You think the ’50’s are long gone? Think again. Comparing Scott Walker with fellow Wisconsinite, Joe McCarthy, isn’t a stretch. The same dangerous DNA is at work.
… He is not as outrageous as Donald Trump and Sen.Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), but his technique of scapegoating unions for the nation’s ills is no less demagogic. Sixty-five years ago, another man from Wisconsin made himself a national reputation by frightening the country about the menace of communists, though the actual danger they represented was negligible. Scott Walker is not Joe McCarthy, but his technique is similar: He suggests that the nation’s ills can be cured by fighting labor unions (foremost among the “big government special interests” hurting America), even though unions represent just 11 percent of the American workforce and have been at a low ebb. ...DanaMilbank,WaPo
Conservatives like to imagine that the great industrialists were the makers of American prosperity and the tradition is being carried on, today, by our “top ten percent.” Actually, nothing could have been accomplished without the strong backs of nameless laborers. No oil. No coal. No steel. And no reliable and reasonably compensated labor without the union movement — enabling increasingly prosperous members of the middle and working classes to buy the goods and give us a booming economy.
Scott Walker is out to destroy all this, entrenching a predatory corporate elite — first in America and then, if he can pull it off, the rest of the world. He’s ambitious and harbors little if any self-doubt.
Earlier this year, Walker likened the union protesters in Madison, Wisc., to the murderous Islamic State: “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world.” …DanaMilbank,WaPo