social justice unionism Archives

It’s a simple question: How can “Queers for Palestine,” the slogan on protest signs of pro-Palestinian (or anti-anti-Hamas) protesters, be a thing? (Homosexuality is stigmatized and criminalized in the Palestinian territories, while in Israel it is legal, and in secular spaces not stigmatized. As a practical matter, one would much rather be queer in Tel Aviv than Khan Yunis.)

To answer the question, one must consider the operating ideology of left-wing activism, which for lack of a better term might be called “Everything Leftism.”

An Ideology and a Structure

Everything Leftism operates on two levels, as an ideology and as an institutional structure. As an ideology, it is a corruption of or derivative from intersectionality. As intersectionality views all oppressed identities as linked in compounding dimensions, Everything Leftism views all left-of-center issues as linked in compounding dimensions.

Thus, for the Everything Leftist all issues are mutually dependent. In this view, the interests of 2SLGBTQI+ people in the United States depend on Palestinian sovereignty, which depends on radical decarbonization of the economy, which depends on widespread access to taxpayer-funded abortion, which depends on de facto open borders, which depends on every other issue in the progressive playbook.

As an institutional structure, Everything Leftism operationalizes this ideology in the philanthropic and governmental spaces. Charitable organizations and advocacy groups seeking support from left-wing institutional Big Philanthropy will be pressured to align with Everything Leftism not only on any single issue but on all issues, or at least to silence themselves on issues on which they do not align. Meanwhile, where and when administrations aligned with Big Philanthropy hold power, they will use their discretion in government grantmaking, regulatory policy, and prosecutorial decision making to carry out the tenets of Everything Leftism. The Biden administration has announced and carried out a series of “whole of government” schemes related to Everything Leftism, most notably regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and climate change.

Everything Leftism in Practice

Everything Leftism is much easier to see than to define. Groups associated with left-of-center causes sometimes just “tweet it out,” with graphics in the typical corporate-liberal pastel-style demonstrating how all issues are mutually dependent.

Consider the following image from the Drug Policy Alliance, a drug legalization group tied to George Soros and funded by him and numerous other prominent liberal institutional funders:

Sometimes the issue lists of supposedly single-issue groups show the depths of Everything Leftism. The Sunrise Movement is ostensibly a campaign group for an immediate severe cut in carbon emissions to stop the supposed “climate crisis.” But its list of “our demands” includes “union jobs for all,” “abolish the police,” and “ensuring that indigenous communities are well resourced and safe.” Sunrise Movement claims that these Everything Leftist positions are inherent to its environmental mission, but in reality they are extraneous.

In the labor-union space, this is why the United Auto Workers (UAW), driven to strike in part due to the consequences of the shift to electric vehicle production driven by the American and international governments’ war on cars, supports the “just transition” away from conventional fuels. Labor unions in many ways pioneered Everything Leftism with “social justice unionism.” After John Sweeney, a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member aligned with government-worker unions and unionism’s radical Left, replaced the George Meany-Lane Kirkland center-left Truman-LBJ regime at the AFL-CIO in the 1990s, they turned their dues-funded treasuries into general-purpose piggy banks for left-wing economic and social movements.

In a sense, the Everything Leftist intersectional politics of the DSA replaced the old industrial-class politics of Meany, Kirkland, and their turn-of-the-20th-century predecessor Samuel Gompers. Those industrial-class politics may have been left-of-center—they gave America the capital-P Progressive Movement, the New Deal, and the Great Society, which all had many political-economic problems. But they were also patriotic and recognizably American in their liberalism, as evidenced by Gompers’s resistance to European socialisms of his day and the Meany-Kirkland regime’s work against international Communism during the Cold War. But in the new post-Sweeney era, Big Labor has joined the Everything Leftists, backing causes further left than the liberalism of the Biden administration, and so the UAW demands Israel not defeat Hamas in battle.

Concluding Thoughts

Once the concept of Everything Leftism is introduced, it is easy to find examples. Blaming school choice on “racism, homophobia, and xenophobia”? Everything Leftism. Calling everything “x justice” – “racial justice,” “environmental justice,” “economic justice,” “algorithmic justice”? Everything Leftism. California offering government-funded sex changes to illegal immigrants? Everything Leftism.

