A Twitter-friend and I have been batting around an analogy between the 1920s and the era we’re living through now. There’s the brief rise of a white Protestant right-populist movement (the KKK then, Tea Party now). There’s the likeness between Obama’s conservative brand of progressivism and that of Herbert Hoover — an analogy that was drawn out at length by Kevin Baker in an essay in Harper’s a couple years ago.

But what got that ball rolling was this comment from the economics blogger Noah Smith:

The country is becoming more liberal, but unions are losing more and more battles. This should tell us something.