ABSTRACT
The war on the labor-left has been waged with relentless vigor for well over a century. The New Deal era did transform and empower labor for a time, but starting in the mid-1950s and accelerating rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s, the war drove labor into retreat and even turned its sights on the most conservative trade unions and their moderate politics. As for union behavior, some critics claim that "sellouts" by union leaders have been the major cause of union decline. Almost all theories of the contemporary US union decline fall finally under the rubric "repression", typically originated by employers and sustained by government. Although no major left party survives in the United States, some labor-left policies have obviously infiltrated the American two-party system, turning the Democratic Party in some places into a quasi-labor party.
