That the GOP and their friends bit off more than they could chew in Wisconsin is probably accurate, for what it's worth. It's likely true that Walker and the emboldened GOP majority in the statehouse figured they could ram the new budget through without much resistance or notice from Democrats and labor unions until it was too late, thus ending collective bargaining rights for public employees while selling off public assets in a fire sale. And it's certainly true that the heroic protesters in Wisconsin are at this very moment engaged in a high-stakes battle for the American middle class that the ultrawealthy and their GOP marionettes never quite saw coming.

But in another sense, it requires no conspiracy theory thinking to suggest that, no matter the outcome of the current struggle, the GOP has in a way already won. They've won because the idea of hating schoolteachers and calling them goons, fat cats (!) and parasites (!!) on the body politic was unthinkable just a few years ago. Now it's an acceptable part of the public discourse. As with social security privatization, the formerly politically radioactive is now part of the "he said, she said" debate in the newspapers and on the cable news networks.

Those of you familiar with the Overton Window (no, not the Glenn Beck "tease the tiger" travesty of the same name) understand this principle all too well:

At any given moment, the “window” includes a range of policies considered to be politically acceptable in the current climate of public opinion, which a politician can recommend without being considered too “extreme” or outside the mainstream to gain or keep public office. Overton arranged the spectrum on a vertical axis of “more free” and “less free” in regards to government intervention. When the window moves or expands, ideas can accordingly become more or less politically acceptable. The degrees of acceptance[3] of public ideas can be described roughly as: * Unthinkable

* Radical

* Acceptable

* Sensible

* Popular

* Policy The Overton Window is a means of visualizing which ideas define that range of acceptance by where they fall in it. Proponents of policies outside the window seek to persuade or educate the public so that the window either “moves” or expands to encompass them. Opponents of current policies, or similar ones currently within the window, likewise seek to convince people that these should be considered unacceptable. Other formulations of the process created after Overton's death add the concept of moving the window, such as deliberately promoting ideas even less acceptable than the previous "outer fringe" ideas, with the intention of making the current fringe ideas acceptable by comparison (This might be a form of the “Door-in-the-face technique" of persuasion.).

I've written about the Overton Window before on numerous occasions (see here, here and here for a few tastes of my previous work on this subject). It's an incredibly important topic to learn about if one hopes to understand a major aspect of how the Right has achieved its ideological dominance over the last 40 years.

In short, it's entirely unnecessary to actually win a debate, or achieve a specific policy aim, in order to accomplish the rhetorical goal of shifting the framework of a debate. That is what Governor Walker is doing in Wisconsin today, whether he set about to do so intentionally or not.

For the left, this issue is about workers' rights, and the well-being of the middle class. Perhaps we win this fight, and perhaps we lose it. But the trouble is, the Democrats have always, the nauseating neoliberals and DLC notwithstanding, at least theoretically been about those very things. To win on this issue does not represent a great leap forward, so much as a holding of our ground.

But for the right, even just pitching the battle itself constitutes a victory. So what if they get clobbered in the polls today? Ten years ago, the public support for bashing teachers over the head would have been at well under 20%. Today, it's somewhere between 20% to 40%, depending on the poll and how you read it. And as with so much else of the rightwing agenda that was previously unthinkable, it may well be that within five years, Fox News' rabid base will have mainstreamed at least into so-called "moderate" Republican circles the notion that teachers need to be paid the salaries of janitors in order to benefit America's children.

Because the reality is that when Jon Stewart actually has to take up an entire segment repudiating the notion that your average middle-school social studies teacher is an overpaid fatcat, well...it's not really all that funny. In reality, we've already lost something important.

That sort of "opinion" should by all rights be relegated to the sort of zero-relevance land in which NAMBLA, the 9/11 truthers and the Westboro Baptist "Church" currently reside. Jon Stewart wouldn't spend 15 minutes on any of these people. But now it's mainstreamed. Now, it's an actual meme that must be fought.

In that sense, no matter the actual outcome of the fight in Wisconsin, the GOP has already won as much as it needs to. If progressives wish to win similar victories, it will be incumbent upon us to adopt similar tactics.