House
Republicans continue to struggle finding a “suitable” candidate for the role of
speaker while needed government action remains at a standstill because of the stupidity of
their far-right flank that many on that fringe insist they are only “listening”
to their equally stupid “constituents”; the latest “candidate,”
Tom Emmer, sunk like a stone as lead idiot Donald Trump posted "Voting for
a Globalist RINO like Tom Emmer would be a tragic mistake!" since he is "out
of touch with Republican voters" and "never respected the Power of a
Trump Endorsement.” Yeah, OK, I’m sure that consoles all those candidates
for which your “endorsement" in more recent elections and primaries was a poison pill that many voters refused to consume.
Meanwhile, there are those who see the state of Wisconsin as the template on how to turn a once “progressive” state into a bastion of far-right fundamentalism. I spent my entire “developmental” years there before enlisting in the Army, and only once briefly returned, and had no reason to once “family” had all moved out of the state, all except me into “red state” territory. Did Wisconsin “change” politically and socially since then?
I’m not so sure anymore; I had the impression that the teachers at the Catholic school I attended through the eighth grade were on the left side, but otherwise I didn’t get out enough to tell. All I knew for certain was that my “caregivers” were definitely not “liberals.” The evidence suggested here in presidential elections…
…that voters in the state preferred Republicans at the time, and only became a “blue line” later, but obviously far from "solidly" so, as we saw from Trump’s “shocking” win in 2016 and Joe Biden only won back the state by the skin of his teeth. Thanks to the most recent redistricting, previously “competitive” districts that allowed Democrats in “good” years slim majorities in the state house became more solidly Republican, so much so that even in “bad” years, Republicans have virtually guaranteed themselves legislative majorities.
Here we see the effect of the most recent court-approved gerrymandering, with "governor" on top followed by the two branches of the state legislature:
A "blue" state, huh? Republicans have a 64-35 advantage in the lower house when total votes suggest they should only have an 8 or 9 vote majority. Gerrymandering is also responsible for the fact that only 2 of Wisconsin's 8 delegates in the U.S. House of Representatives are Democrats, with Democratic voters "packed" in Madison and Milwaukee.
From a story by the NPR affiliate in Milwaukee:
The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent leak of its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade suggests the court has left the decision over abortion rights and women’s autonomy to state governments. But in Wisconsin, that Legislature is unlikely to reflect the state’s voting base, thanks in part to another U.S. Supreme Court decision over Wisconsin's new state legislative maps.
The new maps, drawn by the Wisconsin State Legislature, are considered the most partisan-biased, court-adopted maps in the nation. That’s according to a new analysis from the University of Wisconsin Law School. The maps heavily advantage Republican politicians, all but guaranteeing Republican-rule in the state Legislature, regardless of what most voters want.
The analysis looked at four metrics: partisan-bias, efficiency gap, mean-median difference and declination.
"On every one of these standard partisan fairness metrics, these new maps are the worst, court-adopted maps that we’ve seen anywhere in the country," says Rob Yablon, an associate professor at the law school, who published the analysis.
The analysis finds that Wisconsin's state legislative maps have substantially higher levels of partisan inequity than other court-adopted maps, with a score three to five times worse on each metric. The inequity in these maps means that despite Republicans and Democrats getting approximately the same number of votes statewide, Republican politicians will likely continue to control the vast majority of seats in the Wisconsin state Legislature.
The maps are the result of intense gerrymandering on the part of the Wisconsin Legislature by "cracking and packing" districts, effectively subverting a voter's ability to choose their representation based on partisan affiliation.
"If part of being a healthy democracy means that people have an equality of voice and that equality of voice is meant to be converted into representation so more often-than-not, what the majority of people want, the majority of people get — you know, gerrymandering makes that very difficult," Yablon explains.
The arrogance this brought about saw the legislature with the connivance of outgoing governor Scott Walker pass a bill attempting to prevent incoming Democratic Gov. Tim Evers from removing and replacing far-right Republicans in certain commissions, especially in regard to environmental policy. Although Evers won reelection by a slightly higher percentage in 2022, the state assembly saw Republicans actually gain three seats.
