They saw that shit as dirty jobs that were beneath them so they were all too happy to fuck the miners over.
I think it's pretty common for everyone to not understand the absolute SCALE of things, but liberals have it real bad. They're unable to understand that "1 million coal jobs" concentrated in a few regions is death for those regions, because where they're used to, a million jobs is spread over multiple industries, and people flow between them relatively easily.
And so they ALWAYS end up trying to smother a dying industry when they could just leave it for 10-20 more years, and the people who worked it would retire away, and their kids would work something else somewhere else.
But boiling frogs is not on their menu, it's too damn slow.
Tim recounts Occupy Wall Street with lots of bad actors who infiltrated the movement.
The key was bringing in intersectionality or whatever. If Bernie Sanders is ranting about the 1% and wages sucking ass, he's going to get way more support than if you force him to also list of ten thousand other liberal causes, like troon balloons or whatever.
Any
single issue group has tremendous power as long as they stay focused and single-issue, because they can pick up people from both sides. They can't
win political office, but they can definitely shape the discussion. And the way to attack them is to make the group become a multi-issue group, which means they just become part of a political party, and lose their grassroots support.