My friend Paul Buhle, the great historian of the American left, has edited, with his wife Mari Jo Buhle, It Started in Wisconsin: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Labor Protest (http://www.versobooks.com/books/1076-it-started-in-wisconsin), just out from Verso. The best pieces in this collection of eighteen essays on the recent uprising in Wisconsin place the spirited pro-union and anti-Governor Walker rallies in the context of Wisconsin’s democratic populist history: in other words, as rooted expressions of a still vital La Follette tradition. Paul Buhle—who coauthored an outstanding biography of the Iowa patriot and New Left historian William Appleman Williams—notes that a “fresh, fascinating” aspect of the Wisconsin movement was its “localist or regionalist” character. “Reference to the distinctive features of Wisconsin pop culture,” he writes, “situated the resistance to Walker within the vernacular of Midwestern democracy.” Never underestimate the iconography of brats and cheddar and the Green Bay Packers.
[A] “fresh, fascinating” aspect of the Wisconsin movement was its “localist or regionalist” character…[which] situated the resistance to Walker within the vernacular of Midwestern democracy.”
As we’ve argued before! Thanks for the heads-up, Bill; I’ll have to check this book out.
Recent Wisconsinite here, and someone who visited the protests (for purposes of observation more than anything else; I’m ambivalent regarding Walker).
At the very least–based on the excerpts available–it appears that the authors are valorizing both the protesters and their cause. Of the protesters who are actually from Wisconsin, most are statists of one sort or another, and the State, I would argue, is one of the biggest enemies of the porch. Furthermore, the unions themselves are rather thin gruel if we’re trying to bolster/recover Burke’s “little platoons” in any meaningful way.
I’m no fan of Burke, who betrayed the American Revolution in the end, and misdirected what could have been a valid criticism of the French Revolution by degenerating into a defense of monarchy, but I too am currently still in Wisconsin, and have no use at all for Walker.
It is of no great significance that those who did not support Walker in the first place want him recalled. It means a great deal that people who voted for him have circulated recall petitions. I haven’t seen Buhle’s book, but I hardly think he could have missed the signs around the capitol “I voted for Walker — and he spit on me,” or “I voted for Walker and I’m sorry.”
A fair number of public employees who earn decent incomes and own their own homes are prepared to vote for low taxes… until they find out how that is to be financed. Voters tired of unquestionably venal Democratic leadership were taken in by a fresh face talking about his brown bag lunch and the need for 250,000 new jobs.
Democrats could easily snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, if they take the recall as a mandate for the tired old politics and tired old candidates they have previously offered. Nominating Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett again would be a great way to secure Walker’s continuation in office. What is needed is someone who can deal with a genuine shortage of funds in new ways… which might even meet some version of a porcher seal of approval. There is nothing more statist than Walker, who took office with an agenda of centralizing unprecedented power in the hands of the governor, giving away massive quantities of public money to favored insiders, and slashing needed resources, such as mass transit, without offering any basis on which local communities could have the resources to take matters into their own hands in any creative way.
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