With all the sturm und drang over the labor battles going on in the Midwest, a very fundamental point is often being overlooked.  Yes, our would-be Galtian overlords hate unions with every fiber of their being.  Dagny Taggart did speaketh from the mountaintop and demand that all employers be free to, e.g., pay poverty-level wages, kill workers in unsafe mines and employ children to clean out the tiny steel mill pipes (who else is gonna do it!?).

But wash all that from your mind.  What’s really going on here is a calculated, state-by-state attack on the long-term electoral viability of Democratic Party candidates.

Why, you ask?  Well, for those of you who don’t know, fundraising in (most) state politics is dominated by two primary centers of gravity: (1) the business community (typically in the form of the Chamber of Commerce or its local analogue), which typically backs Republican candidates; and (2) the local unions, which typically back Democratic candidates.  This is especially true in Wisconsin (see below).  You may have some opinion on the propriety of all this but unless we finally implement exclusive government funding of elections, that’s the state of play today and for the foreseeable future.

You don’t even have to take my word for it.  Here’s Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald accidentally committing an act of truth:

Well if they flip the state senate, which is obviously their goal with eight recalls going on right now, they can take control of the labor unions. If we win this battle, and the money is not there under the auspices of the unions, certainly what you’re going to find is President Obama is going to have a much difficult, much more difficult time getting elected and winning the state of Wisconsin.

With all that in mind, it quickly becomes clear that a simultaneous, full-on GOP assault on labor rights in key electoral college states in the Midwest just before the 2012 election season is just a little bit too convenient to be taken at face value.

If you need some more convincing, check out a phenomenal post by TPM’s Eric Kleefeld on the nuts and bolts of Wisconsin politics vis a vis unions and the business lobby (you really should read the whole thing):

[T]he Democratic Party in Wisconsin is, to an extent that is not true in most other states, a genuine labor party — a party that is intertwined with unions at the institutional level, with many politicians who have also been union officials or done legal work with unions, and which speaks for organized labor in key debates. They in turn compete with the Republican Party, which represents business interests as embodied by the state’s Chamber group, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, in what has until now been a sometimes uneasy but nevertheless predictable political system.

In short, unions in Wisconsin are not just economic organizations made up of their respective workers — they are political institutions that are a major part of the state. As such, a change to the state’s union laws that would threaten the existence of organized labor would in turn threaten the existence of the Democratic Party itself in Wisconsin, as people have known it for over half a century — something that state Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R) may have accidentally alluded to earlier today.

And this is a key reason why a governor taking on public employee unions, which would be popular in many other states, was really lighting a political powder-keg here, and why so many polls showed that the people of Wisconsin, who had just elected Walker and the Republicans, were now on the side of the unions and the Dems. It’s one thing to defeat the unions on financial issues — this is, in part, a major reason that people would elect Republicans in Wisconsin — but to try to hobble and obliterate them really went against people’s sense of fair play and respect for the state’s institutions.

As a parting thought, please remember that some of the harmful effects of the Citizens United ruling were mitigated somewhat by the fact that it unshackled the political purses of not only huge corporate interests (i.e., 8 points for Republicans) but also national labor unions (i.e., 1 point for Democrats).  Because modest parcels of union money could cancel out at least some of the transoceanic shipping containers full of business interest money, I saw at least a certain (partial) parity in that, which muted some of my general outrage over the decision. Going forward, however, if Republican schemes to gradually destroy organized labor succeed, the partial parity that gave me at least some comfort goes away.  Because, after all, most people of good faith would agree that organized labor is pretty much the only large, well-funded lobby in this country that constantly pushes for the interests of working people to be heard, considered and addressed.  If that goes away, I really don’t know what else would fill the void.