There used to be an actual liberal wing of the Republican Party that was at least tolerant of the labor movement. That doesn’t exist anymore.”

Where did they go? They mostly became Democrats. I think the extreme rigidity of the increasingly hardline conservative Republican Party is partially responsible for that shift, but that process was accelerated by shifting partisan geography. Back in the pre-70s, when you had to work hard to find a Republican below the Mason-Dixon Line (loads of conservative Democrats though), there were a lot of moderate northern Republicans who could comfortably line up with labor in their union-heavy states. But as the parties realigned after the tumult of the sixties, the old Dixiecrats became the reddest of red staters and their general antipathy towards labor contributed to a powerful anti-labor (and anti-moderate, for that matter) narrative already prevalent within the Republican Party. And now we have today’s partisan breakdown where the Democrats can’t find a single Republican senator to vote with them on EFCA. Or anything else.