From the American Heritage Dictionary: "coup (kōō) noun. A brilliantly executed stratagem." That word came to mind recently, so I looked it up. Following that, a coup d’état is defined by American Heritage as, "A sudden, unconstitutional overthrow of a government by a group of persons in or previously in authority."
Flipping a few pages further: "fascism (făsh' iz əm) noun. A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."
Words are important. They matter. Watch what's going on in Wisconsin and think about the definitions of those words.
The State of Wisconsin, like so many other states, counties, cities, townships and villages, has a revenue problem. The causes are many: a depressed economy, unemployment, foreclosures, international competition. But let's go deeper: lax regulation that led to craps-table banking practices, which led to the bank meltdown of 2008, which led to no credit, which led to businesses closing up, which led to layoffs, which led to. . .well, you get the idea.
So the Republican governor of Wisconsin and his freshly-minted Tea Party majority in the state legislature has decided that the problem is not because of a failure of business or banking, but it's because of greedy police officers, firefighters, and schoolteachers. There's your cast of villains, Wisconsin! It's this group of thousandaires who are making life difficult for the millionaires because they have the effrontery to form unions! And we all know unions are bad because they don't vote Republican! To the ramparts, teabag-wavers! The schoolteacher-firefighter cabal must be broken!
Governor Scott Walker has become the new symbol of Wisconsin, and that saddens me because I like Wisconsin. It's full of nice people who live in a lovely state. But now their government has been taken over by the extreme right, through the merging of state and business leadership.
Wait...I think I've read that somewhere before. Maybe in a dictionary.
The business leadership part of that equation is a money spigot known as the Koch brothers. Charles and David Koch have been pouring millions of dollars into anti-regulatory, anti-union, and generally anti-government projects for years. The tea-party phenomenon is their most successful project, and the scorched-earth behavior in Wisconsin is their logical next step. It's significant that the prank phone call Governor Walker received last week got through to him because the caller identified himself as David Koch and demanded to talk to Walker. Of course, Walker took the call and chatted warmly with the person he thought was his political godfather.
The Republicans' gambit in Wisconsin is a coup, a brilliant stratagem to dismantle the government, which is what the modern Republican Party stands for. And as they move toward their extreme right wing, merging state and business leadership, we are going to wish we spent more time reading the dictionary and learning the meaning of the other F-word.
