Now let’s be clear. What’s happening in these Midwestern states is not democracy. But it will be a critical test for democracy, whether our system can survive. Stand firm, governors. Protect the rule of law. For if the mob can overrule public officials who are seeking to save their state from insolvency, then America is no longer governable, and the fears of the ancient Athenians and the Founders will have been realized.

Athens is rightly called the birthplace of democracy. But the ancient Athenians would be horrified by the angry mobs we’re seeing every night on our TV screens. Mind you, I’m not talking about angry mobs in Cairo or Libya, but the mob gathered in Madison, the state capital of Wisconsin, and now gathering in other Midwestern states: state workers occupying public property, blocking the legislature from doing its business. These workers, sworn to uphold the state constitution and serve the public, are walking off their jobs.

Why the uproar? In the face of a growing state budget deficit, Wisconsin’s Governor Walker started off by proposing legislation that would force state employees to contribute 5.8% of their income towards their pensions and 12.6% towards health insurance. But, as John Fund writes in The Wall Street Journal, Wisconsin employees would be making payments that are “roughly the national average for public pension payments, and . . . less than half the national average of what government workers contribute to health care.”

What I find particularly galling is that the protestors occupying the state house are claiming the mantle of democracy, that they are protecting the “democratic process.” Not so. They are destroying the democratic process: impeding state legislators, elected by the people, from doing their jobs.

No, what’s happening in Madison and elsewhere, you see, is “mob-ocracy.”

Read More: http://www.breakpoint.org/bpcommentaries/entry/13/16486