Dispatch from a Divided Wisconsin

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By 5 o'clock, most of the protesters were sitting in the open area directly under the 200-foot rotunda dome. Three stood to one side softly singing This Land Is Your Land, then America the Beautiful, then the national anthem. A veritable NATO peacekeeping force of law-enforcement officers, from all over the state—highway patrolmen, city police, sheriff's deputies, university police, and even game wardens—stood guard along the walls and the mezzanine above. They chatted with each other and, from time to time, with the protesters. Democratic assemblymen showed up in support, and, as if incidentally, to talk to the half dozen reporters milling around.

That night turned out to be the end of the occupation—a County judge ruled shortly before 6 p.m. that the Capitol had to be open to the public, but only during business hours. After three hours of discussion and speeches, much patient cajoling by the chief of the Capitol police, and a couple of outbreaks of chanting, the protesters decided that they could, in good conscience, leave. "We've done something that's unprecedented in American political activist history!" exulted a sandy-haired young man in a lime-green T-shirt that read Graduate Employees Organization, perhaps having forgotten that the Democrats were still in Illinois.

Drumming and belting out the union anthem Solidarity Forever, the departing protesters paraded across the rotunda, television cameras trailing them like a school of blunt black fish, then out the doors and into the exultant crowd outside—all but one pale, dreadlocked girl who lingered just off the rotunda for another hour, wet-eyed, seemingly unable to leave.

Shortly after, Representative Milroy tried to walk back inside to get some clothes from his office. He seemed to be in a hurry and didn't properly identify himself. The police, taking him for a trespasser, wrestled him to the ground in the shadow of the pillars of government. There was video, of course, and it quickly made its way to the Internet, another chapter in the surreal serial drama known as the Battle of Wisconsin.

Madison, named after the father of the United States Constitution, has for nearly a month been in a crisis of governance that pits activists who claim to represent workers against politicians who claim to represent taxpayers. At its most basic level, the battle is about what the country wants from its government, what it wants for its workers, and who will pay for it all. According to the state budget director, Wisconsin faces a two-year budget shortfall of $3.6 billion. And so it is around the nation. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank, reports that states overall are facing at least $112 billion in budget shortfalls for the fiscal year 2012. Further out, depending on how you calculate it, they face unfunded pension liabilities between $700 billion and $3.2 trillion. And states, unlike the federal government, can't print money.

In Wisconsin and other states, the debate is not just about the salaries of school teachers, sanitation workers, firemen, and police, none of which are particularly eye-popping. It's about the fringe benefits—from job protection and limited workweeks to good health-care plans and pensions—that make union life sweet, and that, conservatives complain, not only blow holes in budgets but make public workers immune to the disciplining power of the free market. It's a conversation the entire nation is having, though nowhere so dramatically as in Wisconsin—at least not yet.

"Things are getting tough all over," said Zach Keady, a union electrician who had come in from Kansas City to protest the budget. "We're going to have this issue in Missouri soon enough."

Wisconsin seems an unlikely battleground. It's a well-run state where residents pay relatively high taxes for services that, for the most part, work—a health-care program, BadgerCare, that is nationally admired; good, comparatively inexpensive public universities; and a public employee pension that, unlike almost every other states', is by some estimates fully funded (and by others very nearly so). That means that the public services on the chopping block are widely loved, and the people who provide them are proud of what they do. And it means that those who want to cut them anyway are driven by a particularly pure sense of purpose.