Compromise

I mentioned earlier that the idea of a Progressive/Conservative alliance to destroy teachers' unions wasn't really a Progressive/Conservative alliance but rather a Neoliberal conviction that unions have to go.  Over to the NRO, Jay Nordlinger makes this clear. He writes

Teachers used to be something like a holy caste, practically the most honorable among us. I come from a family of teachers. Everyone thought of it as a noble calling. Teachers earned too little, but that was remedied, over time.

Notice the passive voice. It wasn't, so he would have you believe, the concerted union action that led to improved wages rather it "remedied" itself over time.

He continues:

Then everything went screwy. Teachers were not just well paid. (“Best part-time job in America,” Lee Iacocca once quipped, to the howls of many.) They were some of the most petulant, greediest, nastiest unionists around.

The nerve of workers using their collective agency to improve their wages and, one assumes,  to interfere in the political process in a way that benefits them.  They ought, it seems, to have waited for remedies. After a silly letter from someone in Madison Wisconsin who makes the mistake of assuming that the teachers' union here is a barrier to decent education, Nordlinger makes clear why no sensible Progressive, or really anyone, would ally with those seeking to destroy unions:

I remember something a friend told me — a friend who, 15 years ago, was fighting for school choice. When the teacher-union lawyers entered the courtroom, “I could practically smell the sulphur coming off them.”

 I always thought that the phrase demonizing your enemies was meant more or less metaphorically.