Kevin Binversie compares war metaphors:

Liberals behind the recall like to throw around the phrase “civil war” because it fits the purpose of their campaign: Almost everybody hates war and (thus sayeth the Lord) peacemakers are blessed. So, recallistas are working to create the impression that there’s a civil war on, and in the meantime Barrett gets to appear Christ-like. …

But is the recall really a civil war?

Only a fool would deny Wisconsin is politically divided. But it takes a bigger fool to say the state’s divisions appeared only when Scott Walkermoved into the governor’s mansion. In the past decade and a half alone the state has seen two close calls on the presidential level. During the same time, control of the state Senate changed hands four times. Lest we also forget we saw tight elections for state attorney general in 2006 and a state Supreme Court seat in April 2011.

Where was Tom Barrett to stop those civil wars?

Politics — and political fighting — is in the Badger State’s DNA. One of my favorite books on Wisconsin political history is Wisconsin Votes: An Electoral History, a 2008 release by Robert B. Fowler, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It’s a well-researched chronicle of the state’s long voting history from statehood to today. (Fowler has even published online addendums for the 2010 and 2011 elections). One of the many things you will discover by reading it is that since the start of the 20th century the state has always been a political battlefield.

Fowler points out that the first fights were intra-Republican Party — between what were called “stalwart” Republicans and a new breed of “progressive” Republicans led by Robert La Follette. After World War II, the fight moved to the modern-day Democrat vs. Republican dynamic we know today. That was when any remaining “progressive” Republicans joined with New Deal Democrats to create the modern Democratic Party of Wisconsin.

The bottom line — we’ve been fighting since the beginning. Only the labels have changed. …

Coups are defined as sudden and decisive actions in politics resulting in a change of government illegally or by force through a small group. When labor-backed demonstrators occupied the state Capitol in February 2011, Madison certainly looked like any big city in a third world country. When labor leaders used that occupation to argue that the state had become ungovernable, they seemed merely hypocritical. When they leveraged that argument—and millions of dollars in campaign slush funds—to push for the recall of the governor, well, that’s when we had ourselves a very American coup.

Watching the recallistas in action, one can see how their entire campaign platform has nothing to do with reuniting the state, ending the civil war or mending political fences. They just want Scott Walker gone — and with him any hope of permanently dismantling the public-employee machine that used to run the state’s politics.

George S. Will, who on ABC-TV’s “This Week” called Tuesday’s recall election the second most important in the country this year, has another description of the recall:

This state, the first to let government employees unionize, was an incubator of progressivism and gave birth to its emblematic institution, the government employees union (in 1932 in Madison, the precursor of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) — government organized as a special interest to lobby itself to expand itself. But Wisconsin progressivism is in a dark Peter Pan phase; it is childish without being winsome. …

In justifying a raucous resistance to, and then this recall of, Walker, the government employees unions stressed his restriction of collective bargaining rights. But in the May primary, these unions backed the candidate trounced by Barrett, who is largely ignoring the collective bargaining issue, perhaps partly because most worker protections are embedded in Wisconsin’s uniquely strong civil service law. Besides, what really motivates the unions and elected Democrats is that Walker ended the automatic deduction of union dues from government employees’ pay. The experience in Colorado, Indiana, Utah and Washington state is that when dues become voluntary, they become elusive.

So, Barrett is essentially running another general-election campaign, not unlike that of 2010 — except that the $3.6 billion deficit Walker inherited has disappeared and property taxes have declined. By re-posing the 2010 choice, Wisconsin progressives’ one-word platform becomes: “Mulligan!”

The emblem displayed at some anti-Walker centers is an outline of Wisconsin rendered as a clenched fist, with a red star on the heel of the hand. Walker’s disproportionately middle-aged adversaries know the red star symbolized murderous totalitarianism, yet they flaunt it as a progressive ornament. Why?

Because it satisfies the sandbox socialists’ childish pleasure in naughtiness, as does their playground name-calling (Walker is a “Midwest Mussolini”) and infantile point-scoring: When the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel endorsed Walker, Wisconsin’s Democratic Party chair fulminated that six decades ago the Sentinel (which merged with the Journal in 1995) supported McCarthy. …

A January poll found that even 17 percent of Democrats think that recalls are justified only by criminal behavior, not policy differences. If, however, Walker loses, regular Wisconsin elections will henceforth confer only evanescent legitimacy. If he wins, progressives will have inadvertently demonstrated that entrenched privilege can be challenged, and they will have squandered huge sums that cannot finance progressive causes elsewhere. So, for a change, progressives will have served progress.