Knowledge of Everything Leftism, like knowledge of the related social justice unionism, should teach that there is no prospect of long-term alignment with the Left for moderate concession on a single issue. For a real-world example, ask the Republican and conservative groups that allied with liberals for moderate relaxation of criminal justice policies whether they expected their erstwhile partners to jump headlong into defunding police and de facto legalizing mass criminality in the name of “racial justice.”

But the Permanent Revolution is the demand of the Everything Leftist, so the move to abolish the police was inevitable. That was the ultimate objective for many of the left-wing groups, and it was published in the New York Times as such.

So to answer the opening question, how can “Queers for Palestine” be a thing? Everything Leftists saw an opportunity to combine two or more supposedly oppressed identities into a novel intersectional combination and took it. This happens often and across issues.

Let any conservative seeking to work with (or worse, appease) a left-wing faction beware.

AUTHOR

Michael Watson

Michael is Research Director for Capital Research Center and serves as the managing editor for InfluenceWatch. A graduate of the College of William and Mary, he previously worked for a Washington, D.C. public relations firm.

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Why Did Gavin Newsom Meet With Hamas-Linked Groups?

Who Is “Queeg” And Why Should Trustees Be Aware?

Is Marxism Becoming The Norm In Labor Unions?

Last week, Politico reported on a leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade and return the question of abortion regulation to the states, ending the Court’s invention of a constitutional right to abortion. The draft opinion was greeted with predictable outrage from left-progressives, including those in organized labor.

Statements

Now, many people, especially those on the social-conservative right who are re-exploring aligning with organized labor, might not expect union bosses to be among the left-progressive leaders ready to jump on a leaked, not-finalized Supreme Court opinion, but they were. Examples include:

Liz Shuler, who ascended to the presidency of the AFL-CIO after the death of Richard Trumka, argued, “We must be able to control our own bodies—which has a direct impact on economic justice and the ability of working people to make a better life for themselves and their families.”
Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), denounced an “extremist, anti-woman majority of the Supreme Court” (that, it should be noted, is suspected to include Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a woman) for taking away “a woman’s fundamental right to an abortion.”
Jean Ross, president of National Nurses United, said the opinion “should be viewed as part of the broader far-right assault on gender-affirming health rights in this country, including the laws targeting trans youth and their families, attacks on LBGTQ individuals, and homophobic bans on the word ‘gay’ in education,” presumably a deceptive reference to Florida’s Parental Rights in Education legislation, frequently misnamed in “objective” press accounts.

I Told You So

These statements and other pro-abortion activities by organized labor, such as SEIU Healthcare Illinois/Indiana rallying with Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) and Planned Parenthood or the new Amazon Labor Union calling for protests in New York City, demonstrate that American labor unions are inseparable from social left-progressivism through an ideological practice known as “social justice unionism.” Back in 2021, we published a serial outlining how organized labor provided financial support to Washington State measures introducing Planned Parenthood–aligned sex education material into public school curriculums.

And what of the expressed hope of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), that union organizations could provide a counterweight to “a requirement that the workers embrace management’s latest ‘woke’ human resources fad”? Well, I was skeptical, noting that “operatives who run the labor unions endorse woke H.R. fads. And to the extent they don’t, they support going even further.”

Now, I may enter into evidence the statement of Sara Nelson, head of the flight attendants’ union AFA-CWA and rumored candidate to challenge Shuler for the leadership of the House of Labor, last seen campaigning to extend the now-enjoined traveler mask mandate when it came up for renewal in March. Nelson explicitly called on her members’ bosses to engage in woke capitalism:

We call on airline management to stand with us and for equality, anti-discrimination, and mutual respect. It is not enough that corporations espouse these principles as core to their missions—now is the time to demonstrate this commitment to their employees and passengers. This is about our safety and our freedom. We cannot work if we are not safe.

Social justice unionism means that organized labor is an additional pressure point forcing capitalists to be woke, not a point of opposition. The reaction to the Supreme Court leak should prove that beyond doubt.

AUTHOR

Tag Archive for: social justice unionism

An Ideology and a Structure

Everything Leftism in Practice

Concluding Thoughts

Michael Watson

Michael Watson