Ghostbusters (Sort Of)

When I first learned that the Resolutions Committee of the Republican Party of Wisconsin had decided to have the party convention vote on a recommendation to the state legislature that the state of Wisconsin affirm its right to secede from the United States and to nullify federal laws I was pretty apprehensive that I might soon be seeing ghosts.

Sure enough, over the next three nights I was visited by three sets of ghosts.

The first set was dressed in blue uniforms, carried rifles, and seemed to be standing at what passed for attention. They were the young men of Wisconsin’s 2nd Infantry Regiment, organized in Madison in 1861 and sent to fight – and some to die – at places named Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and even Gettysburg. They had fought, of course, against the ideas of nullification and secession and especially against the institution of slavery that both were invoked to defend.

Next came a bunch of guys in fatigues or overalls. Many were carrying guns and they were talking about an oppressive federal government, a state government that wasn’t much better, and their decision to create their own township, the township of Tigerton Dells. With around $100,000 in counterfeit money, some fake money orders, plenty of guns and some land to train on, the Posse Comitatus made a lot of Wisconsinites nervous in the 1970s and 1980s until many of their leaders were arrested, tried, convicted, and jailed, and the rest just sort of gave up.

Finally, I saw good old Cliven Bundy. Mr. Bundy is not so much a ghost I suppose as a hallucination, but he, and especially the self-styled militia members who came to defend him against an oppressive Bureau of Land Management, scare me every bit as much as the ghost of Jacob Marley scared Ebenezer Scrooge. People who point loaded weapons at other people are scary, and when the ones holding the guns are defending a guy who has essentially defrauded the government of close to $1,000,000 and the ones having guns pointed at them are defending the rule of law, that fear takes on a whole new meaning.

I am pleased to say that on May 3 the Republican Party of Wisconsin rejected the idea of secession as well as the idea of nullification. They rejected those ideas, but they didn’t confront them. Governor Walker didn’t think either idea represented the thinking of the party leadership, and the Assembly Republicans found it a distraction from the real issues. But nobody seemed eager – or even particularly willing – to remind us that both ideas are on the wrong side of American history, and that they are on the wrong side precisely because they are ever so likely to put us on a path which ends either in Waco with the Branch Davidians, or in a government that has to admit that some men with guns are beyond the reach of the law. Neither is a very appealing destination for a democratic government.

So the Republicans chased the ghosts out of our old Wisconsin home, but they didn’t exactly make sure they wouldn’t be back. Maybe it’s time they did.

Dennis Riley has taught American Politics for 45 years, 36 of them at UW – Stevens Point, where the student newspaper recently voted him the “Best Professor in Point.”