John Nichols: McCarthy’s Party Revisits His Tactics

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via CommonDreams:




Published on Wednesday, March 30, 2011 by The Capital Times (Wisconsin)
McCarthy’s Party Revisits His Tactics

by John Nichols


William Cronon is about as distinguished an academic as you will find in the United States. The Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas research professor of history, geography and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cronon holds degrees from UW, Yale and Oxford. He’s been a Rhodes Scholar and a MacArthur Fellow. His book “Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England” was a paradigm-shifting study of American history and ecosystems.

Maintaining the Wisconsin Idea tradition, Cronon has been a public intellectual of the highest order. He and I have shared many microphones over the years, and I have always been honored to be in the company of so serious, so thoughtful and so generous a scholar.

It was with an eye to the Wisconsin Idea that Cronon began this month to contribute to the debate about Gov. Scott Walker’s budget repair bill. His “Scholar as Citizen” blog examined the role played by Washington-based think tanks and corporate-friendly advocacy groups in shaping Walker’s agenda.

“After watching the sudden and impressively well-organized wave of legislation being introduced into state legislatures that all seem to be pursuing parallel goals only tangentially related to current fiscal challenges -- ending collective bargaining rights for public employees, requiring photo IDs at the ballot box, rolling back environmental protections, privileging property rights over civil rights, and so on -- I’ve found myself wondering where all of this legislation is coming from,” Cronon wrote in his first blog entry. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/30-5