In the battle going on now in Wisconsin and elsewhere, the liberals and the conservatives are operating not only on opposite principles, but in two different times. The Democrats seem caught in 1911, in an age of sweat shops, exploitation, and of child labor, when endangered and underpaid workers valiantly struggled to wrest living wages out of “The Man.” One would never know from their speech this is 2011, that these union workers are well-off clerks and teachers; that The Man has been replaced by a less-well-off public, and that their early and well-funded retirements are driving state governments into a ditch.

To admit this would blur the clarity that prevailed way back then, when only one side of the argument held the moral high ground. As Roger L. Simon writes of a similar syndrome, “The left has a kind of nostalgia for racism, for a simpler time when it was a lot easier to define right and wrong.”