How strange and wondrous it must be to gaze from some celestial perch and see history -- your history -- being relived. From their great Progressive Precinct in the Sky the family of Robert "Fighting Bob" LaFollette surely must be smiling as they observe the throngs of workers and sympathizers flooding Madison to protest the Koch brothers and corporate America's drive to cripple and ultimately destroy Wisconsin's public service unions. The LaFollettes have seen and lived it all before.

I know the LaFollettes. I spent four years researching and writing a safety valves book about them. And I'll wager that they would see the growing resistance in this fourth year of the so-called Great Recession -- which, for those who have lost jobs, homes, and futures is indistinguishable from a Depression -- as a turning point, a wake-up call that begins a counter-revolution against the steady encroachment of the political and corporate Right, with help from Democratic "centrists," on the shrinking contours of the social contract they fought so hard to advance.

That's up to us. If we ourselves light candles from the flame kindled in Madison and carry them to our communities, then the tumult in Madison could resemble events in the 1890s that provoked a political revolt against the first Gilded Age, like our own, dominated politically, culturally and economically by an elite of super-rich securely entrenched behind their golden walls, indifferent or hostile to the protests of debt-stricken farmers and exploited workers, the thwarted hopes of small businessmen and professionals crushed under the weight of the great trusts and their legions of bought lawyers and editors , the sufferers from the poverty that festered in the shadows of the great cities' monuments to progress.

But year by year as the twentieth century dawned, a new breed of thinkers and activists who labeled themselves "Progressives" -- journalists, academics, enlightened businessmen and financiers, officeholders in state capitals and city halls -- along with anonymous and rebellious workers and farmers who pushed from below -- chipped away at the golden walls. They pushed through three amendments in the Constitution -- a deliberately long and hard process -- between 1909 and 1920: a progressive income tax, the direct election of Senators, and votes for women.

Campaign by campaign, local, state and national, navigating through the endless grind of assemblies and petitions and public events sometimes supported by striking workers who risked their jobs, their physical safety and even their lives for equal justice, they gained other protections and guarantees. Workers compensation, occupational safety, guarantees of pure food and drugs, conservation of natural resources, restriction of child labor, regulations of railroads, trusts, and insurance companies, strengthened defenses against financial panics ignited by reckless speculation. Protections for all, especially that vital middle class on whose shoulders democracy rested. Achieved through a political process made accessible to all by machine-fighting reforms like the secret ballot and the open primary.