"If Democrats let Republicans get away with it, they are undermining their own political future, and..."

If Democrats let Republicans get away with it, they are undermining their own political future, and it is up to us to ensure the opposite: that the Republicans’ anti-union efforts undermine their political future instead.

Indeed, what has happened in Wisconsin is meaningful precisely because we care about it. The protests give it meaning, because they make this no longer just a matter of the strict effects of policy but rather a test of people power. Through the protests, this becomes a case in the question of whether an enormous solidarity movement that sustains itself in massive protests which last day in and day out can affect political change. The Republicans’ legislative action does not represent the will of the people—none of the lawmakers who engineered this maneuver campaigned on a promise to do it. The protests force us to ask: have a unified people, fervently engaged in a robust outcry, the ability to make lawmakers apprehensive about ignoring their will? If the answer is no, then American democracy is sunk. That’s why Wisconsin matters: because if it doesn’t, we don’t.