Category: media

It turns out that there are a lot of people who listen to National Public Radio’s “1A.”

The list of stations that carry all, or some, of “1A,” including the Wisconsin Public Radio Ideas Network, runs from Birmingham, Ala., to Buckhannon, W.Va., the latter famous for …

… and from Concord, N.H., to Coachella, Calif., and from Miami, Fla., to Walla Walla and Yakima, Wash. It’s not on in Alaska or Hawaii, but it is on in the U.S. Virgin Islands. It’s on in states I’ve never been to, including Connecticut, Idaho, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North and South Carolina, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas (though I was on the air once in Texarkana, Texas, broadcasting an adult amateur hockey tournament), Virginia and West Virginia, and Washington state and Washington, D.C.

That doesn’t mean that if I flew to Charlotte Amalie and asked random people if they knew me because I was on NPR on WTJX (93.1 FM) back on July 12 that they wouldn’t assume I had gotten too much sun and too much rum. I was on the BBC World Service earlier this year too, so I was theoretically on worldwide, but between the Beeb and NPR I guess I have now spoken to the biggest audience(s) in my entire life this year. As I said before, had I realized the size of the potential audience, I might have been more nervous.

The show can be heard here. It was, as is usually (but not always) the case with public broadcasting, a very civil discussion. As is always the case, there were some things I wished I had said but didn’t, and some points the other two guests made that I didn’t get to respond to, but such is the way of live radio or TV.

Read the Facebook comments on the show, and you will get an interesting look at how others (and some Wisconsinites and ex-Wisconsinites) view Wisconsin. And not favorably. I find it fascinating that there are people who base their opinion about not merely where they live, their state or the U.S., but even the state of their lives on what the government is or isn’t doing and who is or isn’t in office. (This is one reason I believe conservatism, or at least its libertarian side, is vastly superior to all the leftward “isms,” because one facet of the correct way of thinking is that government should never be the be-all and end-all of anyone’s life, even if the right people, however you define that, are in charge.) Similar statements, including some of mine, can be found on 1A’s Twitter feed.

I admit I did not get a chance to read Kauffman’s book. Charlie Sykes did:

What happened in Wisconsin should be a cautionary tale for the Left in the Age of Trump. But as this book makes clear, the Left declines to be cautioned.

According to the publisher, The Fall of Wisconsin gives “the untold story behind the most shocking political upheaval in the country.” But that story has, in fact, been told repeatedly, and author Dan Kaufman adds little to those accounts. Rather than a thoughtful critique of how progressives in a state with such a rich political tradition squandered their historical advantages, what we get is a work of ideological nostalgia, written with political rage goggles. Kaufman yearns for a return to the days of Scandinavian-style social-democratic politics, which he thinks have been defaced and degraded by a deep-pocketed and malign conservative machine.

The Fall of Wisconsin is packed with the sort of stories that progressives tell one another to account for their multiple defeats. It wasn’t anything we did, they reassure themselves; it was big money, the Koch brothers, Citizens United, voter-ID laws, gerrymandering, and a vast conservative infrastructure.

Kaufman paints a dystopian picture in which conservatives such as Governor Scott Walker (very much the villain of the book) “pitted Wisconsin citizens against one another, paving the way for the decimation of laws protecting labor unions, the environment, voting rights, and public education.” The results of those Republican victories, he writes, have been “disastrous” for just about everyone and everything, from the middle class to the environment, children, and small animals.

How awful — except that I live in Wisconsin and I can testify that, contra the title of this book, it has not “fallen.” Actually, it’s quite nice here, especially during our six weeks or so of summer. Despite his depiction of Wisconsin as a reactionary hellhole, the unemployment rate here is 2.9 percent, well below the national average; both the labor force and wages are growing; everyone in poverty is covered under Medicaid; the state has the ninth-best high-school-graduation rate in the country, and school spending is on the rise; and the state’s GDP has grown faster than that of neighboring Minnesota.

But I can certainly understand why the author and his allies on the left are rending their garments over what has happened here. Few states have flipped more decisively from blue to red, and the transformation of the state’s politics from progressivism to conservative dominance has been traumatic and disorienting.

Kaufman takes great pains to retell the story of Wisconsin’s progressive glory days and its role in pioneering progressive legislation. Wisconsin was the first state to enact an unemployment-
insurance program, the first to grant collective-bargaining rights to municipal employees, and one of the first to enact a progressive income tax. “Indeed,” he recalls, “much of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, including the Social Security Act, was drafted by Wisconsinites loyal to what is called the Wisconsin Idea.”

