Abstract
Greetings from Wisconsin, 3 months into what some have tagged our ‘‘Main Street Rebellion.’’ A couple of weeks ago, I found myself sitting in a messy, airless room above a coffee shop, poring over Republican-filed petitions to recall Democratic senators. We were perusing the handiwork of out-of-state canvassers who had entered long lists of names from the phone book, including an entry for State Assembly Representative Mark Pocan’s father, who has been dead for 20 years. Other volunteers were out in the streets collecting affidavits from people who had signed the petitions because they were told they demanded the recall of Governor Scott Walker. Republicans were contesting the validity of six recall petitions filed by Democrats against Republican senators—on the grounds that the petitioners’ names were not included on all pages of the document. Three blocks away from the coffee shop office, teams of citizen observers watched the recount of ballots from the recent State Supreme Court election. Looking up from a pile of petitions, a fellow volunteer plaintively turned the movement’s pervasive tag-line into a question: ‘‘This is what democracy looks like?’’ How did we get to this point? And what does it say about the prospects for grassroots movements targeting corporate power and defending labor rights and social spending? These are questions I have been asking myself incessantly since February. Here is an attempt to recap the, ‘‘How did we get here’’ question. In February and March of this year, public sector workers and their friends and neighbors took to the streets in Wisconsin. A few months earlier, perhaps in a fit of pique at the bad news of the recession, our state had elected a Republican governor and Republican majorities in both legislative houses. The governor, Scott Walker, had campaigned as a moderate but soon revealed himself to be at the cutting edge of the Tea Party agenda. The massive demonstrations that began February 14th were
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