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On February 17, 2011, The New York Times ran two major stories that have a common denominator: angry protesters. Bahrain and Wisconsin are not typically thought of together.  Bahrain is a small kingdom in the Middle East whereas Wisconsin is a large republic in North America. In mid February, 2011, both were enveloped in protest at their respective capital cities.

In Manama, Bahrain, the army took control on February 17th; on the following day, the military would use automatics against a group of protesters. Before the army had taken control of much of the capital city, the police had opened fired on protesters camped in Pearl Square--that occurred a day after the king had said that the protesters could use that park to express themselves. According to The New York Times on February 17th, "As the army asserted control of the streets with tanks and heavily armed soldiers, the once- peaceful protesters were transformed into a mob of angry mourners chanting slogans like 'death to the king,' while the opposition withdrew from the Parliament and demanded that the government step down."  In short, violence had turned on peaceful protest, turning the capital city into a near warzone, and that situation was repeated the next day.  From the standpoint of the protests in Madison on February 17th, the scene of carnage in Manama would have been difficult to imagine. My thesis is simply that the difference should not be overdrawn, as both the people in Manama and Madison are human, all too human, and thus able to engage in similar actions.

In Madison, protesters had begun protesting on February 16th. I happened to be in Madison on that first day and I witnessed the protest. On the 17th, the protesters were congregating at the seat of government when opposition walked out of the Senate (and in fact out of Wisconsin). With the majority party one person short of a quarum in the Senate, the walkout on Walker (i.e., the governor: the head of state and chief executive of Wisconsin) left his the bill reducing benefits for public employees and restricting their unions' collective bargaining rights to wage negotiations (up to the rate of inflation in Wisconsin) in limbo. The New York Times reported on February 17th that "Walker’s plan was upending life in the capital city."  On the 18th, the paper reported that on the previous evening as the rallies against the bill grew, "(p)eople screamed: 'Shut it down! Shut it down!' Drums pounded. Students, some barefoot, danced." This description is more revealing than one might suppose at first glance.

Even though the protesters in Madison can be distinguished as a group from the protesters in Manama, the protesting Wisconsinites should not be treated as a homogenious mass. In fact, the presence of out-of-state university students broadened the protest beyond Wisconsin. Furthermore, although some of the students were doubtless deeply involved in labor issues, many of the students I saw on their way to the protest on the 16th looked excited rather than angry. Some even had little pictures painted on their faces as though they were going to a summer art festival or rock concert. Later in the week, a large drum circle took shape inside the capitol. At times protesters seemed more concerned by what they regarded as insufficient attention on them by the national media than by their cause. It's all about me! Watch me! That is not a true revolutionary attitude.

The more disgruntled, personally-invested protesters (i.e., actual workers) might have been mobilized by the unions that would receive less in union dues if public workers had the right to withhold union dues (a feature of the proposed bill). In other words, greed rather than anger might have been motivating some of the protest organizers even if most of the unionized protesters were motivated by principle. Also, in addition to teachers attending on principle, schools may well have organized their students to attend as a group. Before lunchtime on the 16th, I witnessed a very large number of students walking from their school to the capitol. Their presence seemed organized; that is, I had the sense that the students had not spontaneously self-organized themselves; moreover, they seemed excited about the cancellation of classes and hence no quizzes (remember how that felt?) and stimulated by all the excitement in downtown Madison. None of the high school students I saw looked angry.  Looking at them, I noticed the party atmosphere--far from a revolution in the works. 

Therefore, lots of agendas (including the labor-protecting one that was passed on by the media) went into the protests in Madison. My point is not that the protesters were somehow fakers; I did not get that sense from watching them, and I saw many (especially the workers themselves) who were protesting on behalf of the right to collectively bargain. Rather, my point here is that things that are notably different may look like one fuzzy blob from a distance (i.e., through the media). Just as it is easy to conflate the various segments at a distance into one angry mass, it might seem like the protests in Madison were essentially like those that were taking place in Manama at the same time. I argue this point first, after which I suggest some underlying potential commonalities based on human nature and political organization generally.