But the “surprise” election of a liberal justice to the state Supreme Court, Janet Protasiewicz, promised a liberal majority would throw out the latest electoral map after years of the court simply serving as a rubber stamp for the Republican anti-democratic shenanigans. Of course this has Republicans lawmakers in a tizzy, although for the moment they seem to be backing down from threats to impeach Protasiewicz, a move opposed by even former Republican justices on the bench.
The Republican swing to the far-right nationally has been decades in making, since at least when organizations like the John Birch Society began giving paranoia and bigotry a place where it could pretend to be “respectable” to “normal” people. In the mid-70s Republicans still had enough respect for “morality” and “ethics” to be prepared to impeach a Republican president, let alone a president who recognized his own deficiencies enough to resign.
But then came Ronald Reagan, who populated his administration with far-right activists like James Watt, aided by bribe-taking pro-business militants posted in the EPA, and then those fanatics who deliberately skirted the law and made deals with our sworn enemy Iran for arms, the sale of which supported a gang of thugs who did more harm to Nicaraguan civilians than the Sandinistas allegedly did. And then came George W. Bush and the re-emergence of dirty political campaigns and an administration which routinely lied to the public as if it was the “natural” way of business.
Of course it was “natural” for all of this to eventually lead to Trump, who unlike his predecessors was entirely unfit in every way to be president, which apparently satisfies an extremist base that came of age when the current Republican Party achieved its worst and they wouldn't know any better. Yes, there are some Republican voters who are not far-right extremists, and “swing” voters who could “swing” either way given how they are feeling on a particular day, but “morality” and “ethics” are terms that Republican voters generally only think they have, and they are not necessarily “traits” that they approve of in the candidates they vote for, because it makes them look “weak.”
It is also worth mentioning that while “liberals” support domestic
policies that generally are meant to benefit all, Republicans only seem to
support policies that benefit the tiny minority—big business, oil companies,
and far-right religious extremists. But it's so much easier to get the Republican base "energized," because, you know, hate is a stronger emotion than love.
Of course, like in former supposedly “blue” Midwestern states like Ohio and Iowa, Wisconsin’s “blue collar” Democratic cred fell along with the destruction of labor unions by Republicans taking bribes from billionaires and corporations. But things used to be "different," at least a long, long time ago. In an interview in Slate. Dan Kaufman, author of The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics, the immigrants that came to Wisconsin in the mid-19th century were mainly German and Scandinavian, both of whom were seeking freedom from dictatorial regimes, and were initially open to progressive ideas and anti-slavery rhetoric.
The Grange movement, mainly composed of farmers who fought against the rail companies who were overcharging them for shipping costs, would form the backbone of unionism in the state. These people who fought for their "rights" against the powerful, found a leader in Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette as governor and later as U.S. Senator and presidential candidate on the Progressive Party ticket in 1924; here we see that La Follette actually won 13 Electoral votes in that elections, winning 54 percent of the vote in his home state:
But the progressive movement based on the “Wisconsin Idea,” which according to the UW-Madison website, “signifies a general principle: that education should influence people’s lives beyond the boundaries of the classroom,” pretty much died as a matter of public policy statewide along with the national Progressive movement after 1925. Of course the main UW campus and its environs still has a progressive tradition, and part of Walker’s infamous Act 10 law was to separate the main campus from the rest of the UW system so as not to “infect” it with liberal philosophy.
Kaufman noted that with the help of the influx of money, “the Tea Party wave in 2010 swept Scott Walker into office as well as gave Republicans complete control over both houses of the state Legislature. Scott Walker was somebody who was very ambitious and had cultivated as Milwaukee County executive a lot of conservative national political organizations, including Americans for Prosperity, which is the Charles and David Koch political arm.”
Walker
needed an “enemy” to fight, and that was the state employees union who he
portrayed as little more than leeches off the taxpayer dime while many rural
voters didn't have access to even “Badgercare.” Although something needed to be
done to address the state’s budget deficit, naturally taxes (especially for
the richer residents) was off the table and Walker chose the employee unions to
shaft. If anyone was going to ask him, as was Wisconsin's most "famous" politician, Joe McCarthy, if he had any sense of "decency," such terms no longer had any meaning to Republicans.
