Artwork by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
I used to be proud of being a Wisconsinite. There was a time when our state was a national leader in education, clean government, and public works. We used to have one of the country’s best state-run university systems. Wisconsin had a progressive tradition reaching back to the days of Fighting Bob LaFollette and Emil Seidel, Daniel Hoan, and Frank Zeidler, Milwaukee’s trio of socialist mayors. Under their respective tenures, the city built a world-renowned park system, constructed an outstanding road system, ensured clean a water supply, and expanded the museum and public library system.
Milwaukee is still a major-league city, but most of these accomplishments are holdovers from the past. Now—and for the last ten years—Wisconsin has stagnated under the corrupt and incompetent leadership of the Republican majority. School budgets have been slashed, collective bargaining for public employees has been eliminated, and extensions for public healthcare have been ignored. And today’s politicians are a national embarrassment.
During the spring primary election last year, State Assembly Speaker Robin Vos demonstrated how safe it would be to vote during the pandemic by coming to his polling place in a hazmat suit, a response either so arrogant or tone-deaf, stupid—or all of the above—that it boggled the imagination. He—and we—became a national laughingstock.
More recently, Senator Ron Johnson has been making headlines with his bone-headed pronouncements about the Capitol riots of January 6th. On a conservative talk show, Johnson stated he never really felt threatened during the riots (even though he fled with the rest of the Senate). He said, “I knew those were people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, and so I wasn’t concerned.” Johnson, idiotically, went on to say if the protestors “were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned.”
Somehow, the senator from Wisconsin managed to sound arrogant, clueless, and racist in the same instant, executing an acrobatic turn of phrase that left most of America gaping. Not only was he telling us that we should disregard the video footage of the insurrection because it wasn’t really violent, but he was also saying it wasn’t violent because the rioters were white.
Obtuseness and ignorance aside, Wisconsin politics is characterized by a nastiness and vitriolic hubris that had never previously existed. Of course, Vos and Scott Fitzgerald—who has graduated to the U.S. House (God help us all) are probably taking their leads from Mitch McConnell, whose dedication to sabotaging every bit of Democratic legislation is legendary, and the worst exemplar of nastiness ever—Donald Trump. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t know better.
Wisconsin politics used to be populated with men and women of integrity, vision, and intelligence. And style. Bob LaFollette served in the Wisconsin Statehouse, the U.S. Senate, as Wisconsin governor, and made a serious run for president in 1924, professing a platform of tax reform, civil liberty protections, union support, and the stoppage of child labor.
In 1957, William Proxmire was elected to the Senate seat vacated by Joseph McCarthy’s death. Proxmire, calling McCarthy “a disgrace to Wisconsin, the Senate, and to America”, went on to serve five terms in the Senate. He was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War, and was also critical of excessive government spending, creating the Golden Fleece Award which he presented—tongue-in-cheek—monthly to wasteful and self-serving government projects. Proxmire was also an advocate for campaign finance reform. In his last two campaigns, the senator refused outside contributions and never spent more than two hundred dollars out of his own pocket. He won those elections by margins of seventy and sixty-five percent.
In 1977, political outsider Lee Sherman Dreyfus decided to run for Wisconsin governor as a Republican, even though the party was backing Robert Kasten for the seat. Undeterred, Dreyfus ran a colorful campaign, sporting his trademark red vest and crisscrossing the state in a painted school bus known as the Red Vest Whistle Stop Special. Against all odds, he won. Governing as a fiscal conservative, Dreyfus engineered tax cuts and focused on reducing government spending while pursuing a moderate social agenda. He signed a bill protecting gay and lesbian rights in the workplace, stating “there are some questions the government has no business asking.”
In 1992, Russ Feingold ran for the U.S. Senate. Although he didn’t have much name recognition, Feingold garnered attention by painting five promises to voters on his garage door, calling it a contract with Wisconsin voters. Like Proxmire, Feingold pledged to rely on small voter contributions to fund his campaign, and to hold yearly “listening sessions” in each of Wisconsin’s seventy-two counties. Feingold made good on his promises. In 2002, he co-authored the McCain-Feingold Act with John McCain, restricting the use of soft money and issue-advocacy ads in campaigns.
Wisconsin also boasted Vel Phillips, the first African American woman to serve as jurist, alderperson, and Secretary of State in Wisconsin, as well as Gaylord Nelson, Wisconsin governor and U.S. Senator, who was an avid environmentalist and the founder of Earth Day.
These men and women did not enter public service to make their fortunes or enhance their connections. They came to serve. All of them brought personal vision, as well as and integrity, as well as personality, to their offices. Today we have politicians whose tenures are marked by vitriol, bullying, and opportunistic manipulation of the public trust. Their campaigns are not characterized by public servants creating trust with the electorate; they are run by party machines and special interest groups.
Ron Johnson is a racist, an elitist, and a naked opportunist. Robin Vos is an idiot. They are obstructionists. Their party has deliberately destroyed years of progressive tradition. Collective bargaining is gone, public schools are underfunded and in danger of privatization. Taxes favor corporations and the very rich. Unions are under duress. Threats to the environment—recently including an illegally run and barbaric wolf hunt—are more prevalent than ever before. Public health is—very obviously—a secondary concern to these partisan hacks.
Wisconsin needs to wake up. We didn’t realize we had it so good. Assessing the losses of national icons like Feingold, Proxmire, and Dreyfus from the political landscape only serves to underline the moral vacuum of leadership that is sucking the very soul out of the Wisconsin experience.