In terms of being different, shutting down the Senate temporarily is a far cry from a revolution wherein an entire government is to be permanently shut down and replaced. Treating the passage of a bill as though it were a matter of life and death smacks of hyperbole. Responding to the flight of the democratic senators, for example, Senator Scott Fitzgerald said, “This is the ultimate shutdown.” Well, no, Senator; the ultimate shutdown was occurring in Tunesia, Egypt and Libya. What was going in Wisconsin was not revolution even if that language may have served the protesters' various purposes. The difference between the two protests can be appertained by contrasting college students in Madison dancing barefoot while protesters in Manama were facing live gun-fire. Screaming "[temporarily] shut it down!" is not like screaming "stop shooting at me!!!" Protesting for a real revolution seems like a world away from protesting to "stop the bill." Accordingly, the pictures below of the protest in Madison show a scene remarkably unlike the one above of the violence on the same day in Manama.


In Madison, the likelihood that the protests would turn violent was perceived on both sides as being so remote that protesters were allowed inside the capitol building, where all three branches of the Government of Wisconsin are situated.


Whereas the police and military in Manama were mobilized on the 17th to remove protesters from a city park, the Wisconsin National Guard (the military) was nowhere to be seen as protesters engulfed even the capitol building itself in Madison. Even when the capitol police wanted to clear the building for cleaning on the Sunday of the second week, the protests were able to remain. In fact, the Wisconsin National Guard had been notified by the government of possible activation not to protect the government from the protesters or to clear them, but, rather, to step in to perform vital governmental functions should the public employees go on strike. In short, the image of college students--pre-inclined to join any protest on the left while studying at a historically progressive (yet internally corrupt) university--dancing barefoot as "angry protesters" in a seat of government is difficult to reconcile with the pictures we have seen of protesters in the Middle East getting shot at and carried to hositals. I wouldn't blame one of the real protesters for shaking one of those students and saying, "Hey, this is serious!" 

Why were the protests in Madison so different on the surface from those in Manama? Why did the drama turn Madison into "a political circus," according the USA Today, while mourning protesters (and even the medics trying to help them) were getting shot at? My knee-jerk explanation is that the tradition of democracy and protest that had by 2011 been so engrained in Wisconsin that no one there would have suspected in February of 2011 that violence would erupt. Furthermore, in spite of there being a protester's sign displayed at the protests in Madison identifying Gov. Walker in Wisconsin with Pres. Mubarak in Egypt in "One Down, One To Go," the Wisconsin protesters' goals did not reach toppling the republican legislature and chief executive, or even the form of government itself.  This said, I contend nevertheless that the disjunction or dichotomy between the protests-to-violence in Manama and the protests-as-festival in Madison is in part illusionary. Imagine, for example, some blue coller unionists in the capitol building suddenly losing their cool and pushing against the police and the latter over-reacting.  Imagine how quickly the barefoot dancing would turn to horror amid real-time images at point-blank range of blood and open wounds. Suddenly, the stakes would get very real--yet I suspect that the protesters would still shink from demanding an actual revolution wherein the government itself would be deposed or overthrown. In other words, the distance between Madison and Manama would have been narrowed, but not eliminated.

The inhabitants in the United States are muffled from the starker political protests that go on in other regions of the world; so much of the status quo is presumed in the U.S. Also, the difference between a real dictatorship and the republic form of government, and the difference between the political culture of Bahrain and that of Wisconsin make a difference, to be sure. However, a political protest by a mob is inherently unstable; the police and military in Wisconsin were just as capable of violence as were the police and military in Bahrain.  This point is often lost on people living in a society whose political system has been stable for over a century.

