Act 10, the bill that included the collective-bargaining measure, eventually passed last March despite widespread demonstrations at the State Capitol, an occupation of the building by protesters, the decamping of 14 Democratic state senators to Illinois for three weeks and numerous legal challenges. According to recent polling, Wisconsin, once known for progressive policy and upper-Midwestern civility, is now the most politically polarized state in the nation. Last June, David Prosser, a State Supreme Court justice, was accused of choking a colleague in her office after an argument over the court’s deliberations on Act 10. Bill Kramer, the Republican speaker pro tem of the Assembly, recently told a reporter that at times he finds it necessary to bring his Glock semiautomatic handgun to work, owing to the atmosphere in the State Capitol. (A new conceal-and-carry law permits concealed weapons even on the Assembly floor.) The protest movement the bill spawned, which shows no signs of abating, culminates in a June 5 recall election against Walker and four Republican state senators. If Walker loses, he would be only the third governor in American history to be recalled.

“There is tremendous frustration with the influence of out-of-state organizations and out-of-state money,” Lisa Graves, the executive director of the Madison-based Center for Media and Democracy, told me when I spoke with her this spring. “Wisconsin has an identity, the Wisconsin Idea, that is based on the notion that legislation should help as many people as possible.” In February, David Koch gave $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, which is spending heavily to fight Walker’s recall campaign, and that same month he praised Walker’s anti-union legislation in The Palm Beach Post. “We’re helping him, as we should,” Koch said. “We’ve spent a lot of money in Wisconsin. We’re going to spend more.” Walker has raised more than $25 million for his campaign, 60 percent of it from outside the state, while his Democratic opponent, Tom Barrett, the mayor of Milwaukee (whom Walker defeated in a regular election less than two years ago), has raised less than $1 million. “Wisconsin used to be the beacon of clean and open and honest government,” Mike McCabe, the head of the nonpartisan Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, which tracks money in politics, told me. “We are now just a pawn on a national chessboard.”

During a late-night session in early March, I sat in the gallery and watched the Assembly debate a bill referred to as the Special Needs Scholarship Act. The bill’s lead sponsor, Michelle Litjens, is a freshman representative from the Appleton area and also a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a Washington-based organization that brings together corporations, legislators and interest groups to draft and disseminate model legislation for state legislatures around the country. Litjens’s bill, AB 110, includes key provisions of an ALEC-model bill that has already passed in Georgia. It would provide up to an estimated $13,500 in taxpayer-financed scholarships for children with disabilities to attend private schools or schools outside their districts. The scholarships would be available to no more than 5 percent of the state’s disabled children. The money for the program, as much as $80 million if the full 5 percent applied, would be drained from the public-school budget.

Of the 36 sponsors and co-sponsors of Litjens’s bill, 25 were ALEC members. Mark Pocan is one of the few ALEC members who did not co-sponsor the bill. A liberal Democrat from Madison, Pocan became a member of ALEC several years ago. He told me he wanted to draw attention to the organization’s unseen effect on Wisconsin’s legislation. In his floor speech that night, Pocan described an ALEC conference in New Orleans that he attended last summer. “I remember going to a workshop and hearing a little bit about a bill they did in Florida and some other states to dismantle public education,” Pocan said. “There was a proposal to provide special-needs scholarships. Lo and behold, all of a sudden I come back to Wisconsin, and what gets introduced? A bill to do just that.”

The next day, Pocan outlined a strategy ALEC advises its members to use: “You have to introduce a 14-point platform,” he said, “so that you can make it harder for them to focus and for the press to cover 14 different planks.” He pointed to several bills introduced in the past two sessions, including one that allows more children to enroll in virtual charter schools. “It sounds good,” Pocan said. “Kids could access virtual schools for home schooling. But again,” he emphasized, the real purpose is “taking apart public schools, drip by drip.”