Post-recall progressive regrets: We should have escalated the protests instead of ceding our ground to the Democratic Party.

Here's Matthew Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive, writing in Isthmus:

[T]he movement -- a real giant grassroots movement, which flooded the Capitol Square with more than 100,000 people.... began to disintegrate the moment the leaders (and who were they, exactly?) decided to pour everything into the Democratic Party channels rather than explore the full potential of the power that was latent but present in the streets back in February and March of 2011....

It was a mistake, Rothschild says, to retreat into the recall effort instead of fighting Governor Walker "with mass civil disobedience." Think of the "creative strategies" that were not tried:

The Teamsters with their 18 wheelers, whose support was so emboldening, could have driven down Interstate 90 and 94 at 45 mph all day long for a week's time to demonstrate that workers in Wisconsin weren't going to take this lying down.

Okay, let's be creative! Let's imagine what would have happened, if Teamsters with their 18 wheelers had driven down down Interstate 90 and 94 at 45 mph all day long for a week. Rothschild — he's so creative! — seems to imagine that the public would become enraged at Scott Walker and demand political change. That's the progressive fever dream.

I would have thought that the recall election was a reality slap in the face for progressives. But no, they plunge more deeply into a self-marginalizing fantasy, from which they cannot speak to ordinary people.

But I do agree with Rothschild about one thing: The Democratic Party appropriated the passion and idealism of the protesters and turned it into a hackish pursuit of partisan power. They sucked the life out of it, and the protesters should feel abused.

ADDED: About that Teamsters on I-90/I-94 protest: I love the way lefties totally forget about global warming and carbon footprints whenever anything distracts them