For Socialists, Legislative Hardball Has Limits

The Right, as Corey Robin has famously argued, learns from the Left. Edmund Burke argued conservatives should copy the Jacobins. The slaveholders, even as they denounced the rights of man, celebrated the demotic virtues of widespread slaveholding in the antebellum South. Newt Gingrich argued that the conservative minority in the House needed to adopt “Viet Cong” tactics to harry the majority. More recently, the Left has also attempted to learn from the Right. Liberal activists created the State…