"The people need a victory. The teachers in Chicago need to stay strong and win this struggle. I’m not sure how far this will go, but we’ve talked about how we aren’t teaching history, but maybe making it."

"In a post yesterday (“Why teachers unions are different: A reply to Doug Henwood”), Matt Yglesias takes exception to my speculation on why elite liberals don’t like teachers unions (“Why do so many liberals hate teachers’ unions?”). Boiling it down to a soundbite: unlike labor disputes in the private sector, where raises would come out of the pockets of shareholders, raises for public sector workers come out of the pockets of “taxpayers,” meaning you, me, Matt, and everyone else—mostly, that is, people of fairly modest means.

This use of “taxpayers” is a fascinating bit of ideology. Its dispersion into wide use marks a very successful deployment by the right of a very conservative notion. It is founded on a view that one lives in this world primarily as an individual, and consumes privately. Any sense of collective consumption (or investment, if you prefer), via the public budget, is ruled out. As is so often the case with right-wing concepts, reactionaries have a much clearer and more consistent sense of the politics behind their buzzword. Liberals, or neoliberals, like Yglesias import the right’s concepts without fully integrating them into their worldview. Yglesias wouldn’t support Paul Ryan’s fiscal policy, but he’s happy to use a word that’s deeply implicated in its underlying concepts.

Also ruled out in this usage of “taxpayers” is any sense of the state as a contested realm for class struggle. We’re all taxpayers—even though the upper classes, who are overflowing with money, have long been evading their share of paying for public goods like education."