Alexis de Tocqueville thought, as I observed in an earlier post, that after the grand principled politics of the earliest years of the Republic, American parties and politics would be about minor issues.  About dividing up the spoils, not about the definition of what democracy is and how it should be enacted.  His important insight was to distinguish between two different forms of political contestation. He correctly noted that American politics would be mostly about dividing the spoils, resting upon a general consensus about fundamental principles.  But what he missed is that fundamental conflicts have a way, episodically, of reappearing, sometimes quite unexpectedly, and even with a slight of hand.  Such is our present situation.

This became clear to me as I was surfing the web this morning and came across a post by Jonah Goldberg at the National Review online.  He openly made the move from petit to grand politics in Tocqueville’s sense.

“The protesting public-school teachers with fake doctor’s notes swarming the capitol building in Madison, Wis., insist that Gov. Scott Walker is hell-bent on “union busting.” Walker denies that his effort to reform public-sector unions in Wisconsin is anything more than an honest attempt at balancing the state’s books.

I hope the protesters are right. Public unions have been a 50-year mistake.”

Goldberg argues against the very idea of public employee unions, going a step further than the aggressive Governor of Wisconsin. For Goldberg it is all about the principle, as he supports a politician who must get on with practical political concerns.  As Max Weber would put it, Walker uses an apparent ethic of responsibility, fiscal balance, to hide his ultimate ends; attacking the public employees’ unions.   Walker governs responsibly, moving toward the principled goal.

But there is more than meets the eye in Goldberg’s essay, which is framed around the idea that unions in the private sector fought a valiant and historic struggle against capitalist exploitation, while public unions  just stand for stealing from the public coffers. On the page where his post appears, there is a standard right wing advertisement, that takes the issue one step further from fiscal responsibility to opposition to public employee unions by calling for an anti-union petition.

The libertarian call for anti-union ‘right to work’ laws has been standard fare at the National Review dating back to its founding in the fifties.  Back then, it was a voice in the liberal wilderness, i.e. from its editors’ point of view. Back then there existed a social contract in the nation, supported by a broad spectrum of Democrats and Republicans alike, that prevented sustained attacks on workers’ rights.  Goldberg presents an argument that purports to adhere to that position.  But the anti-Obama, libertarian ad makes clear not all are interested in a social truce. It is not about the spoils but about a principled choice between individual liberty and the primacy of the right to property on the one side, and worker collective action and the struggle for social justice, on the other.

I suspect that Goldberg didn’t object to the ad’s placement, it communicates the logical conclusion of his and Governor Walker’s positions.  It revealed to this reader what is at stake in the Wisconsin events.

Yesterday Anna Paretskaya presented a report on the political standoff in Madison Wisconsin.  This stimulated comments by Michael Corey and Iris, the first generally critical of Paretskaya’s presentation and analysis, the second supportive.  This evening, Chad Alan Goldberg, Vice President, United Faculty & Academic Staff (UFAS), AFT 223 and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison offered his analysis in a reply to that discussion, which I think requires deliberate consideration as a post of its own.  -Jeff

1. Dr. Corey suggests that Anna Paretskaya’s account of events here in Wisconsin is insufficiently objective and lacks a “suspension of belief.” To be sure, knowledge of the social world is always socially situated. Those of us with backgrounds in the labor movement–those of us who are public employees, like Anna and myself, whose collective bargaining rights are now threatened in Wisconsin–are indeed likely to see things differently than someone, like Dr. Corey, with a background in corporate management. However, the tradition of critical theory suggests the possibility of another kind of relationship between the observer and the events she observes. As Max Horkheimer put it, “If … the theoretician and his specific object are seen as forming a dynamic unity with the oppressed class, so that his presentation of societal contradictions is not merely an expression of the concrete historical situation but also a force within it to stimulate change, then his real function emerges…. His profession is the struggle of which his own thinking is a part.”

