A November 30 glossy magazine feature in Vanity Fair teased readers with the promise of “A Wisconsin Death Trip for Our Times,” led by gonzo tour guide Jeff Sharlet, a journalist and best-selling author whose book is reviewed in this issue of the magazine. Sharlet’s peek into the heart of Midwestern darkness depicts America’s Dairyland as downright dangerous.
Knocking on doors with “F--- Biden” and “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, he interviews locals across the state and creates a composite portrait of deranged, tattooed, gun-toting insurrectionists readying themselves for imminent civil war. A friend of mine who lives in North Carolina sent me a link to Sharlet’s piece with the message, “After reading this Vanity Fair piece, not so sure I wanna come visit y’all.” Surely a Southerner could see through the Midwestern version of Deliverance, I told her.
Shuddering at stereotypes of exotic rural people is an increasingly popular pastime in liberal urban enclaves across the United States. It’s not a healthy pursuit, as I said to Sharlet, who took to Twitter to defend his nihilistic take on my home state after I criticized it in a column for the Wisconsin Examiner. Yes, he’s a talented writer. And yes, there are some paranoid, alienated voters out here in fly-over land. But reality does not look quite as dark as Vanity Fair’s horror film depiction of the Midwest.
Sharlet follows in the footsteps of his former teacher Michael Lesy, who wrote the original Wisconsin Death Trip book, published in 1973, after rummaging through Wisconsin Historical Society archives as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin. Lesy’s eerie collection of black-and-white photos and newspaper clippings about arson, madness, murder, deadly disease, and suicide in Black River Falls between the years of 1885 and 1910 became a cult classic. (A 1999 documentary film version added dramatizations of the exploits of serial killers Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer.)
Lesy writes about the brutal economic forces that bore down on workers and farmers in the late nineteenth century. Bankruptcy was as much an epidemic as diphtheria and smallpox. Ruined farmers frequently died by suicide. Paranoia was a natural reaction to the chaos and cruelty of the world at the time, Lesy theorized. What he missed was the larger political context, including the rise of “Fighting Bob” La Follette and the progressive movement, one of the most consequential developments of the last century.
Fast forward to our own times. We survived the midterm elections of 2022 without any of the truly awful predictions of disaster coming to pass. Across the country, the Big Lie fizzled, as candidates endorsed by Donald Trump mostly lost and doomsday scenarios involving GOP candidates refusing to accept the results and armed militias waging campaigns of intimidation against voters failed to materialize.
In Michigan, where in 2020 militia members protesting pandemic restrictions had invaded the state capitol with semi-automatic rifles and plotted to kidnap and execute Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Democrats swept the board. Whitmer was re-elected, and Democrats took control of both houses of the state legislature for the first time in forty years. Voters also passed referendums to codify abortion rights and enshrine in the state constitution the fundamental right of all citizens to vote. Violent, white supremacist, misogynist politics went down to defeat.
What happened in Michigan shows what is possible when citizens shake off minority rule and elect a government that represents the interests of the majority. Michigan’s Blue Wave was possible because, four years ago, voters passed a referendum adopting nonpartisan redistricting. Republicans couldn’t gerrymander themselves into power anymore. And the extremists who captured headlines and fed Trumpist fantasies crumbled under majority rule.
This resurgence of democracy is exactly what Republicans have been fighting across the country to prevent. Even as the widening rift between urban and rural voters has become a feature of our toxic and hyperpartisan times, it is the people in power, not the voters, who are driving the fracturing of our nation. That’s important to keep in mind.
The U.S. Supreme Court ended 2022 with oral arguments in Moore v. Harper, the North Carolina redistricting case that relies on a rightwing fringe notion called the “independent state legislature” theory. Conservatives have used this theory to argue that state courts cannot interfere with state legislatures’ decisions to create gerrymandered voting maps, and even to claim that legislatures, not voters, should determine the outcome of presidential elections.