Just a week before the protests, a Madison police officer had been dismissed for "overbearing, oppressive, or tyrannical conduct." Visiting Madison for the day on February 16th, I personally witnessed similar conduct by a policeman. Having no idea why there was a crowd at the capitol, I walked to one of the street baracades to ask a Madison policeman. I started chatting with him lightheartedly about the protest.  He told me that 40 buses were on their way from across Wisconsin, and I mentioned my thought that government is indeed more accessable to a Wisconsinite in Wisconsin than in Washington, D.C., so it makes sense to me that more domestic policy should be decided by the Wisconsin Government (and less by the General Government). I wasn't sure what the policeman thought of my mini-lecture on federalism, so I did not belabor my point.  In the context of the noise from the protesters, I then mentioned offhandedly what I had heard earlier that day from some local residents concerning the local apartment building owners and managers being unethical with deposits and  regularly ignoring complaints by their adult tenants about drunk college students regularly disturbing them in the middle of the night. I told the policeman that I was surprised that the property owners and students get away with the collusion there. Furthermore, I said I would have thought that the police department would have come down on the local property owners for not being responsible in managing their buildings. The policeman's reaction was, frankly speaking, pathological and excessive. He  began quickly walking away from me, stating in an aggressive tone, "I don't know about that case! WE ARE DONE HERE."  While he was walking away from me as though he had temporarily lost impulse control, I tried to remind him that I had said that the local property owners were the corrupt parties in those cases--that the police had simply not broken up the collusion between them and the drunk college students.  I had not mentioned a particular case, so I was surprised by the irrationality of his apparent need to assert his ignorance of any particular case. His assumption, in other words, was way off (and his emotional reaction was excessive), and yet he had the gun.  This is what really concerned me. Additionally, his reaction itself, being disproportionate, could have been an indication of guilt concerning the existence of a cozy relationship between the local property owners and his department. In short, I was left to question an on-duty policeman's state of mind and impulse control, ironically as I walked in the direction of the "angry" protesters. A friendly chat amid the festivity of the protesters had quickly turned on me, and in a most irrational and bizarre way. I could see how the police, whether from incompetence, psychological make-up, or corruption, could feel themselves justified in suddenly attacking protesters based on some imagined provocation. In other words, I could visualize Madison becoming more like the capitals such as Manama in the Middle East. However, such a visualization could not gain much traction due to the very different political contexts.

On Saturday, February 19th, Tea Party and pro-labor activists protested peaceably outside the seat of government of the republic of Wisconsin, while "Libyan forces opened fire on mourners leaving a funeral for protesters Saturday in the flashpoint city of Benghazi." Both were simultaneous front-page stories on msnbc.com (and CNN)--the Libyan death toll from protests reaching 100 due to the 15 killed on that Saturday, while Wisconson senators were praising the lack of any violence in five days of mass protest. The contrast could not be starker. Besides the obvious difference in violence, protecting the bargaining power of public-sector unions in a republic is a world away from deposing a dictator.



Even so, the potential of an underlying common denominator based on human nature, from which violence is possible at any large protest, should not be so easily dismissed even where there are limited aims, a mitigating poltical culture, and a relatively open political system. To support this point, I now turn to the matter of the more fundamental substratum existing in the concurrent protests in Madison and Manama (Sana, Yemen and Benghazi, Libya could easily be substituted here for Manama).