2. Much of Dr. Corey’s comment lays out the differing claims of the social and political actors in Wisconsin in a “he said, she said” manner without making any real attempt to investigate the substance of those claims. As social scientists, we are interested in facts. And the facts are on the side of the tens of thousands of protesters gathering day after day at the Wisconsin state capitol.

a. Corporate-funded right-wing propagandists insist that public employees are a new privileged class which taxpayers can’t afford. However, as the Wisconsin State Journal reported, a new study by the Economic Policy Institute shows that public employees make less than private workers, when one controls for education and examines total compensation.

b. The fiscal crisis which Governor Walker and Wisconsin Republicans are using as a pretext to eliminate collective bargaining rights and destroy public-sector unions is largely manufactured. The Capitol Times (a Wisconsin newspaper) recently reported: “To the extent that there is an imbalance — Walker claims there is a $137 million deficit — it is not because of a drop in revenues or increases in the cost of state employee contracts, benefits or pensions. It is because Walker and his allies pushed through $140 million in new spending for special-interest groups in January.”

c. Walker’s push for more tax breaks for corporations is further evidence that he’s not interested in balancing the budget. At a time when Wisconsin has a budget shortfall of $137 million, Governor Walker signed a law lavishing $117 million in tax breaks on corporations. As the Wisconsin State Journal reported, these corporate tax breaks will “only deepen the state’s fiscal woes.” Apparently, Wisconsin can afford big tax giveaways to corporations which add to the state’s budget deficit, but not social spending for education, health care, etc. Or, to put it differently, Wisconsin’s current Republican leadership wants to pay for corporate tax breaks with draconian cuts to education (tuition at my university would need to rise by 26% over two years to compensate), health care, and so. This is income redistribution in the wrong direction.

d. On Friday, Feb. 18, Wisconsin’s state and local public employees offered to accept all economic concessions called for in Governor Walker’s budget bill – including Governor Walker’s pension and health care concessions that he says are needed to solve the state budget challenge. With economic issues off the table, it is clear that the only rationale for Republicans continuing to push the governor’s budget bill is to cripple public-sector unions and eliminate public employees’ collective bargaining rights.

In sum, this conflict is not primarily about money, as Dr. Corey and much of the media suggest. It is about the right of teachers, nurses, and other public employees to have a voice in the workplace.

3. Dr. Corey says that “a fundamental question by many supporters of private sector unions is whether or not public sector unions are a good idea.” I was struck by the resounding answer given to this question by the large numbers of private-sector trade unionists who came to the Wisconsin state capitol this week to show their solidarity with public-sector employees. I saw them and met them first-hand. They understand that the anti-labor and pro-corporate right wing, having decimated unions in the private sector (where only 6.9% of workers belong to unions), is now going after public-sector unions (where 36% of workers belong to unions). The right-wing agenda is clearly to destroy what remains of the labor movement in this country.

4. Regarding democracy:

a. Dr. Corey has a narrow and anemic conception of democracy. He is concerned about public employees calling in sick to demonstrate (a “sick out”) and Wisconsin Senate Democrats leaving the state to force Republicans to negotiate. A far more robust conception of democracy can be found in the chapters in Cohen and Arato’s Civil Society and Political Theory on social movements and civil disobedience.

b. The principle threat to democracy in Wisconsin does not come from union members or Democrats. It comes from the governor’s radical and extremist assault on the civil rights of public workers–rights which some public workers have exercised for half a century–to collectively bargain. I quote from a statement signed by hundreds of University of Wisconsin faculty, including myself:

“As scholars, teachers and citizens, we recognize that the right to form unions and bargain collectively has been essential to the establishment and enrichment of democracy in Wisconsin, in the United States and around the world. The International Labor Organization, which the United States joined in 1934, states that ‘the right of workers and employers to form and join organizations of their own choosing is an integral part of a free and open society’ and includes collective bargaining rights among the four ‘fundamental principles and rights at work.’ The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the United States endorsed in 1948, states that all workers have the ‘right to form and to join trade unions for the protection’ of their interests. Since 1935, it has been federal policy in the United States to ‘encourage collective bargaining’ as a tool for avoiding labor conflict and improving wages and working conditions in private industry. The state of Wisconsin led the way in extending those principles to the public sector, adopting a 1959 law stating that public employees, elected officials and the public itself all have an interest in ‘industrial peace, regular and adequate income for the employee, and uninterrupted production of goods and services.’ Toward that end, the law affirmed that ‘an employee has the right, if the employee desires, to associate with others in organizing and bargaining collectively through representatives of the employee’s own choosing, without intimidation or coercion from any source.’ We are concerned, therefore, about the Governor’s proposal to deprive public employees of the right to bargain collectively in Wisconsin.”

c. The assault on public-sector unions in Wisconsin and other states is an attack on democracy for another reason too. As Rachel Maddow reported:

“In 2010, post Citizens United, 7 of the 10 top spending groups [groups that spent the most money on elections] were all right wing…. The only non-conservative groups that cracked the top ten were the public employees union, the SEIU, and the teachers union. That’s it. Unions are the only competition Republicans have in electoral politics…. Without unions, essentially all of the big money in politics would be right-wing money.”

