Wisconsin has an answer to Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck knows what he does. He wants Americans to surrender our history of social progress to him and his editorial staff. He claims to speak for the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.. He rallies his faithful before the Lincoln Memorial. He invokes Thomas Paine and the Liberty Tree, and calls his faithful the “Tea Party” movement.

But the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a self-described democratic socialist who said that when, “profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

And Abraham Lincoln was an advocate for the labor movement who told the Wisconsin State Fair that, “labor is the superior -- greatly the superior -- of capital.”

Thomas Paine was our first national figure to call for socialized medicine, social security, free public education, common land ownership, and a progressive income tax.

And the Liberty Tree radicals? Their enemy was the British East Indies Trading Company. That multinational corporation suffered billions of dollars in damages from an act of sabotage called . . . the Boston Tea Party.

King, Lincoln, Paine, and the Sons of Liberty were all of them, to a last one, American progressives.

Glenn Beck knows that. He also knows that those American heroes are not here to speak for themselves. And he hopes that living Americans will fail to do our homework, and to read for ourselves the original words and deeds of the people who made all the good that is America today.

Beck has made it plain that he would like to take an axe to the progressive movement. What better way to do that than by cutting it off from its historical roots?

Wisconsinites, in particular, can play a part in protecting our nation’s history from this abuse. In the pre-Civil War period, when other northern states compromised with slavery, Wisconsinites took up arms to abolish it. During World War I, as the rest of the nation fell victim to war fever, Wisconsin elected antiwar progressives to Congress. Our state pioneered social security, medicare, immigrant rights laws, and the living wage. If there is an American state ready to recognize Glenn Beck’s attack on American progress, and to resist it, that state is Wisconsin.

We know what Glenn Beck is doing, and we have an answer for him: We can renew the progressive spirit of America by implementing progressive reforms here in Wisconsin, so that our state will again be a beacon for the nation, and so that America may again be a beacon for the world. We can work to fully fund our public colleges and schools. We can add achieve an Equal Rights Amendment to our state constitution. We can expand voting rights, reform elections, and expand democracy. Mr. Beck, Wisconsinites will not surrender our progressive history. We have not yet begun to fight.