America is screwed.
You know it, I know it. Not because media pundits on cable news or power brokers on Capitol Hill say so. Not because college professors have clued us in on how empires fall. You can tell on your own. You’ve got eyes. I can tell because the place I’ve called home my whole life—the flyover state of Wisconsin—is America’s weather vane. As Wisconsin goes, so goes the U.S. of A.
Cover of Mike McCabe's new book, "Unscrewing America: Hints and Hopes from the Heartland," published February 28, 2020.
Wisconsin was instrumental in putting Donald Trump in the White House. Before that, my home state played a crucial role in making Barack Obama the nation’s first black President and then re-electing him.
Like litmus, the mixture of dyes extracted from lichens that is red under acid conditions and blue under alkaline conditions, Wisconsin readily changes colors. Politically speaking, it is a swing state, not bright Republican red or solid Democratic blue but rather deep purple.
From the mid-1940s through 1984, Wisconsin again voted Republican more often than not. Democrats won the seven presidential elections from 1988 through 2012, though usually not by much. The Democrats’ winning streak was broken in 2016 when Trump won the state by 0.7 percent over Hillary Clinton. After losing Wisconsin’s April 5 Democratic primary to Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, Clinton didn’t come back to the state to campaign before the November general election. Not once.
Clinton evidently did not consider that whenever major change has come to America, Wisconsin has been on the cutting edge. Wisconsin established the first kindergartens and was first to set up a vocational, technical, and adult education system. First to pass a law providing workplace injury compensation and first to create an unemployment compensation program. First to create primary elections to take the business of nominating candidates away from party bosses in smoke-filled rooms and put it in the hands of the people. First to base taxation on the ability to pay.
Social Security was invented here. When Americans were spooked by communism after defeating the Nazis, it was Wisconsin’s Joseph McCarthy who most aggressively fanned the flames of the Red Scare and popularized Cold War thinking. As environmental degradation began to take a noticeable toll, Wisconsin’s Gaylord Nelson founded Earth Day, celebrated on April 22, to raise consciousness.
Time and again, Wisconsin has blazed trails. In 1919, Wisconsin became the first state to ratify the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, giving women the right to vote. In 1982, Wisconsin led the way again by passing the country’s first statewide gay rights law.
Once a state of firsts, Wisconsin now is bringing up the rear by many measures. The state lags the rest of the country in job and wage growth and was slower to recover from the last recession. It has lost manufacturing jobs at a disturbing clip and has been slow to adapt to the changing nature of the economy, ranking dead last in the country in new business start-ups and entrepreneurial activity. So far in the twenty-first century, no state in America has seen its middle class shrink more than Wisconsin.
As of 2018, the state ranked forty-ninth in Internet speed and was lagging badly in renewable energy development. We used to pride ourselves on having some of the best schools in the nation but have watched them slip toward mediocrity in recent years. Many parts of the state now have a public health crisis on their hands when it comes to drinking water.
Long known as America’s Dairyland, Wisconsin’s family farmers are in crisis. The state is losing more than a family farm a day, and western Wisconsin led the nation in farm bankruptcies in 2017. There also was a record number of suicides in Wisconsin that year, driven by a surge in the numbers of farmers taking their own lives.
One sector that is booming is the prison industry. In a country with the most prisoners of any nation in the world, Wisconsin’s biggest city has the dubious distinction of being home to the most incarcerated zip code in America.
Wisconsin has lost its way and is becoming a shadow of its former self. Same goes for the country as a whole. The gap between rich and poor is wider in America than in any other major developed country. And the gap continues to widen. Barely half of Americans now qualify as middle class. That compares to 61 percent in 1971. More challenging was the uneven recovery from the Great Recession geographically, with the coasts rebounding faster and more completely than the heartland.
All of this gravely threatens the country’s cohesiveness. It’s hard to remain the United States of America with such stark divisions.
Small towns across America are dying, and it’s not too much of an overstatement to say that rural life faces extinction. This breeds political resentment and is a threat to all of America, and conditions cry out for a Marshall Plan for small towns across America. Problems in inner cities are just as alarming, and urban renewal is needed every bit as much as rural revitalization.
Wisconsin’s largest cities are the state’s biggest economic engines, and the same goes for other states. America cannot thrive if our biggest cities struggle and crumble. Decaying cities need a Marshall Plan too. We can’t just seek refuge in the suburbs.
Hate and fear of outsiders are on the rise and lead nowhere good. Walling ourselves off is the wrong impulse, especially when there’s an increasingly acute labor shortage that threatens to throttle the U.S. economy. For all those who have lost good-paying, family-supporting factory jobs, few seem to recognize that the primary culprits are automation and economic globalization, not immigration. Now more than ever, it is important to remember that ours is a nation of immigrants.
