Depending on your partisan loyalties, this picture of a winking Gov. Scott Walker, soundly victorious in Tuesday night’s Wisconsin recall election, is evocative of either the scrappy kid who just knocked out the school bully, or the fox in the henhouse.
Suzanne Tucker / Shutterstock.com
Why not both?
Yesterday, I made the case that Walker and his devotees have a narrow ideological view of why the country is mired in debt. Walker and others like him — Gov. Chris Christie in New Jersey, for example — have achieved national prominence by dealing boldly with state-level problems like overly generous public pensions that have been brewing for a long time. However … these are not the same problems that President Obama is dealing with.
The Great Crash of ’08, with its Giant Revenue-Sucking Sound, threw these state-level problems into sharp relief, and, indeed, made them even worse than they already were.
Yet to listen to the high-fiving GOP pundit class last night, one got the impression that “too much spending” — especially on those school teachers with their cushy retirement packages! — is connected, somehow, to the demise of Countrywide and travesties like “Mantoloking.”
To be sure: I’ve got no fundamental problem with the reforms that Scott Walker imposed on public-sector unions in Wisconsin. I’d have more respect for him if he had imposed them uniformly on firefighters and police officers, but the fact remains that it’s not unreasonable to force government workers to pay more for their health care and retirement.
But Walker’s party is enjoying a perverse advantage right now: They are fooling their constituents into thinking that while they deal decisively with genuine issues of state budgeting, they’re also solving a separate problem (public finances destabilized by tax cuts and private-sector recklessness) that they helped create.
If we must consider the reforms enacted by Scott Walker and proposed by Paul Ryan as of a piece — we shouldn’t, but let’s do, for the sake of argument — then it seems to me they’re like an accident-prone driver who tells a judge he has resolved to quit drag-racing. And the judge replies, “That’s nice. But when are you going to quit drinking, too?”
Rossbach 
My heart was with the movement against Walker, though it was clear in the last month all the mistakes they were making, and Barrett’s talk about “tea party extremism” was pathetic. The only thing I would change, at least in the abstract, in your account of the immediate causes is that Walker went about his abstractly reasonable demands in a very reckless and heavy-handed way.
All that being said, I certainly agree with your general point, but would add another large one – which is that the neocons, in their fanaticism on this issue and for Paul Ryan and the like, are transparently on the warpath against entitlements for the sake of preserving the military budget and its endless growth, i.e., the empire. I continue to believe, furthermore, that this is in major contradiction to the “welfare-warfare state” paradigm that most anti-empire conservatives refuse to acknowledge, much less consider.
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