In Socialism, his 1972 magnum opus, Michael Harrington termed the American labor movement an “invisible” mass social democratic movement. Even as he noted that its language, its forms, and its foreign policy (at least at the AFL-CIO) suggested nothing like social democratic beliefs, it had been the leading force behind such landmark Great Society legislation as Medicare and Medicaid, and remained the leading force behind expanding such social welfare policies in the years thereafter. Most commentators and scholars of American politics had missed this transformation, Harrington wrote, because it had happened gradually and incrementally, with no ideological proclamations or even much in the way of discussions to herald this transformation. Hence, its invisibility. more
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