In states like North Carolina and Wisconsin, where extreme partisan gerrymandering has locked in big Republican majorities in the legislature, even when Democrats win statewide elections, the “independent state legislature” theory could provide a cover of legitimacy to the fake electors who met in secret after Joe Biden won the presidency, flouted the will of the voters, and sent fraudulent electoral ballots for Trump to Washington, D.C.
The election deniers are losing in the court of public opinion. Candidates who backed the Big Lie lost almost every major race in November’s midterm elections. One exception was Senator Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin Republican whose staff attempted to deliver Wisconsin’s fake electoral ballots for Trump to then-Vice President Mike Pence.
Johnson fended off his challenger, African American Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes, in a dirty, race-baiting campaign that was decided by a single percentage point.
Republicans are running scared. Bob Spindell, a Wisconsin GOP elections commissioner and a fake Trump elector, bragged in an email to about 1,700 party members in the Fourth Congressional District about suppressing the turnout in Black and Hispanic areas of Milwaukee, in part through restrictive voting laws, in order to help Johnson win.
Trying to stake out a middle-of-the-road, kinda-insurrectionist, kinda-noncommittal position is simply a declaration of moral bankruptcy—but that’s where the Republican Party is today.
To help chart a course for the next election, the Wisconsin Republican Party recently hired a paid party leader for the first time, a step Johnson urged the party to take. Veteran GOP consultant Brian Schimming took the job, which will involve raising lots of money and figuring out how Republicans can win.
In an interview on a Sunday TV news show in Milwaukee, Schimming announced his plans to lead his party wherever the wind may blow. Trump “certainly is a vote-driver here in Wisconsin,” Schimming observed, before offering the following advice to Trump supporters: “If you’re going to support Donald Trump, go do it, but have a second choice.”
To the Trump-averse Republican, he said, “Don’t say you won’t vote for Donald Trump, because he could end up the nominee.” Schimming added, “There’s a way to be into both places there, and we will be,” promising to bring pro- and anti-Trump Republicans together.
Schimming unveiled this bit of opportunistic wisdom just one day before the House January 6 committee announced its criminal referrals for Trump to the Justice Department.
It takes a lot of cognitive dissonance to pretend that Trump is just another politician, and that supporting him amounts to the same thing as supporting any other political candidate. Shortly after announcing another run for the White House in 2024, he called for suspending the U.S. Constitution so that he could be reinstalled as President ahead of the election.
Trump is an authoritarian who abetted the attempted overthrow of the U.S. government. That’s too much for a lot of voters, including the wealthy and well-educated country club types who’ve been abandoning the Wisconsin Republican Party in droves.
Schimming’s approach—go ahead and hang out your Trump banner but be ready to raise the flag for another candidate if things go south—is absurd. Most voters are either passionately pro-Trump or totally turned off.
Trying to stake out a middle-of-the-road, kinda-insurrectionist, kinda-noncommittal position is simply a declaration of moral bankruptcy. But that’s where the Republican Party is today—scrounging for votes wherever they can find them, unconcerned about the damage they are doing.
As Wisconsin’s new GOP chair advises voters to keep their seditionist options open and the state prepares to host the Republican National Convention in 2024, things could get scary.
But there’s another danger, besides the GOP’s continued game of footsie with an authoritarian megalomaniac and his armed white supremacist followers. As the Democrats move into the space abandoned by the GOP in the affluent suburbs, there is a temptation to ignore rural voters and further isolate an alienated segment of the electorate.
The collapse of manufacturing and the loss of the family farm—economic and social crises that have contributed to our bitter political divisions—need addressing. Instead of exploiting people’s anger and sense of abandonment (Republicans) or turning away and ignoring rural issues (Democrats), Wisconsin—and the nation—badly needs leaders in both parties who will pay attention to the urgent issues that affect all of us.
We need a new progressive movement for our times, to defend democracy itself and the will of the people against a powerful minority that wants to hang on to power at any cost. ◆