And when they get really angry, they get going. It's happened before and it's happening now according to William Cronon, history professor at the University of Wisconsin. In an article in today's New York Times, Cronon says Governor Scott Walker has blown it.
Mr. Walker’s conduct has provoked a level of divisiveness and bitter partisan hostility the likes of which have not been seen in this state since at least the Vietnam War. Many citizens are furious at their governor and his party, not only because of profound policy differences, but because these particular Republicans have exercised power in abusively nontransparent ways that represent such a radical break from the state’s tradition of open government.
Perhaps that is why — as a centrist and a lifelong independent — I have found myself returning over the past few weeks to the question posed by the lawyer Joseph N. Welch during the hearings that finally helped bring down another Wisconsin Republican, Joe McCarthy, in 1954: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
Scott Walker is not Joe McCarthy. Their political convictions and the two moments in history are quite different. But there is something about the style of the two men — their aggressiveness, their self-certainty, their seeming indifference to contrary views — that may help explain the extreme partisan reactions they triggered. McCarthy helped create the modern Democratic Party in Wisconsin by infuriating progressive Republicans, imagining that he could build a national platform by cultivating an image as a sternly uncompromising leader willing to attack anyone who stood in his way. Mr. Walker appears to be provoking some of the same ire from adversaries and from advocates of good government by acting with a similar contempt for those who disagree with him.
What happened after McCarthy? It took a few years but then Kennedy happened. Much of the support and energy for Kennedy's campaign came from old political allies in Boston but very considerable and effective support came from universities.
As Cronon says, it's not the same era. They had Soviet threats and H-bombs. We have the Middle East, oil, and a crumbling, corrupt democracy. They had Joe McCarthy and a frightened populace. We have Reagan, Bush, Cheney and the dominance of corporations. They lived in what felt like nuclear end-times. We live in environmental end-times. They got active; we've gotten oddly passive. Vocal, querelous, yes. But passive. The sheer, malign idiocy of Scott Walker (and his many backers, financial and political) may well turn out to be something the left -- finally! -- finds intolerable.
