(Guest post by Greg Forster)
Over the weekend, Pajamas Media carried my column on the Rhode Island teacher firing flap:
That leads us to the second question: why does Obama think he can advance himself by gratuitously hacking off the teachers’ unions? Answer: because the unions are on the way down, and he wants to ingratiate himself with the people who are taking them down.
On the left, the dam continues to crack. How long before it breaks?
And what happens when it does?
In the long term, I’m as optimistic as I ever have been about the prospects for real reform — especially for vouchers, the only reform that will make any of the other reforms sustainable. In the Cold War, the Russians had more men, more missiles, more tanks, and (let’s be honest) more guts. The only things we had that they didn’t were the entrepreneurial spirit and a just cause. And guess what? It turns out that in the long run, that’s what you really need.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
I’m not so sure this isn’t just designed to be Obama’s “Sister Soulja” moment. I think his strategists want to position him as someone who supports the teachers unions but only up to a certain point. They saw an opportunity for him to get some street cred by supporting action against an obvious educational injustice, but I doubt his supposed “war on the teachers unions” will go any further than that. The unions are sitting on too much campaign cash for that to happen.
I don’t think we disagree! I wasn’t suggesting the unions were going to disappear in the next election cycle, just that they’re getting weaker over time while other constituencies on the left are getting more hostile to them over time, such that Obama can make hay by doing a Soulja on them. That wouldn’t have been the case five years ago.
In fact, I think the comparison to Soulja bolsters my case. Clinton gave the professional civil-rights-mongers plenty of what they wanted, just as Obama gives the unions plenty of what they want. He wasn’t going to go to war with them for real, just as Obama isn’t going to go to war with the unions for real. But he saw that they were on the way down, while other constituencies he needed were growing more hostile to them. So that’s why he chose them (it was really Jesse Jackson, not primarily Soulja, Clinton was publicly smacking) rather than some other target for his “I’m not Jimmy Carter, I can stand up to constituencies on the left” moment.
Okay, then we are agreeing. I just read your Pajamas Media piece as conveying a much stronger claim that Obama has abandoned the unions and wholeheartedly joined the social justice people. The problem with social justice, of course, is that there isn’t much money in it.
If I remember correctly, Milton Friedman’s hope was that a single state might one day pass voucher legislation sufficiently potent to finally trigger the full brunt of competitive market forces across all socioeconomic lines. At that point, the undeniable results and appeal of universal choice would then provoke a national cascade of “I’ll have what she’s having” populist demand. At least that’s how I understood him.
Of course, it’s hard to say where the threshold lies that would trigger the tipping point he envisioned, and so we advance incrementally while feeling our way. Although some get discouraged from time to time, I agree that the sound of these new cracks in the dam is a valid indicator.
After all, those lines from Shakespeare underscore the innate thirst for justice woven into the human spirit if not our genes. Bound as it is to liberty, it’s notable that gulag uprisings and slave revolts throughout history follow a pattern of similar tipping points: a large critical mass witnessing a visible group of their peers obtaining power and greater freedom in broad daylight. Even the enormous slave uprisings led by Spartacus in Rome followed this pattern.
While our legal system allows for happier endings, disruptive technologies are the other game changer. Ubiquitous communication is forcing an unprecedented glasnost that will ultimately empower this innate human desire for justice and liberty (even if under the misnomer “social justice” by some) to prevail definitively. I’m more hopeful than ever that we’ll see the tipping point for the ensuing perestroika within our lifetimes.