As the Democrats convene for their coronation in Los Angeles, two powerful accounts have been published of the way in which Hispanic immigration into California is fuelling a new, class-conscious, race-based, militant labor union movement: Lloyd Billingsley's "Union Card for Green Card: The Radical Vanguard in the Los Angeles Labor Movement," posted on the Capital Research website http://www.capitalresearch.org/LaborWatch/lw-0800.htm; and Harold Meyerson's "Back to the Future" in the August 13 Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/
articles/A15043-2000Aug12.html

Meyerson, who approves, says that "Latinos have become the single most left-leaning group in the entire state." The future to which he happily alludes is "the New Age version of the big city immigrant ghettoes out of which the Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt emerged, and out of which a nationwide progressive movement may yet emerge."

Just what we needed.

Of course, the same milieu produced the neocon intellectuals who proclaim from e.g. the Wall Street Journal Edit Page that "family values" made Hispanic immigrants natural Republicans.

They were wrong. Funny thing.

August 13, 2000