The fanatical Republican governors pushing through anti-labor legislation across the country are engaging in what The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel calls especially “despicable politics.” Vanden Heuvel joins MSNBC’s The Ed Show, along with The Nation’s John Nichols, to call on Democrats to cement their allegiance to the working class.

Responding to a newly proposed bill that would deny food stamps to families who have a member on strike, Heuvel says, “these extremists want to take this country back, back to a time when even Charles Dickens couldn’t have imagined such a stealth, cruel bill.”

Their actions, she says, are part of a 30-year, well-funded Republican strategy to destroy the rights of working people on a national scale. Instead of looking for enemies abroad, the US should now “reinvest in a country that is living on the carcass of the industrial base of the New Deal," vanden Heuvel says. "We can do better.”

—Sara Jerving