Wisconsin: back to basics against kleptocracy and authoritarianism

A friend, knowing I was supporting workers in a progressive campaign to keep a Democratic governor in Wisconsin in 2022, found The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics  by Dan Kaufman. Perhaps the 2018 book had ended up in a "Little Free Library"? She passed it along.

It's depressing, but I'm grateful.

This journalist, originally from the Badger State, lays out the story of how Wisconsin became a kind of tightly-walled right wing preserve, more like Victor Orban's Hungary than I could have imagined.

Donald Trump's victory [in 2016] may have shocked the Clinton campaign and media pundits, but the result merely heralded the final stage of Wisconsin's dramatic transformation from a pioneering beacon of progressive, democratic politics to the embodiment of that legacy's unraveling. ... Throughout the twentieth century, Wisconsin led the country in devising ... progressive legislation that aided the vast majority of its citizens. ... If conservatives cannot tolerate a state that offers what Wisconsin once did, what kind of future is there for the American citizen?

Kaufman is thorough and devastating. His approach is thematic:

• He describes how Scandinavian immigrants brought a communitarian ethos to their new home; these settlers were instinctive abolitionists, appalled by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1854 which empowered slavers to chase their "lost property" to free states. They founded the Republican Party at Ripon, Wisconsin that year.

• In the latter 19th and early 20th century, Robert "Fighting Bob" LaFollette Sr., governor from 1906 to 1925, articulated a bold vision for his democratic, farmer, labor coalition:

The purpose of government, [LaFollette] believed, was to alleviate economic suffering, foster equality, and encourage active citizenship to preserve American democracy.

• But a contemporary Republican governor Scott Walker (in office 2011 to 2019) managed to do away with all that.

• With his Republican buddies in the legislature, he succeeded in outlawing collective bargaining and the union shop in the public sector. (Not including the police unions, of course.) The complacency and anti-Black racism of the established union leadership didn't help Walker's opposition. 

• Walker managed to shut tribal people and environmentalists out of the process of giving over parts of the state for oil pipelines. 

• The local Dems and some unions sought, unsuccessfully, to recall Walker. The national Democratic Party under Obama's designates didn't assist. As Californians have reason to know, when a recall fails, the surviving office holder is cemented in place. (See Difi and Gavin.)

• Walker's Republican buddies then enacted a Koch Brothers-designed legislative program to weaken unions, shrink public services, and eviscerate higher public education. They gerrymandered the state legislature so GOPers have a death grip on state law-making, despite not winning a majority of the statewide vote.

• Even the election -- statewide -- of Democratic governor Tony Evers in 2018 didn't reverse the tide as that legislature stripped the governor's office of many of its powers.

• Joe Biden did win Wisconsin in 2020 -- when all those cheeseheads turn out, Dems can still win.

All is not lost in Wisconsin. Kaufman's book dates from 2018 and is an important description of how democracy has been overthrown in one state while a pretense of rule of law endures. But Wisconsin Democrats are fighting back. The Wisconsin Democratic Party is one of the most activist anywhere, carrying on grassroots base organizing, in and out of season. For our Future WI is a coalition project of unions and nonprofits meeting citizens where they are and organizing a progressive civil society base.

In Wisconsin, it's not enough to mourn -- progressives are also organizing.