If you want to understand America today, look at Wisconsin.
Now, when I say Wisconsin, you might be thinking of a place with lots of cheese,
hats made to look like cheese, and, oh yeah, maybe those World Champions, the Milwaukee Bucks.
But Wisconsin is more than that. Wisconsin is a SYMBOL of what has happened to the United States
over the last 50 years. It is a canary in the coal mine of American life. Whether it’s an assault on
the rights of workers, preventing the majority of voters from having their say, or assaulting
the right to vote itself, Wisconsin has been a PROVING GROUND for how our country is failing.
But it wasn’t always this way. In fact it used to be, well…almost the reverse.
You see, the German and Scandinavian immigrants who came to Wisconsin in the nineteenth century
brought with them communitarian ideas. They had an emphasis on collective solidarity over
individual success. Wisconsinites displayed a remarkably durable social fabric built on
strong communal ties, vigorous labor unions, and a deeply democratic, egalitarian worldview.
Early on, they wanted to abolish slavery and embraced Lincoln’s Republican Party.
Later, they embraced populist, anti-monopolist movements like the
Progressive Party of Robert La Follette. And in the twentieth century, in cities like Milwaukee,
they elected socialist mayors and socialist members of Congress.
They saw Wisconsin as a “LABORATORY OF DEMOCRACY,”
a place where ideas like the progressive income tax or unemployment insurance were first tried
before being implemented on a national scale. It was a concept they called “THE WISCONSIN IDEA”:
that government was a tool to better the lives of ordinary people. There was a broad,
social democratic consensus, backed by a powerful labor movement, about what government can
and should provide for ordinary people. That is what defined Wisconsin for decades.
But in the second half of the twentieth century, all of that came under assault.
Starting in the 1970s and accelerating in the ‘80s and ‘90s, waves of deindustrialization
swept across the Midwest, and they hit Wisconsin particularly hard.
The industrial base that supported so much of social and political life decayed rapidly:
as companies outsourced or automated their workforces,
factories were shuttered, workers were laid off, and towns fell apart.
It was a disaster for places like Milwaukee or Kenosha, where deindustrialization led to a
crisis of joblessness and despair that lingers on today. In today’s Wisconsin, 1 in every 7
children live in poverty. That includes 1 out of 2 Black children living in poverty.
And in the 1980s, a similar crisis began in Wisconsin’s rural areas.
As interest rates climbed, family farmers found themselves unable to pay back their debts, leading
to a massive campaign of farm repossessions where HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people lost everything.
This farm crisis led not only to hundreds of suicides by farmers,
but also to a transformation of agriculture: family farmers were pushed out, and huge new
agribusiness giants like Conagra or Cargill took over much of Wisconsin’s farmland.
After the two successive crises, Wisconsin, like much of the United States, found itself
in a quiet but deep social malaise by the beginning of the twenty-first
century: a despair that fed off a very real experience of decay. Median incomes were stagnant;
incarceration was rising; factories were closing, rural towns depopulating, atomization and suicide
rising. The only people doing very well were members of a new class of ultra-rich elites,
the same people who ran those companies like Cargill or Conagra.
But political leaders in both parties didn’t care. To them, Wisconsin was still a testing ground for
new ideas. But those ideas had changed. Government was no longer a tool that could help people,
but instead an enemy to be slashed, limited, made ineffective.
Republicans focused mainly on catering to the new elites, while Democrats gradually abandoned
their relationship with labor unions and focused on educated professionals.
Under Republican governor Tommy Thompson in the ‘80s and ‘90s,
Wisconsin pioneered “welfare reform” programs that reduced benefits and cut eligibility,
just as people needed them most. And under Democratic governor Jim Doyle in the 2000s,
the state eagerly cut state budgets and laid off government workers.
None of this, of course, improved material conditions. Plants were continuing to close or
downsize, and cities and rural areas continued to decay. And in 2010, amidst a wave of discontent,
Republicans won the state legislature and the governor’s office – winning about a third
of union households. The new governor was a conservative named Scott Walker.
Walker was very different from early generations who had defined Wisconsin.
He liked to play up his blue-collar credentials, and occasionally drove a Harley-Davidson
motorcycle. But beneath that facade, the new governor was an agent of the wealthy elites.
And he saw his time as governor as an opportunity to put their worldview into practice.
The main enemy, Walker thought,
was Wisconsin’s labor unions. Though they were much weaker than they had once been,
they were still the biggest remnant of the social democratic coalition that was once
central to Wisconsin politics. So the governor adopted a strategy of “divide and conquer.”
First, he sought to isolate the state’s public sector unions, branding them as greedy and
wasteful of taxpayer funds. He enacted a law outlawing collective bargaining for workplace
safety, capping wage increases, and requiring recertification elections every year. Within a
few years, Wisconsin’s public sector unions lost about 70 PERCENT of their membership.
And once he had hamstrung the public sector unions, he focused on private unions,
signing a right-to-work bill that aimed to dramatically reduce union membership.
Within a few years, Walker had cut Wisconsin’s unionization rate nearly in HALF – to roughly
the same rate as Alabama, a state with a long and violent anti-union history. In just five years,
Walker had successfully hobbled the state’s long tradition of labor power.
At the same time, the governor led a dramatic remaking of democracy in Wisconsin. Shortly after
taking office, he approved a new electoral map of the state that divided districts to ensure large
majorities for Republicans in every legislative election: Democratic voters were divided into
a few districts where they’d win overwhelmingly, and then a larger number of districts where they’d
always lose. It was one of the most effective gerrymanders in American political history.
In 2018, for instance, Democrats won 53 percent of the statewide votes for State Assembly to 45
percent for Republicans. But Republicans still won about two-thirds of State Assembly seats.
In order to have gained even a small majority in 2018, Democrats would have needed to win
by about 20 points statewide, 65 percent of the vote – an almost impossible feat.
With an essentially permanent majority, Republicans are empowered in Wisconsin’s
government basically no matter what happens in any election. And when a Democratic governor won
office in 2018, the Republican legislature executed an eleventh-hour power-grab that
stripped him of his powers and strengthened their own. Because Wisconsin doesn’t have a
system of direct democracy, there’s practically nothing that can be done about any of it.
Wisconsin today is a very different place than the Wisconsin of a hundred years ago.
The egalitarian worldview of the Wisconsin progressives and socialists
is gone. The institutions that allowed that world to flourish – the factories and labor unions,
the thriving towns and cities, the basic sense of COMMUNITY and SOLIDARITY – have disintegrated.
And the democracy that was once the heart of the “Wisconsin Idea”
has become a farce, where every election returns the same party to power.
What this means for Wisconsinites is that policies that are popular with
the vast majority of Wisconsin voters – legalizing recreational mairjuana,
raising the minimum wage, expanding Medicaid – have no shot of becoming law.
In other words, Wisconsinites don’t live in a representative democracy.
But this isn’t just a story about Wisconsin.
It is, in part, a global story, the same story that has played out all across the West:
in the north of France, in the east of Germany, or in northern England.
It’s a story of loss: not just the loss of jobs and the dissolution of communities,
but of the loss of possibility, of hope – the loss of the bright futures once offered
by the mass politics of working people. All we are left with is a dreary present.
And there is no better symbol of that than Wisconsin. A state that, though
always imperfect, once represented equality, solidarity, and democracy has become a SYMBOL
of a NEW TYPE of society. We traded away those time-tested ideals – and in turn,
got a society that was far more oligarchic, more atomized,
more adrift than the one that had come before. And in that bargain, we are ALL worse off.
I’m Philip Rocco, associate professor of political science
at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for the Gravel Institute.