Leftist radicals don’t believe in democracy in the way the term is used in America. If they win, it’s democracy in action, a noble rendering of the wise judgment of the people. If they lose, democracy has been undermined and usually some cabal of corporate villains in a smoke-filled backroom somewhere is to blame for the injustice.
The union goons and paid protesters wreaking havoc in Madison, Wisconsin believe in the radical left-wing un-American conception of democracy.
They’re being cheered on by the Rev. Jesse Jackson who dropped by to outrageously compare the ongoing disruptions to the 1965 civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. “This is a Martin Luther King moment, this is a Gandhi moment,” he said without chuckling.
They’re also being praised and encouraged by the nation’s foremost leftist guru, professor Noam Chomsky. Chomsky told Democracy Now! recently that he hopes the protests begin to resemble the violent demonstrations in Egypt. “It was heartening to see that there are tens of thousands of people protesting in Madison day after day in fact. I mean that’s the beginning maybe of what we really need here, a democracy uprising. Democracy’s almost been eviscerated.”
It should surprise no one that the Democrat-labor-academia-media complex agrees with Chomsky. That brotherhood has already written the narrative in deficit-riddled Wisconsin, anointing selfless, public-spirited, criminally underpaid educators as the heroes in a David-and-Goliath struggle against a mean, tightfisted Republican governor who is the tool of special interests.
Would that it were true.
In reality, the state’s teachers are well compensated. Teachers there earn an average of $89,000 annually in salary and benefits. The average U.S. private sector employee earns just $61,000.
And Wisconsin is facing an estimated $3.6 billion shortfall by 2013. Unlike the federal government, the state can’t print money, so choices have to be made.
Well, actually, the choices were made – back in November – but in recent days the left has been waging all-out war against the will of Wisconsin voters as democratically expressed at the ballot box.
In a repudiation of the previous administration’s spendthrift ways, Gov. Scott Walker was elected on an extensively publicized, popular austerity platform. To help Walker rescue the state from a sea of red ink, voters made sure Republicans received clear majorities in both chambers of the deep blue state’s legislature.
Gov. Walker has been trying to enforce his electoral mandate and has asked state lawmakers to vote on his proposals, which include curbing the power of public sector unions and making their members contribute a little more to their health plans.
Left-wing lawmakers have gone into hiding and union goons have been doing all they can to shut down the state capitol and prevent the legislature from conducting business. These are tactics one might expect to see from the Italian squadristi or German Sturmabteilung, both of which used physical coercion and intimidation to halt the democratic process.
To the disappointment of anarchists everywhere, Walker has responded not with water cannons or truncheons, but by calmly making his case to the public and trying to negotiate with the unions.
So, of course he’s a dirty Fascist in the eyes of leftists who have to demonize the governor in order to keep the donations pouring in. Pro-labor demonstrators in Madison have embraced the “Fascism” meme like mother’s milk.
Political science professor Bob Fitrakis says what the left is doing in Wisconsin is “ultimately about preventing the United States from becoming a full-on fascist state” and “about saving the last shreds of American democracy.” He then plays the Hitler card lamenting that “[t]he first Germans Hitler put in concentration camps were neither Jews nor gypsies – they were trade unionists.”
It’s trite, tedious, high school debating tournament level stuff.
Ironically, Fitrakis is using a version of the Big Lie, a rhetorical technique embraced by history’s most infamous Fascist. (As a political scientist presumably he knows this.)
The professor’s lie is so bold and outrageous that he’s gambling Americans won’t dare to question it, as if there were a straight line between labor law reform in Wisconsin and the ovens of Auschwitz.
So far it looks like Americans aren’t falling for it, and in an ominous sign, a bellwether of progressive thinking also isn’t falling for it.
In a rare moment of candor Time magazine’s Joe Klein, usually a reliable member of the leftist echo chamber, points an accusing finger at his own side:
Revolutions are everywhere–in the Middle East, in the middle west. But there is a difference: in the Middle East, the protesters are marching for democracy; in the Midwest, they’re protesting against it. I mean, isn’t it, well, a bit ironic that the protesters in Madison, blocking the state senate chamber, are chanting “Freedom, Democracy, Union” while trying to prevent a vote? Isn’t it ironic that the Democratic Senators have fled the democratic process? Isn’t it interesting that some of those who–rightly–protest the assorted Republican efforts to stymie majority rule in the U.S. Senate are celebrating the Democratic efforts to stymie the same in the Wisconsin Senate?
Will Big Labor’s rent-a-mobs in Madison now start burning Klein in effigy? It may depend on how much George Soros offers them.
Matthew Vadum is a journalist in Washington, D.C. His book on ACORN and its infiltration of the Obama administration will be published in mid-2011.
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