Rather than merely use Act 10 to force employees to pay a percentage of the premiums on health care and pensions, he decided to make the unions a vocal enemy by also inhibiting their ability to negotiate terms with the state, as well as inhibiting union dues collection, which of course is political since Republicans see unions as their worst enemy as they actually have some money to put-up against the billionaire and SuperPac money that backs them and provides their "culture war" ammunition.
Walker survived, with the help of out-of-state money, a recall election, and helped engineer the new gerrymandered election map. Walker also courted Trump, whose influence on much of the Wisconsin electorate helped “racialize” right-wing populism. Kaufmann noted that “There’s a wonderful political-science professor, Kathy Cramer, who wrote the book The Politics of Resentment. I interviewed her. She mentions that for years she was going out to these small, rural communities, and no one would mention immigration. She wouldn’t prompt people; it just never came up.” But that was before incidents like this one reported by a Madison area news site in 2016:
Officials from the Elkhorn Area School District are investigating racist taunts directed at Beloit Memorial High School soccer players by a group of its students attending a game. The incident happened Thursday night as the Beloit Memorial girls varsity soccer team visited Elkhorn. Beloit Memorial girls soccer coach Brian Denu said the Elkhorn students taunted black and Latina girls soccer players with racial slurs and chants like “Donald Trump, build that wall.”
Of course "liberals" in the state don't do themselves any favors when they display ignorance as well. In 2020 during yet another George Floyd riot that was nothing more than an excuse to riot, rioters in the state capitol of Madison were involved in pulling down a statue of and “beheading” an anti-slavery activist and Union Army colonel Hans Christian Heg, who was killed in battle. Of course ignorance never stops a fanatic, and the man convicted of using his car to topple the statue “explained” his action by “wanting to make a difference” and “I was just a person who woke up and saw the injustice done to a man named George Floyd.” He probably would have been better off staying in bed. As an aside, it is curious that BLM, “woke” society and “critical race theory” is blind to those who actually fought a war that ultimately made the ending of slavery possible.
Anyways, Wisconsin is still one of the whitest states in the country, although a small percentage of Hispanics add to that by self-identifying as “white,” although this is self-deceiving since if you do not look “Anglo-Saxon” you are not actually seen as “white.” Milwaukee is still one of most segregated cities in the country, not helped by the fact that an ordinance was passed that removed the restriction that city employees (including police, firefighters and teachers) be required to reside in the city; most of those who “opted out” were of course white.
Recent anger by black residents for the city council declaring Chicago a “sanctuary city” was supposedly about job competition, but the fact is that cities like Milwaukee need immigrants from anywhere for population and economic growth, so as to not lose all the tax revenue that whites escaping to the suburbs are taking with them; we know what that looks like in cities like Detroit, littered with once grand old buildings from the heyday of the auto industry, but now just abandoned, decaying structures that the city can’t afford to demolish or entice developers.
The photo book Lost Detroit: Stories Behind the Motor City’s Majestic Ruins is a fascinating guide inside these shattered structures and how they got there, and while many cities like Seattle have housing shortages, in Detroit there are over 50,000 abandoned houses like this one, whose first occupants were likely a fairly well-off whites…
…while grand old palaces like the United Artists theater built in 1928 and now a “historical site” is slowly crumbling, with a bankrupt city that can’t afford its upkeep, or people who just don't care:
But I digress. It’s hard to say just how “different” Wisconsin is now since I left there a long, long time ago. Maybe it never really changed. After all, that was the state I was living in when those white kids held me on the ground and stuffed grass in my mouth, and when I was watching a soft ball game in a public park, some white kid standing behind me kept throwing pebbles at me before Dad told him to stop it. Maybe deep down very little has changed in Wisconsin, and like the country as a whole, all it needed was far-right nutcases like Walker and Trump to allow them to be more “comfortable” expressing their own bigotries and paranoia openly.
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