RedBeardSpeaks: On Public Employee Unions, & Sherrod Brown's (lack of) Intellectual Honesty

1. September, 2011

"I look back in history, and some of the worst governments we've ever had, do you know one of the first things they did? They went after the unions. Hitler didn't want unions, Stalin didn't want unions, Mubarak didn't want unions. I'm not comparing what's happening to the workers in Madison or Columbus to Hitler and Stalin..." -Sherrod Brown, March, 2011

Mr. Brown's statement ellicits three questions from this Ohioan: ONE, does Mr. Brown seriously equate the admitted autocracy of Mubarak's Egypt with the genocidal regime's of Hitler's Nazi Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union? TWO, did Mr. Brown even accurately depict the government-labor relations of those states? THREE, what political end did Mr. Brown hope this incredibly basic and classless statement would accomplish, and did he really believe he could blatantly make the comparison, and absolve himself by flatly denying it?

ONE-Let me start just by saying-really? Hosni Mubarak, who resigned when he saw he would never recover the public mandate, in the same breath as HITLER and STALIN? Can we cue the music to "One of these tyrants is not like the other?" Does this guy realize he's on c-span right now? What an obvious attempt to equate the toppling of any status quo in the Middle East with "democratization." Nice try, Mr. Senator but the myth of equivocation only works on domestic issues. If I said to my girlfriend before a date, "Oh, I bet Rosie O'Donnell or Kathy Griffin have that same dress-not to compare you to Rosie or Kathy in any way," I would find myself eating spaghetti-o's and watching SportsCenter alone in my basement.

TWO-Mr. Brown's premeditated statement in no way resembles the unintentional gaffe of the Sarah Palin-ilk. No, Senator Brown studied Russian at Yale, and I suspect even a few of his instructors came to Yale as a result of Soviet oppression. He must have gained some semblance of an understanding of the Soviet system, so we can't excuse his ignorance on this one, he knew what he was saying at the time.
Let's flip this around-if Rob Portman came to the Senate floor and lambasted public-sector unions as pre-requisites to authoritarian regimes like Hitler's Germany or Stalin's USSR, or even to a lesser extent, Mubarak's Egypt. Mr. Portman would be historically more accurate (see below) but likely would have been MSNBCrucified for a week of primetime news cycles. Brown got off relatively easy, and even predictably got some good press from the outburst.

THREE- Brown invokes the names of Hitler, Stalin and Mubarak. None of these comparisons hold water in relation to whether public-sector unions should have to contribute to their own pensions or insurance. Let's very briefly examine the labor union-government relations in those three cases:
GERMANY-The Nazi party officially called itself the National Socialist German Workers' Party. In Chapter 12, Vol. 2 of Mein Kampf, Hitler expressly dedicates an entire chapter to the importance of labor unions, "They are among the most important institutions in the economic life of the nation. Not only are they important in the sphere of social policy but also, and even more so, in the national political sphere." Through Hitler's ramblings, one easily extracted concept was the political expediency of union support. Doesn't sound to me like he went after unions, indeed, the opposite was true.
EGYPT-Supposedly the backbone of Egypt's economic future, Mubarak coordinated the nationalization of Egypt's textile industry in the early 1990's-it was an abject disaster. By 1997, output and earnings had dropped by 10% and 15% respectively. Until recently the political dividends far outweighed the economic consequences of government takeover. Egypt's government originated from the Arab Socialist Union, which successfully consolidated power in the late 1950's through the early 1960's, and never let go. Whenever new unions arose, rather than crush them, Mr. Mubarak and his predecessors, Mr. Sadat & Mr. Nasser, would systematically co-opt the labor union into the government's auspice. This joined the new union with the other nationalized entities, essentially turning every union in Egypt into a public-sector union. Unions in fact provided Mr. Mubarak with a useful tool to practice flexible authoritarianism: it served as a conduit for political cohesion. Mr. Mubarak apparently also embraced unions.
USSR-The absolute silliest of Mr. Brown's attempts, especially considering his academic background. Millions of Ukrainians starved as a result of farm collectivization in the USSR-the functional unionization of Soviet farmers. Stalin committed genocide to unionize his farms.

So...WTF, Sherrod?
To his credit, Mr. Brown apologized for his remarks. But since he's an elected official and I'm a schmuck from Cleveland, I'm going to go ahead and give Mr. Brown a dose of his own medicine:
Q. What does Sherrod Brown have in common with Adolf Hitler?
A. They were both democratically elected officials, who both tirelessly sought the support of labor unions and tried to use historical demagoguery to rally their constituency to hatred toward their political opponents.

Talk about a dime-store effort from a dime-store politician.

I'm not going to backtrack like you, either, Mr. Brown. I compared you to Hitler, there. Now you know how it feels. At least my comparison was historically accurate.

-RedBearded.

FURTHER READING:
Bova, Russell. Russia and Western Civilization. 99, 297-302. 2003.
Brownlee, Jason. Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization. 2007.
Henry, Clement & Springborg, Robert. Globalization and the Politics of Development in the Middle East. 2001.
Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Volume 2, Chapter 12. 1926.