The Military State...of Wisconsin. So declares the imperial Gov. Walker

Only the authoritarian mind, as author John Dean has written, would think to go this far:

Chicago Tribune: Gov. Scott Walker says the Wisconsin National Guard is prepared to respond wherever is necessary in the wake of his announcement that he wants to take away nearly all collective bargaining rights from state employees. Walker says he has every confidence that state employees will continue to show up for work and do their jobs and he's not anticipating any problems. 

What a vote of confidence from Walker. Here's a warning from John Dean, former Nixon White House counsel, from July 14, 2006 about exactly what we're seeing today spurred on by the tea party movement:

Authoritarian conservatives are, as a researcher told me, "enemies of freedom, antidemocratic, anti-equality, highly prejudiced, mean-spirited, power hungry, Machiavellian and amoral." And that's not just his view. To the contrary, this is how these people have consistently described themselves when being anonymously tested, by the tens of thousands over the past several decades.

Authoritarianism's impact on contemporary conservatism is beyond question. Because this impact is still growing and has troubling (if not actually evil) implications, I hope that social scientists will begin to write about this issue for general readers. It is long past time to bring the telling results of their empirical work into the public square and to the attention of American voters. No less than the health of our democracy may depend on this being done. We need to stop thinking we are dealing with traditional conservatives on the modern stage, and instead recognize that they've often been supplanted by authoritarians.

Updated reaction by a few stunned Democrats:

Capital Times; "The fact he's ready to call in the National Guard tells you far the governor has gone," says state Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Madison. 

Scot Ross of the progressive Advocacy Group One Wisconsin Now added: "You take away people's rights and then use the National Guard to back it up. If this was happening in another country, we'd call it a Banana Republic." 

Even the normally staid state Sen. Fred Risser, D-Madison, the most senior legislator in the country, called it a "dictatorial attack on public employees that borders on abuse."