Perhaps a veteran at one of the mass rallies in the Wisconsin state capitol this week put it best: he said he had not fought for democratic rights overseas to have Governor Scott Walker take away his rights at home.

Friends and colleagues, at a time of crisis in Wisconsin and other states, maybe we all need to ask ourselves a fundamental question: Which side are you on?

Anna Paretskaya is a PhD candidate in sociology at the New School for Social Research and lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her primary academic focus is on the study of political and economic liberalizations and the relationship between democracy and capitalism.  She has a front row seat observing the developing events in Madison. This is the first of a series of reports.  Jeff

What started as a stunt by a group of University of Wisconsin-Madison students to deliver a few hundred “Valentine’s Day” cards from students, staff, and faculty to Governor Scott Walker asking him not to slash the university budget has now become national news: close to 100,000 Wisconsinites have come to the State Capitol in Madison over the past four days to protest the so-called “budget repair” bill, effectively occupying the building since Tuesday, diverting traffic from the streets around the Capitol, and hindering Madison’s recent, but beloved tradition, the Winter Festival, that was to take place in downtown’s isthmus area this weekend despite unusually warm temperatures.

On Tuesday, when state legislature’s finance committee was to take up the discussion of the governor’s bill, thousands of people from all over the state descended on the Capitol to lobby against it. At the 17-hour-long committee hearing—a “citizen filibuster,” as one speaker dubbed it—hundreds of Wisconsin residents spoke, nearly all against the bill, and scores expressed dismay at the governor’s attempt to take away the right of 175,000 Wisconsin’s public sector employees to collectively bargain. It wasn’t only union activists, Madison’s aging hippies, and liberal university professors, who waited for up to seven hours to make their two-minute statement before the committee. Amid nurses and teamsters and teacher aides were several self-described Reaganites, fiscal conservatives, and Republicans (or newly ex-Republicans) who were just as distraught by the governor’s heavy-handedness. The UW-Madison’s teaching assistants’ union (TAA), which has been representing graduate employees for the past 40 years, expressed the prevailing sentiment best: “This bill is an affront to democracy on two important levels. First, it proposes to completely eliminate the fundamental human right of fair representation and voice in determining workplace conditions. Second, the process for the passage of this bill has been shamefully undemocratic.” The governor of the state that prides itself on transparency and integrity of the political process, referred to here as “The Wisconsin Idea,” wanted the legislature to pass the bill within a week of its introduction, not giving the pubic much time to weigh in, nor for the elected representatives a chance to debate amendments.

Most of the rally chants and handmade posters that now adorn the hallways of the Capitol are about democracy, solidarity, government accountability, and unions, not so much about pay cuts or benefit reductions (although no doubt all working families in Wisconsin are concerned about those too). In the 1930s, Wisconsin was a birthplace of one of the largest public-employee unions in the country, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and the first state to pass a comprehensive collective bargaining law some twenty-five years later. Today, protesters of the bill undoubtedly sense that they are again on the front lines of the battle for the fate of the labor movement. But it seems that for many of them it is just as much about democracy and exercising their rights more generally: there are constant references to the recent democratic uprising in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East. A recent army veteran said at one of the rallies that he had not fought for the democratic rights overseas to have them taken away from him at home. Daily rallies outside of the Capitol begin with the singing of “The Star Spangled Banner.” The crowd inside the building recited the “Pledge of Allegiance” along with the lawmakers at the opening of Wednesday’s legislative session that was broadcast on closed-circuit TV.

The bill is still up for a vote: the governor hasn’t backed away from  any of its draconian stipulations, and Republican legislators have vowed not to amend it in any significant way. Supporters of the bill are expected in Madison on Saturday. It is unclear how many will arrive and how many of them will actually be from Wisconsin. According to a recent poll, two thirds of Wisconsinites believe the bill goes too far and strongly oppose it (including the provision to remove collective bargaining rights). Even though the legislative committee stopped taking testimony early Wednesday morning, people keep signing up to speak before an on-going listening session by the state assembly’s Democrats.

At the very least, the governor’s stance has clearly galvanized the labor and progressive movements. A running joke among local labor activists has been: “Who hired Scott Walker as a lead organizer?” Although they also wish this wasn’t gallows humor.