Cheese Heads and the future of Democracy

I have been watching the situation in the Wisconsin legislature for the last week or so, and as small-time and parochial as it may seem in the context of the current upheavals in the Middle East, I feel that it is far more important to the trajectory of democracy in the world than whatever happens on the North African coast.

The short version is that the State of Wisconsin (like most of the rest of the USA) is broke, and has to make cuts; lots of them. The (Republican) governor Scott Walker has recognized that the expense of public employees is one of the biggest drains on the treasury and wants to remove their ability to engage in collective bargaining.

Your reaction to that (under the circumstances that there isn't enough money to pay all these people what they expect to be paid) will sort you into either the Right or Left camp. All over the world we have run into that sticky point for Socialists that Margaret Thatcher warned about; we have pretty much run out of other peoples' money. If you are the source of that money (taxpayer) you will have a different idea of how this should play out than the recipients of it will.

This is standard Big Government/small Government stuff. What makes this situation important for the future of the liberal democratic system is the nature of the legislative opposition to the bill; the opposition went AWOL and called its' partisans out into the streets.

This sort of things happens all the time in tin-pot republics the world over: don't like the results? Protest and say that your opponent cheated, is illegitimate, etc. thus paralyzing the political system. This is what the 14 Democratic state senators from Wisconsin are doing by hiding in a neighboring State. By being absent and across State lines, they are preventing a quorum and subverting the will of the electorate by preventing the functioning of the legislature.

This could not happen in Canada or many other places, but the quirks of the US constitution which enable this farce throw the political stability of the most powerful nation in the world into question. This is that "Shining city upon a hill" that is supposed to be the beacon of liberty throughout the world?

Back to the aspiring democracies in the Mediterranean and the mid-east most likely next post (still very fluid; Qaddafi still hanging on as of today) but we ignore the current mob rule in Madison Wisconsin (of all places) at our peril. For want of a nail...