We have to face facts about climate change. Our survival as a species depends on it. It should be America’s goal to be the first nation in the world fully powered by renewable energy. Building the green economy to that scale is not only the right thing to do environmentally, but is also a way to resuscitate American manufacturing and replace all those lost factory jobs.
If Wisconsin’s history of being a bellwether foreshadowed what’s to unfold in the future, my state should be leading the way on all these fronts. It is not. Not for now anyway.
Some are wondering if Wisconsin isn’t cutting off its nose to spite its face. For example, dairy farmers who rely heavily on immigrants—some documented, some not—to tend and milk their herds are beginning to voice misgivings about President Trump’s trade wars and anti-immigration policies. Clark County, where I did most of my growing up on my family’s dairy farm, has nearly twice as many cows as people. As of the 2010 census, a majority of the 216 people living in my hometown of Curtiss identified as Hispanic or Latino.
When Trump said in early 2019 that there was no room in the U.S. for more immigrants, the middle-of-the-road Wisconsin State Journal editorialized that “Wisconsin has lots of space and a dire need for more skilled and entrepreneurial workers to fill jobs and keep our economy strong.” It concluded: “Our state needs more people to work and contribute here, including immigrants.”
In Clark County, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by more than a two-to-one margin. This drives Democrats up a wall. Many jump to the conclusion that people in such places are foolishly voting against their own interests. That has become a mantra among highly educated urban professionals who make up a large portion of the Democratic Party’s base.
That belief is as wrong as it is condescending. Rural voters are not voting against their own interests. They know their interests well but feel invisible and forsaken. They wonder if politicians in Washington, D.C., or state capitals even know they are out there. They vote in anger. They vote out of desperation. They vote hoping against hope that they might get the attention of policymakers who haven’t given them a second thought in ages. They vote in hopes of shaking up a system they are convinced is rigged against them.
That’s why dozens of rural counties in Wisconsin and many hundreds across America voted for Barack Obama and then turned around and voted for Donald Trump. The line between hope and change on the one hand and fear and hate on the other is far thinner than you might think.
Large segments of our nation’s population are feeling left behind, struggling to make ends meet and watching their standard of living erode. Places like Wisconsin have more than their share of people in this predicament. Wisconsin is to the nation what canaries are to coal miners. What’s been happening to Wisconsin—politically, socially, and economically—is an unmistakable warning that there’s something toxic about current conditions in our country.
The challenges vary from place to place. But they all grow from the same taproot, a poisoned culture that glorifies greed, dooming us to a government that works for a wealthy and well-connected few at everyone else’s expense and an economy that richly rewards those at the top and leaves so many out in the cold.
There is grotesque inequality, both political and economic, that breeds resentment, anger, and hate. There is privilege, both political and economic, that erodes trust in others and destroys faith in the idea that we are all in this together and need to look out for each other. There is a looming ecological catastrophe that causes many to bury their heads in the sand.
America is screwed. It’s up to us to unscrew it.
If you don’t see it as your job, my job, our job, then ask yourself these questions: Do you have a high level of confidence that Congress will unscrew the country? Will the White House? Will governors or state legislators?
Nope. This is up to we the people.
Unscrewing America starts with remembering the countless forgotten people living in forgotten places in our country.
Unscrewing America depends on democracy being rescued. Democracy as Lincoln defined it—government of the people, by the people, and for the people—is an endangered species. The will of the people has to be the law of the land, and that won’t be the case as long as voting districts are drawn in a way that produces elections where one party wins the most votes, but the other ends up holding the most offices. It won’t be the case as long as voting is suppressed. And it won’t be the case as long as we have the best government money can buy, with the wealthiest in our society allowed to put elected officials in a stranglehold and dictate how our country should be run.
Unscrewing America depends on aligning our politics and economics. That means bringing democracy to our economy. Just as we need the government Lincoln envisioned, we also need to imagine—and construct—an economy that is truly of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Unscrewing America depends on rediscovering our sense of national purpose. It depends on a moral reckoning. It depends on rethinking our relationship with the earth.
It’s not too late. America can be unscrewed once we overhaul the thinking, the practices, and the systems that screwed us over in the first place.
From Unscrewing America: Hints and Hopes from the Heartland, by Mike McCabe, published February 28 by Little Creek Press. Copyright 2020, excerpted with permission.
Mike McCabe is a longtime government watchdog and democracy reform advocate who currently is executive director of Our Wisconsin Revolution.