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A review essay on books by (1) Alan Wolfe, The Future of Liberalism (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009); & (2) Doug Rossinow, Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America (U Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

In the spring of 1995, when Lane Kirkland's old order was toppling and John Sweeney's young(er) Turks were poised to revitalize the American labor movement, one of the movement's leading operatives gave me his take on what was behind the revolt. "We didn't join the labor movement when it represented 20 percent of the work force," he said—and by "we," he meant a generation of more militant organizers, children of the sixties, who were then in their forties—"only to see it drift down to 5 percent on our watch."

With employers able to obstruct worksite organizing campaigns at every turn, unions instead pour huge resources into campaigns to elect governors or mayors who then create agencies that regulate, say, home care workers or port truck drivers, enabling the unions to bargain contracts for those workers with those agencies. The Alliance comprises unions whose members work largely in the private sector, for whom the passage of EFCA is more critical than for public sector unions (which can always organize by cutting a deal with the governor), and they wanted to lay the groundwork for EFCA's passage by campaigning in some swing Senate states that the AFL/CIO did not rank so high. Adapted from the source document.

In Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson—political science professors from Yale and Berkeley, respectively—direct our attention to one of the central mysteries of our time: how Republican elected officials have turned themselves into distinctly less amusing and way less lovable versions of Wile E. Coyote. How is it that the national Republican Party has been able to govern from the far right even while the public opposes it on issue after issue? Enacting policies that have no visible means of public support (indeed, that engender widespread public opposition), the Republicans, by every known law of political physics, should have long since dropped to earth. Though the party "has strayed dramatically from the moderate middle of public opinion," write Hacker and Pierson, "the normal mechanisms of democratic accountability have not been able to bring them back."

Harold Meyerson reviews Peter Beinart's The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals— Can Win the War on Terror and Make American Great Again .