But his history is truncated and selective, more a morality play than an attempt to chronicle the state’s idiosyncratic political history. Kaufman’s narrative sees Wisconsin locked in a decades-long battle over the question posed by its iconic former governor “Fighting” Bob La Follette: “Who shall rule — wealth or man?” In Kaufman’s telling, progressive Wisconsin Republicanism extended through the 1960s. The turning point, he writes, was the Supreme Court’s decision in Buckley v. Valeo, which removed many limits on campaign spending. From that point on, writes Kaufman, “Wisconsin’s politics started becoming more like the politics of other states.”

This fits into his preferred narrative of wealth versus people, but the result is that he glosses over quite a bit of history, including the career of Wisconsin’s red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy. Similarly, former governor Tommy Thompson, who was elected to four terms and compiled an impressive reformist record, barely rates a mention. Nor does he spend much time analyzing the rise of Walker, suggesting at one point that he “attracted little notice during his time in the state assembly,” when in fact he was a ubiquitous presence in the local media. Kaufman devotes only a single paragraph to Walker’s improbable election as county executive in the Democratic stronghold of Milwaukee County after a pension scandal that implicated both the unions and local Democratic politicians.

And he has little to say about Walker’s deeply unpopular Democratic predecessor, Jim Doyle, except to blame the bad economy for “forcing” Doyle to ram through massive tax hikes in the midst of the financial crisis after repeatedly promising not to do so.

But Kaufman does have a great deal to say about the reactionary forces that conspired to “decimate” Wisconsin. Much of his book is devoted to documenting the “vast infrastructure conservatives [have] created over the past forty-five years,” including groups such as the Club for Growth and Americans for Prosperity. At the center of that conspiracy in Wisconsin sat the Bradley Foundation, which “distributes tens of millions of dollars in grants to think tanks, litigation centers, opposition research firms and other organizations promoting a spectrum of conservative causes such as Voter ID laws, school vouchers, the curtailing of safety net programs, and anti-union measures like right-to-work laws.” (Full disclosure: My wife formerly worked at the Bradley Foundation as director of community programs.)

Kaufman is especially troubled by the network of conservative think tanks clustered around the State Policy Network and American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which allowed conservatives to share ideas and model legislation with legislators around the country. Kaufman struggles to portray the policy initiatives as sinister, highlighting, for example, the group’s support for a “Special Needs Scholarship Program Act,” which gave children with disabilities scholarships to attend schools of their choice. He quotes one Wisconsin legislator describing the ALEC-backed legislation that created education-savings accounts as “the death of public education.” You get the idea.

Not surprisingly, much of Kaufman’s account centers on the battles over Act 10, Walker’s proposal to limit the collective-bargaining powers of public employees. His account of the mass protests is nothing if not romantic, quoting speculation that the mass protests were a sign that Wisconsin was becoming the “Tunisia of collective bargaining rights” (a reference to the Arab Spring, which was then breaking out in the Middle East).

In his telling, the protesters were passionate, idealistic, and not at all to blame for their failure or subsequent electoral defeats. Reading Kaufman’s book, one would have no idea that in fact the protests backfired by alienating voters across the state.

Early polling suggested that support for Walker’s reform was soft, at best. But public opinion began to turn as the protests escalated. Demonstrators occupied and trashed the state capitol and marched on Walker’s family home in Wauwatosa, where his elderly parents lived. Others, dressed as zombies, disrupted a ceremony to honor participants in the Special Olympics. Death threats and obscene letters became commonplace, and the language of Walker’s critics was especially toxic. During one of the protests in Madison in 2011, a video captured one demonstrator repeatedly shouting the F-word at a 14-year-old girl who was speaking at a pro-Walker rally. On the floor of the state assembly a Democratic state representative turned to a female Republican colleague and shouted, “You are f***ing dead!” A progressive talk-show host mocked the state’s female lieutenant governor for having colon cancer and suggested she had gotten elected only because she had performed oral sex on talk-show hosts.

Readers won’t find any of that in Kaufman’s sanitized account and, as a result, will probably have a hard time understanding why Walker went on to be reelected twice while the GOP strengthened its hold on the legislature.

But perhaps the most revealing aspect of The Fall of Wisconsin is Kaufman’s choice of Randy Bryce as the hero. Often known as the “Iron Stache,” Bryce is an ironworker and union activist who has become something of a media/Hollywood/progressive celebrity for launching a bid to unseat U.S. House speaker Paul Ryan before Ryan announced his retirement. As it happens, even though Bryce is locally known as something of an Internet troll, perennial losing candidate, and deadbeat, Kaufman has been touting the Stache for years, including a long article featuring him in The New York Times Magazine in 2015. Even on the left, there have been growing misgivings about Bryce, for example a piece in Vice titled: “Democrats Bet Big on ‘Iron Stache.’ They May Have Made a Mistake.”

