MSNBC earlier that day on Alex Wagner's show and the need for union leadership to be doing more to educate their members. I agree with the points he made. The question is how do unions use the limited resources they have to potentially follow up on them when their ranks are under assault, which means their finances are as well.

SCHULTZ: What happened here? Is this another example of working class voters going against their own economic interests? What do you think?

FRANK: Well, come on Ed. This is like... that's the story of our times. Right? Going back thirty, forty years. This is what happens again and again and again. But what's going on lately, okay, in the last two, three years with the conservative movement is something really, really interesting, okay?

These guys have taken, as you know, a hard shift to the right, okay, and they've taken sort of the politics of say Herbert Hoover and made it the new politics for our hard times moment. We're in this terrible economic slump, this persistent economic slump that doesn't go away and they have made the sort of 19th century banker view of the world the remedy for all that ails us.

SCHULTZ: Yeah.

FRANK: It's an amazing accomplishment what they've done.

SCHULTZ: It is amazing and they've got the money to do more of it.

E.J. Dionne followed up with some really good points as well.

DIONNE: But I think there's some real problems we progressives have to deal with because conservatives take advantage of them. One of them is the decline in confidence in government's capacity to improve people's lives.

SCHULTZ: To do anything.

DIONNE: Right. And that's a real dagger pointed at the heart of progressivism, because we believe government can improve things. One of the reasons I wrote my new book, Our Divided Political Heart, was to talk about what government had done in our history to build up the country, to create institutions that made us all wealthier. And progressives have a lot of work to do in that area.

Secondly, there's a kind of spiral going on with the trade union movement. When I grew up, unions were a vital part of life. They were very important institutions, people were in unions or had friends who were in unions. It was just part of your community. With the decline in unionization there were fewer and fewer people who have the experience of unions.

And so it's easy, it's easier to run against them and with such a big share of the union population of public employee unions, the Republicans can split public and private workers against each other.