As labor unions plan their political work for this election year, they face two uncomfortable truths:

First, from the state to the national levels, Republicans – relying on both a huge influx of money unleashed by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling and extreme attack ad nastiness – have demonstrated their intensified determination to dismantle the labor movement, workers’ rights and government programs, policies and institutions critical for the economic security and democratic voice of the 99% of Americans.

Second, many working people – including many union members and even union leaders – are disappointed with the inability of the Democrats, including President Obama, to fight for progressive policies and challenge the unified and reactionary Right.

“I wish President Obama had governed consistent with his [more populist] rhetoric in the State of the Union address,” says Bob Master, Communications Workers of America (CWA)’s District 1 Legislative-Political Coordinator and Working Families Party co-chair in New York, reflecting widely shared labor movement sentiments. “Notwithstanding all our disappointment with the Obama presidency, it’s clear that the clowns on the Republican side would be devastating to working people. But we’re anticipating a tougher challenge motivating people because there is a lot of disappointment and letdown.”

Dashed hopes, even if Republicans deserve most of the blame, depressed the 2010 turnout of Obama’s 2008 supporters, while Tea Party resentment boosted votes for Republicans as they took control of the House and many state governments. That’s still a hurdle. “There’s just not the enthusiasm, excitement, electricity about the presidential race or congressional races in a lot of states. Overall, it’s nowhere like 2008,” says Joseph Hansen, international president of the United Food and Commercial Workers union. “That’s labor’s hardest problem.”

Independence days?

Democrats and Obama need unions – one of the few credible Democratic-leaning persuaders with blue-collar workers – to minimize the Republican advantage among moderate-income white workers with less than a college degree, a frustrated demographic that nonetheless generally shares many progressive populist economic views.

Union leaders have so far expressed their own frustration with Obama and his party in various ways, such as withholding endorsements of previously labor-backed candidates (perhaps even of Obama, says machinists union spokesman Rick Sloan); withholding money (last year the politically active, well-heeled firefighters union announced it would no longer contribute to any federal candidates, then revised plans recently to contribute to select labor champions); or not attending the Democratic national convention this year (partly because it will be in anti-union North Carolina).

Most unions also plan to revise their recent strategy to strengthen the labor movement’s political influence and, as AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka frequently insists, its “independence.” But it is now more difficult than ever for labor to find Republicans to support as an alternative to the Democratic Party. The limited Working Families Party model of cross-endorsing labor-friendly Democrats is right now the biggest left-wing hope for a labor or progressive party.

“Independence is about building our structure, about getting working people to mobilize, whether they’re union members or not, and talk about differences out there. It’s supporting people who are friends,” Trumka told In These Times in late January. “It’s about year-round mobilization that can transition quickly from electoral politics to advocacy to accountability. Those [politicians] that are real friends will get more attention from us; our marginal friends will get less attention; obviously those that aren’t friends will get the opposite kind of attention.

“It’s not about the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. It’s about workers having an independent voice in a system where people can drop in $5 or $6 million at the drop of a hat to alter a presidential race. It’s about us having that independent voice and talking to workers, union and nonunion workers.”

Proposals to create a more potent and independent labor movement – though not universally supported by union leaders – include:

• Full-time politics. In response to unionists’ ire at politicians taking labor’s election-time money, and then turning their backs when making decisions, Trumka and others want the AFL-CIO political apparatus to mobilize workers and allies year-round to elect candidates and then to make sure they deliver on policy. United Steelworkers International President Leo Gerard insists such a year-round organization – regularly proposed over the past 15 years but never fully implemented – must be a “grassroots, bottom-up” effort that can take the offense politically. And it must focus on issues and nonelectoral actions as much as candidates and voting, says Wisconsin SEIU leader Bruce Colburn. Ultimately, Master says, the current top priority of electing the president isn’t enough.

• Mobilizing all workers. Union members are more likely to vote and cast ballots for labor-backed candidates than otherwise similar nonunion workers. To increase union influence, strategists agree that they should reach out more to the unorganized working class. But they don’t always know how to do it.

The 3 million-member Working America affiliate of the AFL-CIO doesn’t only influence nonunion workers (mainly suburban politically moderate independents). In some areas, it is also becoming a cohesive, dues-paying, direct action, issue-oriented community organization in support of workers’ rights – and an important way to expand labor’s political power.

After the Citizens United decision, which the AFL-CIO supported, unions can spend their money more freely on politically educating nonmembers. The AFL-CIO has set up its own Super PAC – Workers’ Voice, now with a modest $3.7 million – to help with that task. But the PAC must overcome skepticism from some union leaders.

• A broader movement with a bigger message. Unions in Wisconsin, Ohio and other states fighting antiworker Republican governors have generated feisty community-labor coalitions at both state and local levels. In doing so, they have learned that labor often has to loosen its control over organizations to gain scale, says Midwest CWA Vice President Seth Rosen.