The article noted that “Bryce is perhaps more politically vulnerable than his liberal fans realize,” citing a series of failed previous campaigns and a tangled personal backstory that includes unpaid debts and multiple arrests, including a DUI. Despite that, he loaned his failed state-senate campaign $5,000 and, according to the New York Times, bought Twitter followers in 2015. He’s been dogged by reports about his offensive tweets (“If you look up the word succubus, you’ll see Ivanka Trump”) and was caught claiming nonexistent endorsements.

But Dan Kaufman has seen the future, and it is more social democracy and more Stache. “The support for Bryce,” Kaufman enthuses, “was a sign of a broader awakening.”

Perhaps not.

Two points I made more than once on the show. Coming into the 2010 election Wisconsin had a Democratic governor, Democratic-controlled Legislature, and only one Republican statewide official. All of that exactly reversed in the 2010 election, the GOP has controlled the governor’s, attorney general’s and state treasurer’s offices and, except for a few months around Recallarama, both houses of the state Legislature. Voters have four chances — the 2012 recall election and the 2012, 2014 and 2016 elections — to change that, and they have declined to do so.

Kaufman and others on his side will blame gerrymandering (which helped Walker how?), the Evil Koch Brothers, other big campaign money (which is the fault of excessive government power, which means excessive stakes in elections and the absolute need to do whatever it takes to win) or whatever boogeyman the left likes. The fact is that a majority of Wisconsin voters to this point have approved of what Walker and Republicans have done in Wisconsin, and a majority of Wisconsin voters to this point have not felt the need to restore power to Democrats. Like it or not, that is reality. And trying to shame voters for their incorrect (in the leftward opinion) views or past votes isn’t likely to make them vote correctly (in the leftward opinion) in the next election(s).

It turns out that my forced retirement from public broadcasting punditry (because the show on which I was punditing concluded) lasted a month and a half.

I will be appearing on National Public Radio’s “1A” show today discussing “Wisconsin’s Legacy” and the book The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics by Dan Kauffman.

The show calls itself “a show about a changing America. Host Joshua Johnson convenes a daily conversation about the most important issues of our time. 1A brings context and insight to stories unfolding across the country and the world. With a name inspired by the First Amendment, the show celebrates free speech and the power of the spoken word.”

I’m all for that. (Which is why I appear on every show, friendly audience or not, I’m invited to, other than the fact that I am a media ho.) In fact, I think every newspaper should change the name of its opinion page from “Opinion” or “Perspectives” or something generic like that to “The First Amendment.” (Of course, then they would actually have to respect the First Amendment, which is not currently the case for such newspapers as the New York Times.)

What is the book about? Glad you asked!

During the 20th century, Wisconsin was the embodiment of what U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis called a “laboratory of democracy” — an experiment in social and economic innovation, and a prospective blueprint for other states.

A bastion of progressive values, Wisconsin created the first workers’ compensation program, a progressive state income tax, stricter child labor laws, and the first unemployment insurance program. Much of FDR’s New Deal was even authored by Wisconsin natives.

But in recent years, the state has undergone a major political shift. Republicans secured the [state] government in 2010, and in the 2016 presidential election, the state went Republican for the first time in three decades.

How did Wisconsin go from electing Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016? Dan Kaufman, author of “The Fall of Wisconsin,” assesses the state’s changing tides:

Wisconsin has gone from being a widely admired “laboratory of democracy” to a testing ground for national conservatives bent on remaking American politics. Its century-old progressive legacy has been dismantled in virtually every area: labor rights, environmental protection, voting rights, government transparency.

As Gov. Scott Walker campaigns for a third term, new polls indicate that public opinion of various economic and environmental conditions is low.

We’ll discuss how the changing political landscape has impacted life in Wisconsin — and vice versa — and what’s next for the once-progressive state.

The show originates from WAMU radio in Washington, D.C., which means I will be on a radio station in a place I’ve never been to, though as readers know that didn’t stop me from appearing on the BBC World Service earlier this year. Actually, since this is on NPR nationwide I will be on the air in a lot of places I’ve never been to. (I therefore should be nervous, I suppose.)

The show is on WAMU (88.5 FM for Washington-area listeners) from 10 a.m. to noon and 8 to 9 p.m. Eastern time. It’s on WPR from 1 to 3 p.m. Central time. Our discussion will be on WAMU live at 11 Eastern, 10 Central, and on WPR at 2 p.m. Central time, which means I guess I’ll be able to hear myself after I’m done talking.

As you might imagine — spoiler alert! — I will be taking an opposing view, or views, from the author and the third guest, a fellow Wisconsin Public Radio Week in Review alumnus who apparently suggested me for this. (I might start, perhaps, with questioning the term “once-progressive state,” which infers that most Wisconsinites bought everything the Progressives did.)