This will be mostly stream of consciousness. I don’t intend to support with as many links as I would usually do. I apologize, it’s just too hard to do all of that today.
Much will be written about Donald Trump, our president-elect, and how he was able to pull a rabbit out of a hat to win the 2016 presidential election. Here’s my initial thoughts.
The midwest is what killed the democratic party this year. Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and almost all the parts of Illinois that aren’t Chicago.
There are vast swaths of country outside the cities in the midwest. I’m from one of those non-city parts of Wisconsin. But I have spent time either in business or residing in many of the major cities of that state, and I now reside in Madison, WI.
People outside the cities don’t get what happens inside cities, and don’t respect the cities. The people in urban areas can seem arrogant, through their education and relative wealth, making those not from the cities feel inferior (though you would never get these rural folk to admit that). The cities are the type of places you go for a day, then come home where your real life is.
One example of the distrust that many rural people have for cities is the traffic. For most of these rural types, the traffic in cities is a hassle and an annoyance. I have friends from childhood that won’t visit me in Madison because the traffic is too stressful for them to handle. Many of them have to gird themselves to get through it. They’re used to lower volume, longer distance, quieter drives.
In Wisconsin, at least, there is the added element that many people in the rural areas fucking hate Madison and Milwaukee. Madison is the communist utopia that consumes their best and brightest kids at the university and turns them into godless liberals. Milwaukee is where the blacks and hispanics are shooting cops in the street. They invent these images in their head and use their fantasies to justify their unjust hatred toward their fellow human beings. (There are suburban areas who are just as bad. Don’t get me started ranting about the moral depravity of the WOW counties around Milwaukee — you know, those people who claimed to have some type of principled opposition to Trump in the primaries before slavishly prostrating themselves before their new master yesterday).
Yesterday was deeply saddening for me, another major crack in this Wisconsin democrat’s already broken heart. I cannot tell you, in any words that would make sense, how profoundly upset I am that Russ Feingold is likely done in politics. Seeing WI as a red state makes me sick.
While sad, I cannot say that I am surprised, however. I have seen this story before.
In 2010, Scott Walker did something similar to what Trump did nationally this year. He took those rural areas, full of well meaning people who have genuine misconceptions about the urban areas, and weaponized them against the cities and the democrats. He took that natural distrust that has always existed and frothed it up into an irrational hatred based in fantasy. And in 2010, in a bad Democratic year, they put him in office.
Once in office, Scott Walker became the petri dish for the national GOP. (While you may see Never Trumpers derisively refer to Reince Preibus as a “kenosha operative,” it is now they who are the clowns, not the largely SE WI GOP political machine that will serve as the model for the next 4 years.)
Scott Walker started by attacking traditional supports of democratic power in the state. Act 10 gets a lot of attention with public unions, but less attention is paid to the fact that the GOP went after the trial lawyers—another aspect of the donor class of the democratic party—immediately, enacting aggressive “tort reform” measures into law sometimes literally in the dark of night in those first months.
State democrats, to their credit, saw the existential fight and did what they could to stop or slow it. As you may recall, 14 senators fled the state. All of the initial agenda attacking democrats ended up passing regardless. The state GOP was going to pass it regardless of procedure, regardless of open records laws, and regardless of whether the public had any meaningful input. GOP legislators closed ranks, and closed their ears to the protestors.
Meanwhile, redistricting occurred. Aided by conservative law firms in state, the WI GOP gerrymandered the shit out of the state. The assembly has since settled into a 2/3-1/3 GOP majority, with comfortable senate margins as well.
The reaction of the state democratic establishment was to consent to increasing calls for a recall election. We failed in that, due in no small part to the fact that approximately 10% of the electorate disagreed with Walker but didn’t think he should be removed from office based on disagreement alone.
So, the democratic party lost two huge supports right from the start. Once Walker survived the recall and gerrymandered the state, the state GOP began paying off constituent groups at the expense of the rest of us, and has been essentially doing that ever since. They are more secure in state government than ever. We have a state democratic party that seems to have no ideas except opposition to the brutalizing legislation of the Walkerite WI GOP.
Watch for a similar pattern to unfold at the federal level, as Donald Trump uses the apparatus of the government as a tool to destroy political opponents, and the congressional GOP uses policy as a tool to diminish democrats everywhere.