This article by Jane Anne Morris was published on her website, DemocracyThemePark.org, on November 25, 2014.
September 2011, Madison, Wisconsin. The legislative recall elections generated by the Wisconsin Spring demonstrations are over.1 Democrats failed to retake the state Senate, gaining only two seats over the fall 2010 total. Republicans now hold the Senate by a 17–16 margin, and retain control of the Assembly and governor’s mansion. In June, both the anti-collective bargaining bill and the Republican budget, little altered, became law. In other words, no revolution. It is a still point in Wisconsin history: time to take stock.
Media coverage of the “Wisconsin Revolution” has been shot through with an array of superlatives, many of them deserved. Wisconsin’s great “Outpouring” that began in February 2011 was a watershed event. The largest crowds at a political demonstration in state history (up to 150,000 in a city of about 200,000). Weeks of continuous occupation of the Capitol building, with 24/7 marchers outside: also unprecedented.
Even more than size or duration, it was the character of this Outpouring—which took place two blocks from my apartment—that most astonishes. I have never seen anything like it in the US in four decades of demonstrating. After weeks of attending demonstrations and talking to people, I realized that much of the unspoken ideological underpinning of the Wisconsin “revolution” was antithetical to most of what a green agenda would be. But disturbing as that was, I see promise as well. …
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