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USA 2025 = Wisconsin 2011 [1]

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Date: 2025-04-02

Thank you, my fellow Wisconsinites! It’s a cold and rainy morning here, but it could not be any brighter. The world was watching us and we rose to the occasion.

Thank you, Susan Crawford! “Today, Wisconsinites fended off an unprecedented attack on our democracy, our fair elections and our Supreme Court. Wisconsin stood up and said loudly that justice does not have a price. Our courts are not for sale.” Amen.

But most of the commentaries I’m reading are missing a key lesson. Crawford’s victory comes after years of hard work in the trenches, dating back to the takeover of Wisconsin by Governor Scott Walker and his gang of cynical ideologues in the 2010 governor’s election, part of the national Tea Party wave. We endured eight awful years of Walker’s fascist-friendly power-tripping, and we are still feeling the hangover.

Through the Walker years, Wisconsin politics was poisoned by deeply gerrymandered state legislative and U.S. congressional districts; dark money coming out of the Bradley Foundation, the billionaire Uihleins and Diane Hendricks, and other oligarchs; reactionary media dominance, especially in the Milwaukee collar counties and across rural Wisconsin; the denigration of public education at every level, from our local schools to the University of Wisconsin System; intimidation and fear-mongering; attacks on science (including Walker’s ban on using the term “climate change”); attacks on unions, public workers, and the very notion of public service; and attacks on local governance, voter access and participation, the independent judiciary, and other foundations of our democracy.

In early 2011, many of us, desperate to do something, anything, took to the streets during the weeks of the Wisconsin uprising to protest the assault on decency and democracy. Walker had campaigned on certain vague promises—and then undertook a blunt, radical unmaking of the state’s laws and institutions. When the protests mounted, he was first caught off-guard, then cast himself as a conservative hero for his cowardly refusal to address the issues the protesters raised. In subsequent years he doubled down, fomenting division all along the way. Recall Walker infamously telling Hendricks that they would "divide and conquer" the state in busting the labor unions and making Wisconsin a “right to work (for lower wages)“ state.

We in Wisconsin had to claw our way back over fourteen years to get to last night’s decisive Crawford victory. We had to fight an intransigent, gerrymandered Republican state legislature. We had to win a majority of the state supreme court that was not captured and controlled by the far right. We had to work, year after year, for fair legislative maps. We had to suffer hard losses and setbacks along the way, in court and at the polls. We had to organize and march and work in all our rural, suburban, and urban communities to move things in the right direction. In 2018 we tossed out Walker and elected Governor Tony Evers, then reelected him in 2022. He held the fort as we elected supreme court justices Rebecca Dallet in 2018, Jill Karofsky in 2020, and Janet Protasiewicz in 2023, securing a progressive-minded majority.

In short, it has been a long hard slog in a closely divided state. And that is why we are deeply savoring yesterday’s results. It feels like we may finally have crawled up the sides of the deep hole we have been in for so long, and can now peer out on a brighter landscape.

And now the nation is right where we were in 2011. A demagogue is in power, in league with a compliant, cowardly, unprincipled legislature. Trump is doing a Walker. He ran on one thing, and is unleashing something else (that something else defined by the well-heeled think-tanks). Public workers, and the public good, are under all-out assault. We are lined up against big—the biggest—money. In fact, many of those exact same players, the Uihleins and Hendricks and Bradley Foundation, are still in the room nationally, joined now by the world’s richest person. People are desperate to do something. And over the last two months we see it, in all those contentious Republican town hall meetings. And of course we get the same shopworn characterization of “paid protesters and instigators” that we heard in Wisconsin in 2011.

So that, I hope, is what Wisconsin can share on this bright morning: encouragement, but also realism. It has taken us a long time and hard work to get back to where we once belonged. In 2011 we felt outrage, and acted on it. But that is when the real work began. We have never stopped since. As Wisconsin’s great progressive-era governor and senator, Fighting Bob La Follette, said in 1911: “Tyranny and oppression are just as possible under democratic forms as under any other. We are slow to realize that democracy is a life; and involves continual struggle. It is only as those of every generation who love democracy resist with all their might the encroachments of its enemies that the ideals of representative government can even be nearly approximated.”

Forward!

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