For one thing,  Madison may not have been any less corrupt than Manama at the time of the concurrent protests. Apart from the progressive students that the university there is known for, the city itself is rather provincial.  For example, La Follette remarks in the preface of his autobiography that the political boss in Madison was quite corrupt and exclusionary. In the 1930s, the inside group in the city government twice thwarted the will of the people expressed in two referendums that Frank Lloyd Wright's plan for a city building on one of the city lakes be built (Monona Terrace was finally built in the 1990s). The reason, according to a PBS documentary on Wright, was that the city "leaders" didn't like him. Similarly, in the early 1990s one of the dean's offices at the university in Madison lied to a professor up for tenure in the early 1990s about the result of his tenure vote (which I believe is a felony) simply because some people at the university didn't like him. Even twenty years later, academics warn about the vindictive politics at that university. Even faculty at the university talk openly of the corruption. For example, one spoke openly to colleagues at other universities about having complained in utter futility to the university's chancellor about the chief of the university's police department notifying students' parents of the respective students' criminal records with the department (which is against privacy laws). The chancellor apparently told the professor that he didn't want to go up against the lesbian. A fish rots from the head down. So it should not be surprising that physicians from the university's hospital (or medical school) were blatantly handing out fake sick notes outside the capitol to local teachers who had called in sick to join the protests. The ends justify the means every time, right?  Perhaps it could even be said that the violence at the Vietnam War protests at the university in the late 1960s were stoked by (and perhaps an unconscious vent releasing pressure from) the stolid corruption in the university's administration. In short, the city (and the University of Wisconsin) may suffer from a corrupt insider element that does not feel itself constrained either by fairness or the law, and this could potentially sow the seeds for revolution. The seed, after all, is in the harvest.
That Wisconsin is a republic (i.e. a policy characterized by representative democracy) whereas Bahrain was a kingdom at the time does not mean that abuse of power by public authorities was not possible in either polity. Moreover, the problems in Wisconsin at the time of the protests there likely went far beyond the Wisconsin Republican Party imposing its will against the entrenched unions and state employees. Judging from the extent of corruption in Madison at the time, the protesters there were probably not going far enough in their demands. For one thing, the firing of the chief of police could quite reasonably have been added to their demands. Such a demand would move Madison closer to the protesters at the time in the Middle East. Outside Sana University in Yemen, for example, a few hundred people complained on February 17th of corruption and poor government services. According to USAToday, Mouath Hamed, for example, said that corruption was killing Yemen. Also unlike the protesters in Madison, the protesters in Sana  declared, "This is the beginning of the revolution," and they faced sticks and electro-shock weapons as the students in Madison danced barefoot. To the extent that Madison was similarly corrupt, there was the potential for such protest (and governmental response) there too. Had that potential been realized, I suspect the students would not have been dancing barefoot for long.

The capital city of a republic can be so corrupt that protesters in such a city should demand mass resignations of  entrenched, corrupt and incompetent civil servants in order to clean up the people's house. It could be objected that my American cultural bias shows through here; to expand protest demands merely to include getting rid of civil servants can be labeled as an Americanization of what in terms of the Middle East protests would include the ouster of top government officials and the cessation of extant constitutions. To be sure, the American constitutions are already democratic. However, it is only to the extent that a constitution really is democratic that it can be expected to not be treated by protesters like a constitution in the Middle East that props up a dictator. For instance, to the extent that office-holders in a republic can protect themselves as entrenched incumbants from the electoral check afforded to the people by a democratic constitution, the protests of the people could come to approximate those in a dictatorship, even in America. That is to say, the curtain of political stability that we presume distinguishes us from them could be ripped down the middle if the corruption continues to get worse. Depending on the salience of popular sovereignty in the American republics, it is possible that the sort of demands made by the protesters in the Middle East could be carried by westerly winds and take root in the United States. I am not advocating such protests because they risk the total collapse of civic order. Also, unlike dictatorships, republics can perhaps repair themselves without such violence. Even so, I acknowledge that fundamental protest that treats the system of governance itself as illegitimate--"Shut it down for good!"--could take root in any of the United States if sufficient public frustration builds up amid the hubris of wealth and power.