Many strategists worried that this statewide work might distract from normal political work. But recent statewide fights, local union leaders conclude, are ultimately likely to strengthen labor politically. And Hansen, who also chairs the labor federation Change To Win, wants to expand the state fight model of cooperation among CTW, the AFL-CIO and the National Education Association.

Building a movement, not a union

Other leaders draw inspiration from the Occupy movement and its message of the 99% resisting domination by the 1%. CWA President Larry Cohen says that unions “must build something deeper, do movement-building for the long haul, not just for this election. … Workers want to hit the streets, not just the ballot box. They want us to take on the fight for a democracy for the 21st century and for economic justice.”

Within the labor movement and within individual unions, like SEIU, strategists disagree.

Some want to focus on winning elections, especially for president. Others see elections as part of building a new movement. “Win or lose,” Rosen says, “we have to build a movement.” Trumka insists both strategies are compatible.

Likewise, some leaders prefer a tried-and-true labor message for 2012 – “good jobs, no cuts, fair taxes,” as summed up by SEIU National Political Director Brandon Davis. Others advocate a more ambitious challenge to the power of big corporations and financial capital. Working America Executive Director Karen Nussbaum says this is an increasingly popular choice among her members.

If labor can expand its horizons, as many leaders, despite their frustrations, seem inclined to do, the political prospects for this fall and beyond are brighter than they now seem.

Who gets to write a war’s history determines how it is viewed for generations. But in the case of World War I, one of the best accounts of the milieu that triggered the conflict was a novel – or three, to be exact: John Dos Passos’ trilogy, U.S.A., published in the 1930s. Any attempt to understand the war since has had to contend, directly or indirectly, with the granite truth of Dos Passos’ objections to the flood of blood unleashed by that immense and needless slaughter.

TNPR news analyst and author Jack Beatty’s new book, The Lost History of 1914 (Walker & Co.), shows the triolgy’s influence, especially in its accounts of socialist efforts for peace. While Dos Passos portrays war protesters, leftists, soldiers and workers in North America and Europe, Beatty moves from Mexican social revolutionaries Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata to the great French socialist leaders Jean Juarès and Joseph Caillaux, showing how their struggles to stave off war and barbarism were undone.

Beatty devotes much of his book to the “what if” questions. What if Juarès had not been assassinated by a reactionary? What if Caillaux’s career had not been destroyed by a scandal originating in the hatred of a rightist editor? But Beatty’s most convincing point – and one Dos Passos made – is that the Great War led to Nazism, World War II and the Holocaust. “It will be long before this nation [Germany] will be in any condition to be regarded again as a menace to the peace of Europe,” one paper mistakenly predicted at war’s end. As Beatty observes: “The Allies would not have won the war without starving the German people. But victory through hunger, followed by peace through vengeance, came at a terrible price … the Nazi Party.”

Beatty delineates how famine bred a generation of Germans easily recruited by brown shirts. “We were hungry all the time; we had forgotten how it felt to have our stomachs full,” a German recalled about his wartime childhood. That starvation was of a piece with the overall slaughter, of which journalist and politician Andre Tardieu wrote about France in 1922: “5,300,000 were killed or wounded … not counting 500,000 men who have come back to us from German prisons in very bad shape.”

The response of soldiers, deep in the mud and gore of trench warfare, was, Beatty writes, “live and let live,” a democratic and internationalist sentiment that alarmed the officer corps and the ruling caste, who quickly sought to crush it. For Beatty, trench warfare was not “death’s victory,” but quite the opposite – a concession to the necessity and desirability of survival. It was defensive, not offensive, and therefore affronted the titanic, warlike pride of military notables, who Beatty demonstrates rightly perceived it as a threat to their power.

Facilitating the advance of death and thus postwar fascism, Beatty argues, was the unparalleled callousness of the Great War’s elites, who blithely turned Europe into a charnel house. The revolting spectacle of British Prime Minister H. H. Asquith leching after his young society mistress, from whom he could scarcely manage to distract himself to attend to the butchery of the millions he sent to the front, is a stark emblem in this book of what World War I was about: the idle and indulged elite toying with and disposing of the lives of countless ordinary people.

At the other extreme strode the energetic likes of Mustapha Kemal, the founder of modern secular Turkey who commanded troops at Gallipoli with the famous words: “I don’t order you to attack. I order you to die.” With such governing classes, it is no wonder that “between August 1914 and January 1915 … over a million men died in battle,” sacrifices to “the cult of the offensive” (or what might more accurately be termed the idiocy of attacking in waves in the machine-gun age).

