Today, Wisconsin GOP Senators moved to pass an anti-union bill without a single Democrat present. The move took observers by surprise. GOP Senators side-stepped the need for a quorum to pass the controversial legislation, thus rendering powerless Democrats who left the state capital and traveled outside state lines to avoid a vote that would harm the teachers unions. The GOP and Governor Scott Walker effectively altered the State of Wisconsin’s legislative structure toward one-party rule, and in the process moved it toward Fascism.

Fascism.

The definition of Fascism is:

1.: a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition 2.: a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control.

Consider that Wisconsin’s government has become, for all practical purposes, a police state, where Democratic Rep. Nick Milroy was tackled by police just for trying to enter the Wisconsin Capital to retrieve clothes from his office. Also Democrats who refused to vote were subject to illegal threat of arrest last week. These are examples of a use of police power to ultimately repress opposition. There’s nothing democratic about what Governor Walker and the Wisconsin GOP have done, and everything, again, Fascist about it.

Fascism is a nasty term, indeed, but when the actions of the Wisconsin GOP are looked at from a cold, analytical perspective that embraces history, the use of the word to describe what’s happening in Wisconsin becomes inescapable.

Moreover, if one looks at the more detailed Wikipedia definition of Fascism, the comparisons with the actions of the Wisconsin GOP are unmistakeable. In part:

Fascism is a radical, authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to organize a nation according to corporatist perspectives, values, and systems, including the political system and the economy. Fascism was originally founded by Italian national syndicalists in World War I who combined left-wing and right-wing political views, but it gravitated to the right in the early 1920s. Scholars generally consider fascism to be on the far right. Confusion over whether fascism is of the left or right is due to the inability to fit the economic policies into a clear-cut category, because while fascism is considered on the right politically, fascist economic controls were left-wing, though ended up benefiting social groups considered to be supportive of right-wing parties. Fascists believe that a nation is an organic community that requires strong leadership, singular collective identity, and the will and ability to commit violence and wage war in order to keep the nation strong. They claim that culture is created by the collective national society and its state, that cultural ideas are what give individuals identity, and thus they reject individualism. Viewing the nation as an integrated collective community, they see pluralism as a dysfunctional aspect of society, and justify a totalitarian state as a means to represent the nation in its entirety.

Pluralism embraces a diversity of views and “stands in opposition to one single approach.” Governor Walker doesn’t want compromise, and it’s clear he’s not interested in balancing the budget, or plain and simple union-busting, but far beyond that, to something that looks like dictatorial control.

Governor Walker points to how Indiana Republican Governor Mitch Daniels was able to eliminate collective bargaining in his state, but what Scott either doesn’t know, or leaves out of his rants, is that Daniels was able to do so by executive order, and because a Democratic predecessor was able to do so “many years before” as he explained to Fox News in February of this year.

Governor Walker can’t rule by the stroke of a pen, so he has to resort to arresting, then locking out, the opposition party and having his GOP pass the largely unwanted legislation.

The idea of seeking compromise is out of the window.

So, it seems, could be Governor Walkers term, if the recall effort reaches it’s logical objective.

That is, unless Walker figures out a way to enlist the police to arrest recall election advocates, too. Don’t put it past him.

Stay tuned and follow me on Twitter here.