In Wisconsin, money power trumps people power

Voting ballots are stacked and ready as voters wait in line to cast their ballot Tuesday, June 5, 2012, in Milwaukee. Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker is taking on Democratic challenger Tom Barrett in a recall election. (AP Photo/Jeffrey Phelps)

Recall Campaign Against Scott Walker Fails

John Nichols on June 5, 2012 - 11:27 PM ET, The Nation

Robert M. La Follette, the architect of the progressive movement that a century ago made Wisconsin the nation’s “laboratory of democracy,” recognized that the experiments would at times go awry. “We have long rested comfortably in this country upon the assumption that because our form of government was democratic, it was therefore automatically producing democratic results. Now, there is nothing mysteriously potent about the forms and names of democratic institutions that should make them self-operative,” he observed after suffering more than his share of defeats. “Tyranny and oppression are just as possible under democratic forms as under any other.”

Those words echoed across the decades on the night of June 5, as the most powerful of the accountability tools developed in La Follette’s laboratory—the right to recall errant officials—proved insufficient for the removal of Governor Scott Walker.

The failure of the campaign against Walker, while heartbreaking for Wisconsin union families and the great activist movement that developed to counter the governor and his policies, offers profound lessons not just for Wisconsin but for a nation that is wrestling with fundamental questions of how to counter corporate and conservative power in a Citizens United moment. Those lessons are daunting, as they suggest the “money power” populists and progressives of another era identified as the greatest threat to democracy has now organized itself as a force that cannot be easily thwarted even by determined “people power.”

(More here.)