The New, New Left: How American Politics Works Today.

• Author: Jason, Gary
• Position: Book review

The New, New Left: How American Politics Works Today By Steven Malanga Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006. Pp. 157. $22.50 cloth.

In The New, New Left, Steven Malanga argues that contemporary American politics is a battle between those who gain and those who lose economically when government expands. Malanga, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, claims that this battle between "the tax eaters" and "the tax payers" has reached a tipping point, with the tax eaters gaining ascendancy, especially in large cities.

In Malanga's view, the driving force of the tax eaters, the "New New Left," consists of labor unions in general and government-employee unions in particular. These unions--such as the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME); the American Federation of Teachers (AFT); and the National Education Association (NEA)--acquired the right to bargain collectively roughly forty years ago, and they have increased their power continuously since then. Malanga emphasizes two pernicious aspects of such bargaining. First, public-employee unions are not bargaining against corporations constrained by fiscal reality, but against government bureaucrats seldom so constrained. Second, these same unions exploit their members' dues and votes to elect politicians who will expand the government and to defeat initiatives that seek to slow that expansion.

Aiding the unions in advancing their goals are numerous social-activist "advocacy" organizations. Leftist organizations such as the Association for Community Reform Now (ACORN) and Citizens Action (Ralph Nader's organization) push continuously to expand social spending and governmental regulation. These organizations typically function as statist middlemen, accepting money from unions and pumping it into voter-registration drives, initiative campaigns, political campaign coffers, and so on. Also working to push the New New Left agenda are the highly politicized labor studies programs at public universities and the leftist foundations, such as the Tides Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

As Malanga illustrates repeatedly, the programs that these activists and organizations push usually serve to benefit only themselves. For example, ACORN earns large "consulting" fees from banks that are trying to deal with the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which mandates that banks doing business in a locality must invest a certain percentage of their capital in poorer neighborhoods, but ACORN just...