After the Wisconsin protests, what?

I think it’s fair to argue, as many labor organizers have done, that Republicans didn’t win their landslide victories last November on a platform of destroying or ham-stringing unions.

How many voters raced to the polls in hopes of eliminating collective bargaining rights or establishing new “right to work” rules?

I’m guessing not very many.  But that said, Americans in states like Maine, Michigan and Wisconsin, where huge labor dustups are in the offing, can’t have had any illusions about the class of Republican conservatives they were electing.

The GOP flies under a tea party banner these days and the tea party has promised a major realignment in American society, setting out to role back most of the reforms and laws established under the New Deal and the Great Society.

It’s the American way, of course, for people to gather and protest and shake their fists.

The pro-labor rallies in Wisconsin and around the country are healthy expressions of political sentiment — just as the tea party rallies were.

But I’m skeptical about the liberal movement’s ability to translate all that zeal and hub-bub into the campaign contributions, volunteers and ultimately the votes needed to shift the country’s political momentum.

The GOP made that transition.  They took a lot of anger and frustration and turned it into votes.  Along the way, they regained the high ground not only in Washington, but in dozens of state capitals around the country.

Even many Democratic governors — including Andrew Cuomo — have adopted many of the right’s basic philosophies, including an aversion to tax increases and a willingness to embrace deep program cuts.

The problem here isn’t that there aren’t plenty of potential Democratic voters out there.  Barack Obama proved in 2008 that it’s possible to motivate a huge number of people around the liberal message.

No, the real problem is that the left doesn’t have a coherent language or a vision for where they hope to take us.

Republicans do. They want our government to function (or not function) in a way that’s roughly comparable to the Federal system that existed in the 1930s, playing a much more limited role in our lives.

They are convinced — even when the factual evidence seems to contradict their faith — that this approach will generate more prosperity and more liberty for more people.

So what do the Wisconsin protesters believe? In an annual cost of living increase?  In tenure and seniority rules?  I don’t think that will cut it.

Napoleon argued that people don’t go to war for “a halfpence a day or for a petty distinction.  You must speak to the soul in order to electrify him.”

The same is true for why people go to the polls, and so far the left just doesn’t have an electrifying message.

One hurdle they face, frankly, is that we Americans have short memories.  How many tea party protesters have studied what life was like for rank-and-file workers before unions existed?

How many laissez-faire libertarians have sat down to bone up on the Dickensian depths of poverty that existed — especially among our senior citizens — in the good old days before Big Government?

How many people alive today remember life before the Federal interstate highway system, or before the Clean Air Act?

Bluntly, it’s hard to rally people against dangers that no longer seem real, especially when the sagging economy eclipses those issues with  more immediate problems.

But unless the Democrats and their allies can translate the hub-bub in Madison into a more coherent big-picture message, one that electrifies and offers a real promise for the future, these protests will do little to slow the GOP’s return to power.

Tags: politics