In the longer run I suspect Democratic pols across the country will rue the creative day their local embodiments took flight from Wisconsin.
David Brooks sets the stage (or two-ring circus):
Whatever you might say about Walker, he and the Republican majorities in Wisconsin were elected, and they are doing exactly what they told voters they would do. It’s the Democratic minority that is thwarting the majority will by fleeing to Illinois. It’s the left that has suddenly embraced extralegal obstructionism.
Uncomfortable truths, but truths nevertheless, even if, to some, Brooks perhaps overreaches in his use of "exactly." To me, he does not.
Any plausibly aware Wisconsin voter should not have required candidate Scott Walker's airing of 60-second ads bluntly advocating the busting of public-sector unions to appreciate the gross reactionaryism that was on the way with Walker's election. Virtually all of late 2010 was about one exceptionally nasty, very bad moon rising from Republican pols everywhere. They made no secret of their hostility to all manner of modernity, to differing strains of legitimate pluralism, to the fundamental concept of coming and reasoning together.
To their tea-partying bands of GOP agitation, the nation's November elections were akin to Enabling Acts -- and their elected leaders were determined to not disappoint.
True to their word, they haven't. And how any Wisconsite could have missed the GOP's intentions is beyond me. Remember, this turn to reactionaryism was hardly sudden: choose your own number of decades if you like, but multiple they have inaurguably been in which the Republican Party has steadily decayed into the ideological rigor mortis of right-wing imbecility. How any moderate voter could have believed that 2011 would be the GOP's year of statesmanlike maturity is ... well, I already said it.
We should also remember that Wisconsite voters in all their La Follettian splendor chose to terminate the brilliant senatorial career of Russ Feingold in preference for a corporate shill. They weren't tricked, they weren't bamboozled; no amount of even the cleverest of right-wing propaganda could have genuinely swindled Wisconsin's voters into believing their ultimate decision was anything but towering, self-destructive stupidity.
Nonetheless that's the democratic process. The barbarians sometimes win. In Wisconsin, they did.
Thus Brooks is uneasily but realistically correct in concluding that "It’s the Democratic minority that is thwarting the majority will by fleeing to Illinois. It’s the left that has suddenly embraced extralegal obstructionism." Their flight is inspirational -- no question about that -- and in its own way, courageous. But make no mistake: there was in November a pro-Walker voting majority and a pro-GOP state senate majority, so the flight is indeed "extralegal obstructionism" -- one perhaps fine for now, but what of the future?
What happens, say, if Democrats capture the statehouse by a slim majority in the next election? What's to prevent minority Republicans, upon any legislative provocation, from simply evacuating the newly reconstituted progressive state and fleeing to their truer ideological homeland of, say, Iran or Zimbabwe? And in protest of such Republican poltroonery what counterargument could the homeboy Dems honorably stage?
There won't, of course, be one. For Wisconsin's elected Dems -- in league with one-time Lexington-Concord Texan Dems -- will have already presented themselves as the founding fathers of antidemocratic, extralegal obstructionism -- as an example for all to follow; all those, that is, who won't particularly give a damn how the last democratic majority voted.
In short, Wisconsin's Democrats could be setting the national stage for a truly anarchic headache, one in which voting majorities and majority wills matter not in the least to whichever minority party. It pains indeed to argue that, but I can't see the argument's flaw.