But few civilians knew. As Beatty documents, the press took its cue from its pampered overlords, censored itself without being told to and never mentioned the corpses that blanketed he ground. Instead Beatty gives a list of the euphemisms that clouded journalistic reports: honor, sacrifice, valor, pluck and the fallen. “The ‘cheerfulness in the face of vicarious torment and danger’ that marked the war reporting the soldiers read on leave or wiped their arses on in the trenches ‘roused the fighting troops to fury,’ ” he writes.

With admirable scholarship, riveting footnotes and acerbically unsparing prose, Beatty weaves together these primary strands: socialist struggles for peace, revolutionary fury at an imperialist war (Lenin, Trotsky, etc.), the war’s barbarism, the genesis of Nazism and the extermination of European Jews, and the criminal indifference of the belligerents’ governing elites. The result is a startling study of what Woodrow Wilson called “an injury to civilization,” as indeed all war is, be it in Iraq, Iran, Europe or elsewhere. But in this case, the injury festered, infecting the 20th century with one of the most virulent evils ever witnessed in human history. The socialists, this book shows, were correct. Peace would have been better.

I have a love/hate relationship with Rolling Stone, which isn’t surprising given that I never was, and certainly am not now, part of the magazine’s desired demographic. On the one hand, nearly every woman who appears on the cover must be dressed like a stripper in the final stages of her act. By contrast, Jon Stewart, Steven Tyler and other men on the cover actually wear clothes. On the other hand, how could we have gotten through the final years of the Bush administration, not to mention the financial crisis, without the indispensible Matt Taibbi, or the political reporting of Tim Dickinson? In its in-depth articles about the environment, the war in Afghanistan, the Fox News echo chamber, and, of course, electoral politics, Rolling Stone publishes some of the liveliest and most outraged exposés in America.

Dickinson’s article “The GOP’s Crackpot Agenda” should be required reading for everyone. Unlike some of the overly circumspect – one might say timorous – coverage of the House Republicans and presidential aspirants, whose completely outrageous positions are reported with a straight face, Dickinson tells it like it is. What is their agenda? “Promote Dirty Jobs; Trash the Environment; Unleash Wall Street; Destroy the Safety Net; Wreck the Economy; Wage Endless War; Cut Taxes on the Rich; Attack Abortion Rights; and Bash Immigrants.” He left out one crucial item: “Wage War on Gays and Lesbians.”

Let’s focus first on the word “crackpot.” Various commentators have resorted to the word “sideshow” to characterize the truly bizarre parade of serial Republican front-runners who brandish their ignorance like Olympic medals and promote the most extremist, numbskull policies to be heard in years. But it was Elayne Rapping who really nailed it: In the age of reality TV, when the Jersey Shore cast unabashedly goes looking for the Vatican in Florence, the Kardashians stage a highly profitable charade of a wedding and stupidity, meanness and dissimulation are a centerpiece of entertainment; it’s how you get and sustain attention these days. If it works for the “Real Housewives” of wherever, why not for presidential aspirants? As Rapping noted, “Mistakes of fact, and ignorance of even the boldest headline news issues, have been displayed throughout, in many cases even creating short term bumps in their poll numbers.”

Yes, it was entertaining to watch Herman Cain wonder what or where Libya is and Rick Perry give a speech in which he appeared to have mainlined a cocktail of roofies and Robitussin. But the carnivalesque nature of the Republican debates and campaign can numb us to how dangerous these candidates are.

So the Dickinson piece, with its bold-faced laying out of issue after issue, got me thinking. In the past, Republicans have successfully used single-issue passions – homophobia, opposition to abortion, creationism – to mobilize particular voters in crucial districts. Maybe it’s time for progressives to do the same. Take any single issue you care about the most – the environment, gay rights, income inequality, reproductive freedom, judicial appointments, healthcare. Things will get worse under a Republican president and Congress. Of course, most of us care about all these issues. But to avoid the so-called “enthusiasm gap” of 2010 that brought us this crowd of obstructionist Neanderthals, activists and progressive PACs need to target people’s hot-button issues much more aggressively, especially given the titanic amount of money that will get poured into Republican coffers courtesy of the Citizens United decision.

There are plenty of voters disappointed by or indifferent to President Obama. But these same people may have strong feelings about the dangers of global warming (which Mitt Romney no longer knows the cause of), have a desperate need to preserve Social Security, have gay friends or relatives whose rights they are sick of seeing trampled, and so on. And they will vote on these issues if galvanized.

Even President Obama seems to be getting it. Despite the staggering number of people still out of work, this election year’s mantra should not be, “It’s the economy, stupid,” but, “It’s the Republican Congress, stupid.” Reports suggest that’s how Obama will campaign, which would be an overdue change. In the meantime, let’s tack Dickinson’s article up on our walls and strategize how to use single issues to keep fanatical bums out of office.