Furthermore, I assert that the potential for such protest was latent even in the barefoot-dancing (and drumming) protest in Madison even though that protest was (shortsighted in being) limited to defeating a bill. Wisconsin really would have shaken things up in the United States had the removal of corruption there and the associated  entrenched  public  authorites been the key demand. While some of the protesters did seem to have sufficient gumption (or partisanship) to protest until the head of the government resigned, even such a demand would have been viewed as too unrealistic (or radical) by most of the "progressive" protesters themselves in the land of La Follette. A real revolution must go beyond partisan-ship to clean house rather than merely rearrange deck chairs.  One would like to think that representa-tive democracy obviates such spring cleaning. However, no political system is perfect.

Abstractly speaking, human political nature is a constant in the human race; accordingly, the potential for escalation and ensuing violence should not be summarily dismissed on the basis of an assumed sui generis American civic culture that is somehow immune from revolution. In the American context, the driver to watch is the extent to which the corruption of wealth entrenches itself in the halls of government at the expense of government of, by and for the people. Public officials desirious of favors, good relations, friendship, or money are tempted to develop cozy relationships with entrenched private property interests at the expense of the public good and justice. At the time of their respective protests at least, Madison and Manama may not have been so different in this regard. Therefore, even though the pictures of the respective protests in Manama and Madison clearly suggest marked differences in the nature of the protests, the underlying dynamic might have been more alike than the barefoot dancers in Wisconsin could have known, for they were generally blind in their festivity to the true corruption in their midst. It is far easier to see corruption in the other's yard than on one's own street.

In summary, America is not an island isolated from human nature. We are not so exceptional or protected as the political culture we have built up may suggest to us.  As incredible as it may seem, both in terms of aims and governmental reaction, the protests that were spreading throughout the Middle East in early 2011 could manifest at some time manifest in any of the United States. It is not as though American public-private liasons are so pristine or salubrious that fundamental protest could not take root. We are not so different--not so immune--as we might suppose. It may be that the Tea Party included traces of this more fundamental level of protest in the 2010 election season in declaring that the U.S. Government had gone beyond its constitutional authority in certain respects and was to that extent illegitimate as a government. It should not be lost on any of us that the subterranean human political dynamic stemming from human nature can surface at any time, anywhere. Specifically, the human proclivity to engage in corruption and even violence and to protest arrogant governmental encroachment on human liberty are the real dynamics going on under the surface anytime, anywhere, there is political authority and mass political protest.  A political culture can moderate this dynamic only to a certain extent, even if appearances seem to say otherwise. Any type of government invented by man is mortal, and flawed, being constructed by and inhabited by human beings. Likewise, human nature is mortal, and flawed. The interaction of political organization and human nature cannot be segmented by region or political system such that one area or type is somehow different, or safe from the latent violence that is almost inherent in the interaction itself. So the protests in Madison and Manama were in some important ways very distinct, but in a more fundamental sense they were made of the same stuff--albeit realized outwardly differentially because of the different types of polity and cultures.

In the end, good government is based on caritas seu benevolentia universalis (higher human love, that is, universal benevolence) rather than privilege and partiality. The people of any polity have the right and  responsiblity to insist that the people they put in authority over them use their power on the basis of compassion rather than corruption.

Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/world/middleeast/18bahrain.html?hp

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/us/17wisconsin.html?ref=todayspaper

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/02/16/us/WISCONSIN-8.html (poster of Mubarak and Walker at the protests in Wisconsin)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/19/us/19wisconsin.html?pagewanted=2&hp

http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/article_1a175cce-30c3-11e0-b614-001cc4c03286.html  (on the psychology/corruption in the Madison police dept)

Iona Craig, "Protests Spread, Worsen in Middle East," USA Today, February 18, 2011, p. 8A.

Dennis Cauchon, "In Wis., Pitched Battle by Unions," USA Today, February 18, 2011, p. 1A.

Concurrent lead stories on protests in Libya and Wisconsin on February 19, 2011:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41658587/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41664858/ns/us_news-life/
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/02/19/rights-group-estimates-84-killed-libya-protests/
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/02/19/saturdays-protests-wisconsin-expected-biggest/

On La Follette of Wisconsin, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_M._La_Follette,_Sr.