I’ve read many post-mortems on the unsuccessful effort to recall Scott Walker, many thoughtful, many not. What I haven’t seen discussed, though, are a few fundamental questions crucial to understanding whether the decision to recall Walker was wise, or the effort conducted well: how was the decision made, by whom, and with what awareness and acknowledgement of the risks and difficulties?

Andy Kroll has a thoughtful analysis of the “Wisconsin Uprising” that was first posted at TomDispatch and is now also up at Mother Jones. It’s a good piece, worth reading, but more starkly than most that I’ve read, it exposes what’s missing from almost all the Wisconsin analyses: Who, and on whose behalf, made the decision to recall Scott Walker?

Kroll’s use of verbs, tenses, group nouns and the passive voice reveal some of the problems with the belief that “the movement” was somehow co-opted or led astray by…