Imagine if Scott Walker had run for governor of Wisconsin on the following platform: "Let's make Wisconsin more like Mississippi and Alabama!" Think he would have won? As Ed Kilgore explains, that's just what he's doing -- and what an entire movement is trying to do. Here's the theory:
It is based on a theory of economic growth that is not only anti-statist but aggressively pro-corporate: relentlessly focused on breaking the backs of unions; slashing worker compensation and benefits; and subsidizing businesses in order to attract capital from elsewhere and avoid its flight to even more benighted locales. Students of economic development will recognize it as the "smokestack-chasing" model of growth adopted by desperate developing countries around the world, which have attempted to use their low costs and poor living conditions as leverage in the global economy. And students of American economic history will recognize it as the "Moonlight and Magnolias" model of development, which is native to the Deep South.
Southern conservatives are longtime experts at setting different groups of low- and middle-income people against each other, with the effect of diffusing any anger that might otherwise be directed at the aristocracy. When it works, that effort produces sentiments like this:
OREGON, WIS. - Michael Wernick, 61, a longtime body and fender man, says his financial fortunes have gone nowhere but down over the past decade. His salary is stagnant, and his 401(k) has shrunk, derailing his retirement plans.
So as he watches Gov. Scott Walker (R) take on the public-employee unions by not only demanding steep reductions in their pension and health care benefits but by also insisting they give up many of their collective-bargaining rights, Wernick is quietly cheering him on.
Maybe there is a little bit of jealousy here, but public workers have what I don't have," Wernick, a political independent, said as he sipped coffee in this bucolic village a few miles outside of Madison.
So the answer to public employees, represented by unions, getting good wages and benefits isn't to figure out how he can get them too but to drag them down to the misery that he's in. And if that goes along with cutting taxes for the wealthy and gutting environmental regulations, well, we need that for the economy, right? That sound you hear is a dozen libertarian billionaires moaning in ecstasy.
