Forty years ago, I came to Madison, Wisconsin, to work for The Progressive magazine after a stint at a publication founded by Ralph Nader. I admired The Progressive (still do!), and I relished the opportunity to live in a state with such a clean reputation and a storied progressive tradition.
Well, Wisconsin is not clean anymore, and it has long since lost its claim as a laboratory for democracy.
Under eight years of Republican Governor Scott Walker, the state evolved into a laboratory for plutocracy, a Petri dish for the Koch brothers, and a how-to manual for rolling back the clock.
In Wisconsin, Republicans have a lock on the legislature, thanks to gerrymandering. Last year, Republicans rammed through new maps that Assembly Speaker Robin Vos admitted were tilted toward cementing their hold on power.
Walker is gone now, but the Republicans still control the state legislature, and they have used that power not only to tie the hands of Democratic Governor Tony Evers but also to push a broad anti-democracy agenda.
From repeating the “Big Lie” about Trump being the true winner of the 2020 election, to introducing voter suppression bills, to messing with the commission overseeing elections, to perpetuating the nation’s most gerrymandered electoral districts, the Republicans in Wisconsin have been following a terrifyingly regressive playbook.
But Wisconsin is just a microcosm of these issues, so let’s look at the big picture: There is a militant, aggressive anti-democracy movement afoot in our land. Its leaders include Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Mike Lindell, and Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Paul Gosar. And it has a mass base, embraced by a significant share of Republicans, which adds to its fascist stench.
This movement consists of a toxic combination of white nationalism, the Trump cult, irrationalism (e.g., COVID deniers and QAnon followers), and the rightwing media ecosystem that fuels it all. It is a formidable threat that we underestimate at our peril.
In the last issue of The Progressive, Editor Bill Lueders laid out much of the craziness that exists here in Wisconsin (see “The Party of Fraud”). Here are some further examples: At the outer edges of insanity, there is Republican State Representative Timothy Ramthun, who proposed in November 2020 that Wisconsin should withdraw its Electoral College votes ahead of their certification and Biden’s Inauguration in January, even though there is no provision in the U.S. Constitution for such a do-over.
Then there is Republican State Representative Janel Brandtjen, who actually chairs the Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections, telling her constituents that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. She has held one “public” hearing after another that are “by invitation only,” and the only people she invites are fellow conspiracy mongers.
Meanwhile, state Republicans are now seeking to do away with the Wisconsin Elections Commission for its failure to embrace the Big Lie narrative. What makes this especially ironic is that Republicans themselves created this commission in 2015 after dissolving the highly respected nonpartisan Government Accountability Board because they were mad that it had helped investigate alleged illegal activity by Walker.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission has six members: three appointed by the Democratic leaders in the legislature, and three by the Republicans. But because two of the Republican commissioners have refused to go along with the Big Lie, Republican schemers have had enough of it.
U.S. Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, let the cat out of the bag when he said in November, “If I were running the joint—and I’m not—I would come out and I would just say, ‘We’re reclaiming our authority. Don’t listen to WEC anymore. Their guidances are null and void.’ ” He even suggested that the legislature could do this without having to change the law that established the commission.
If Evers loses his re-election bid in November, you can bet that the Republicans will either do away with the Wisconsin Elections Commission or hand over some of its powers—including certifying the election results—either to the Republican-controlled legislature itself or to a Republican partisan office holder.
And that would be, as intended, the death knell for democracy in Wisconsin.
In Wisconsin, Republicans have a lock on the legislature, thanks to gerrymandering. Last year, Republicans rammed through new maps that Assembly Speaker Robin Vos admitted were tilted toward cementing their hold on power. Evers vetoed them, and the issue went to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
This court has four rightwing justices and three liberal justices, and the rightwing majority ruled that any new map would have to be based on, of all things, the 2011 maps. Those maps were so tilted toward Republicans that a panel of federal judges in 2016 declared that they were unconstitutional. (Ultimately, this ruling against those maps was rendered moot by the U.S. Supreme Court’s horrendous 2019 ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause, where Chief Justice John Roberts recognized that hyper-partisan gerrymandering was “incompatible with democratic principles” but then said the issue was “nonjusticiable,” and outside of the high court’s purview.)
Laughably, the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s conservative majority said that by “using the existing maps ‘as a template’ and implementing only those remedies necessary to resolve Constitutional or statutory deficiencies,” they are “ensuring we fulfill our role as apolitical and neutral arbiters of the law.”
Hardly.
What they are doing, instead, is cementing Republican control of the state legislature for at least another decade. As Justice Rebecca Dallet noted in her dissent, “That outcome has potentially devastating consequences for representative government in Wisconsin.” She added, “Try as it might, the majority is fooling no one by proclaiming its decision is neutral and apolitical.” In fact, she said, this approach “perpetuates the partisan agenda of politicians no longer in power.”
Dallet also pointed out that “no court in Wisconsin, state or federal, has ever adopted a least-change approach.” For that matter, she added, “The least-change principle is found nowhere in the Wisconsin or U.S. Constitutions.” She argued that this ruling could set a precedent that would be hopelessly self-perpetuating.
“If the party that benefits from the maps adopted in this case controls only the legislature for the next redistricting cycle, it has every incentive to ensure an impasse,” Dallet wrote. “After all, an impasse will result in the court changing the maps as little as possible—thus preserving that party’s hold on power.”
She concluded that in this ruling, “The majority deals a striking blow to representative government in Wisconsin.”
And so it does.
Far too few Republicans have spoken out against the anti-democracy movement we’re facing, with Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois being the obvious exceptions. The vast majority of Republicans are afraid of the rabid base that Trump keeps feeding.
Here in Wisconsin, thankfully, Republican State Senator Kathleen Bernier, chair of the Senate Committee on Elections, has blasted the state’s seemingly endless probes into the integrity of the 2020 election, saying “these made-up things that people do to jazz up the base [are] just despicable, and I don’t think any elected legislator should ever play that game.”
But defeating this anti-democracy movement will remain an uphill battle if many Republican politicians are more worried about being primaried by their own party leaders than getting caught peddling nonsense they don’t fully believe in themselves.
Let me suggest just a few ways we ought to respond:
First, we need to denounce the racism and anti- semitism that are integral to this movement.
Second, we must galvanize our pro-democracy base to get out and vote and protest nonviolently for the preservation of our freedoms.
And finally, each of us needs to try to persuade two or three people in our wide social circles who are not yet on our side but who are coaxable. I’m not talking about the folks who are proudly flying Confederate flags or “Blue Lives Matter” flags or those who have Nazi tattoos on their biceps. I’m talking about people you know who are otherwise decent. We need to try to bring them around: Listen to where they are at, and what their concerns are; find some common ground; and then, gradually engage in conversation with them about the threats confronting our democracy.
This is an urgent moment. Our democracy is at stake.
Still, I remain hopeful. I take heart in this wonderful passage from Howard Zinn, who wrote so many great columns for The Progressive in the last years of his life.
Here’s Howard’s advice:
“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness . . . . If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.”
So let’s defy all that is bad around us, and let’s celebrate all that is good, and let’s save our democracy—in Wisconsin, and throughout the land.