Wisconsin's Cronon Affair: The Power of a Simple Fact

[highplainsdem]

http://www.thenation.com/blog/159521/wisconsins-cronon-affair-power-simple-fact

Wisconsin's Cronon Affair: The Power of a Simple Fact
Jon Wiener
March 28, 2011


More than a million people teach at colleges and universities in the United States, but only one faces a Republican demand for his e-mails: William Cronon, who teaches history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

-snip-

What provoked the Republicans was Cronon’s first-ever blog post, published at his new website, “Scholar as Citizen.” The demand for his e-mail was filed right after that appeared; thus that blog post provides the key to understanding why the Republicans want to stop Bill Cronon. It was titled “Who’s Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin and Elsewhere?” Cronon’s post didn’t make a complex argument, the way his books do. Instead it presented a simple fact, pointing to a little-known group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which drafts model laws which are then introduced by Republicans in state legislatures—for example, laws eliminating collective bargaining with state employee unions. ALEC has been in operation since the seventies and claims its members introduce 1,000 pieces of legislation every year in all fifty states.

The power of this simple fact lies in the way it disrupts the Republicans’ explanation of what they are doing in Wisconsin. They say the new law there ending collective bargaining with public employee unions is an emergency response to this year’s fiscal crisis. They say it’s a response crafted by local Wisconsin state representatives to help their neighbors who are facing big new tax burdens. Cronon suggested that none of this is true: the law is not a response to the current fiscal crisis, it’s been a Republican priority for decades; it’s not a Wisconsin idea, it comes from a national Republican think tank. And the goal is not to protect the little guy in Wisconsin but rather to help the big corporations that fund Republican operations.

Doing research on conservative groups and strategies is nothing new—indeed, Cronon’s blog provides links to several other sources of good information. But the way he highlighted the simple fact about “who’s really behind recent Republican legislation” apparently touched a Republican nerve. Now we will see how successful the Republicans are at intimidating other faculty members from doing the kind of work Cronon undertook when he blogged about the “Scholar as Citizen.”

Emphasis added.

[subterranean]

1. Republicans are so stupid.

By attempting to intimidate Professor Cronon, they are making more people aware of ALEC and its activities than Cronon could ever have hoped to accomplish with his blog. As he himself wrote, it has drawn "attention on a scale I could never have imagined."

[calimary]

2. Shine a bright light. That makes the cockroaches scatter.

[DBoon]

3. it's called the "Streisand Effect"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_Effect