This goes far beyond Wisconsin

By Greg Sargent

Paul Krugman frames the stakes in the Wisconsin standoff:

In principle, every American citizen has an equal say in our political process. In practice, of course, some of us are more equal than others. Billionaires can field armies of lobbyists; they can finance think tanks that put the desired spin on policy issues; they can funnel cash to politicians with sympathetic views (as the Koch brothers did in the case of Mr. Walker). On paper, we're a one-person-one-vote nation; in reality, we're more than a bit of an oligarchy, in which a handful of wealthy people dominate. Given this reality, it's important to have institutions that can act as counterweights to the power of big money. And unions are among the most important of these institutions. You don't have to love unions, you don't have to believe that their policy positions are always right, to recognize that they're among the few influential players in our political system representing the interests of middle- and working-class Americans, as opposed to the wealthy. Indeed, if America has become more oligarchic and less democratic over the last 30 years -- which it has -- that's to an important extent due to the decline of private-sector unions. And now Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to get rid of public-sector unions, too.

Absolutely, but another crucial piece of context here is that people on both sides of this fight view it as a precedent-setter for other similar efforts that are currently being planned to roll back public employee union rights in other states. As I noted here last week, and as Ben Smith and Maggie Haberman report out in more detail today, one key reason national unions are staking so much on this fight is that a victory by labor here could put other governments mulling similar efforts on alert: If they move forward, they can expect another massive war on the scale of the one in Wisconsin. This is why ActBlue has already raised $250,000 to support the efforts of Wisconsin Dems who are holding out against Governor Scott Walker.

The flip side of this is that if labor loses after elevating the Wisconsin battle into a national battle, anti-labor activists will seize on it to embolden other governments to move forward. Indeed, I spoke to one anti-labor activist who said he's relishing a defeat for labor in Wisconsin, because it will stiffen the spines of other governments eyeing similar efforts. In other words, what happens in Wisconsin could have major ramifications for whether the phenonemon Krugman describes -- the undermining of one of the last institutions representing the interests of middle-class and working-class Americans -- will continue apace with the further erosion of public employee rights in other states.

