For several decades now, a basic political dynamic has recurred in Washington. Afforded political power, Republicans push their agenda as fiercely and aggressively as possible, using every tool at their disposal. Among Democrats, something like the opposite is more typically the case. Awarded a sweeping mandate in 2008 and a governing trifecta in 2009, to take a recent example, Barack Obama and his administration refused to go to the mats for the public option for health care, refrained from overhauling America’s financial system, and backed away from promised reforms that would have made it easier for workers to organize unions.

The same has often been true at the state level. As Thomas Frank observed in his 2016 book Listen, Liberal, many solidly blue states are effectively governed from the technocratic center-right. After their landslide midterm victory in 2010, meanwhile, Republicans newly elected to governors’ mansions and statehouses across America quickly moved to transform erstwhile Democratic bastions into laboratories of conservative policy. In both Wisconsin and Michigan, historic strongholds of the American labor movement, a barrage of anti-worker laws soon followed.

With a red trifecta at his disposal, Michigan’s then governor Rick Snyder took aim squarely at the state’s unions and rammed through sweeping “right-to-work” legislation. As State Senator Darrin Camilleri described it: