I am so proud of the Badger state. We live in the Twin Cities (MN) and have friends who live in WI. A few days ago, Meg and I were having a Zoom wine and cheese hour with MN friends who now live across the border. Our friend Marla loathes Trumpism but was deeply discouraged about the election. She looked in the Zoom screen and angrily guaranteed that the Winger judge would win.
He didn’t. And Karofsky apparently won by double digits. The specific result is great, as has been indicated in other posts. I’d like to reflect a bit, however, on some hopeful indications from the win.
Voter Suppression and a Resilient Democracy
I have a friend who has moved further and further into a genuinely leftist perspective. He looks at our society and concludes that things are basically over, that American democracy is dead. Invariably, he points to the corruption of the SCOTUS decision that put the Shrub into office as proof that our political system is irredeemably corrupt. He pretty much despises Biden but hates Trump and will vote for Joe. But he doesn’t expect it to matter much. He figures the election has already been sold out.
This is quite obviously a pervasive feeling within the Resistance. Opposition to Trumpism is strong and growing. But many people, including my wife Meg, seem stuck in something close to despair. The malaise of ideological insanity that has gripped the U.S. seems so oppressive and hard to shake. The GOP base is so intractable and they so often seem to over-perform their numbers. And, above all, people are dogged by the fear of a suppressed and stolen election.
Now let me immediately acknowledge that vote manipulation is a potent weapon, used successfully in thousands of elections throughout the nation’s history. Voter suppression is a favorite weapon of the right because they have used it successfully for centuries to disempower the poverty stricken and the “wrong races.” I do not take these things lightly.
However, as we all know, nothing will ensure a Fascist victory more than the Resistance succumbing to discouragement and despair. If we don’t show up, if we don’t defy the suppression tactics with heroic determination, the jerks will win. And there is so much reason to doubt. We see so many stories about corrupt pols, judges and election officials … The suppression initiatives and their effects are so real … It is hard to maintain faith in our political apparatus.
And yet that is precisely what we need to do: to have faith. And this is why, along with many similar cases in which heroic voters have stood up to be counted, a result like this one is crucial to pay attention to. Think about the parameters of the case.
We know the GOP will desperately try to suppress the vote this fall. They always do. And then comes the pandemic. It hurts them politically, but it also gives them a procedural opportunity. “Let’s use the COVID threat to suppress the vote and offset our loss of support!” That is scary, and so we watched in horror as Koch & Co. condemned the very lives of Wisconsinites to lock out the opposition. If it worked in WI, it would bode very ill for November.
But … IT DIDN’T BLOODY WORK! In fact, it pretty obviously backfired. The vote in Milwaukee was suppressed. But the effect on the vote was the opposite of what was expected. The counties the GOP counted on flipped and by a wide margin. Now I have no idea how much of that was due to people shifting the vote or to Thugsters not voting. It seems pretty clear though that, at least, the Resistance was a helluva lot more determined to vote than the Winger zealots were.
So, OK, how shall we see this? The Thugs will still suppress votes and it will still be effective. But they have to realize some limits on their tactic. They can only be effective to a point. And radical efforts to suppress the vote often backfire. The tactic has a built-in law of diminishing returns. If they learn from it, they will limit their radical efforts. If they quadruple down, they are likely to shoot themselves in their feet.
But they are a minority anyway. What really matters is what WE SEE AND THINK! And it is crucial that we perceive that we can beat even this extreme level of voter suppression. Despair is not only catastrophic, it is also unnecessary. There are more of us than of them. If we mobilize the nation, their disgusting tricks will not help. Only if we lose heart and stop believing will we lose. Hell, Trump is only in office because many of “us” faltered.
I mentioned my friend Scott, the guy who pretty much despairs of America. (Actually, he despairs of the human race, and he does have a point!) What I generally say to Scott is that democracy is rooted so broadly that it is hard to kill. It’s like a huge field covered in grasses, each tiny plant rooted in democratic soil. You can attack portions of it, burn some off, stress it in a thousand ways. But it’s really, really hard to kill off the entire field. I’ve read that, after something like a nuclear winter, the first organisms to recover might be grasses. American democracy is so deeply rooted in a couple of centuries of seasonal renewal that autocrats like the Kochs are finding it very, very hard to kill.
So there is no reason to despair! There is a need to fight because they will come at us with everything they have. But their tactics have limited power. Corruption can ONLY win them an election if it is close enough to steal!
But of course you can kill portions of the field of democracy. And tactics like voter suppression do often work. So what’s the difference in this case? I think there are two to mention.
First, let’s remember that a recall effort in WI during Scott Walker’s 1st term failed. Walker was very unpopular, but the recall effort went nowhere, in good measure because voters hate the idea of “cheating” on the results of an election. Americans deeply believe in the election cycle and resent initiatives that seem to threaten disruption. I can’t prove it, but I suspect that a large measure of the political resistance to Trump’s impeachment reflects Americans’ resentment at the whole idea of challenging the results of an election.
My sense is that the same dynamic helped us here. The same voters who rejected Walker’s recall felt insulted by Walker’s judges’ support of efforts to disrupt the vote. In America, the vote is damn near sacred, and anyone who threatens it will pay a huge price.
But wait. We see voter suppression all the time, and it is very often effective and without political price. Why did it backfire this time?
Well, it seems to me that the key lies in the the threat to ALL Badgers. Political forces can persuade people to turn a blind eye to anything that seems to threaten THEM, but not US. Suppress the black vote in Milwaukee or Miami-Dade? OK. Most White folks won’t really care. But this was different. The forced vote under threat of a pandemic that threatened everyone forced people to think, “Wait, this means WE must risk our lives to vote? That’s crazy.”
And that’s where to me the political tipping point begins to emerge. I am going to look at that a bit.
The Politics of Government
Numerous posts here on Kos are pointing out the political significance of this WI judicial race. You know the drill. This is the Koch State of Wisconsin we’re talking about, with an effectively suppressed Milwaukee vote. That is the recipe for another rigged GOP win, right?
Wrong. Again, whatever the proportions are between Thus staying home and Indies flipping, Karofsky won by a wide margin drawing on counties the GOP desperately needs. If they can’t hold a judgeship in apparently deep red Wisconsin counties, Trump is going to get creamed and the wave will wash over many down ballot races.
OK. But why? Obviously, this is all enormously complex and there are many factors at play. The dedicated number crunchers on this site can analyze all that better than I can.
I do think, however, that we do well to look at the effect of a genuine crisis on 6 or 7 decades of Winger propaganda about the role of government.
We all know that this is really the first national crisis since W W II that has actually changed life in America. We have faced the threats from Cold War nukes and terrorists destroying a major building complex. We have endured scary financial crises. We’ve borne wars in which soldiers from fewer and fewer families have paid the price. And through it all, our lifestyle and economy have chugged along, with minimal disruption to a huge chunk of our population.
Again, I would invoke the principle of unenlightened self-interest. When bad things happen to OTHERS, a relatively small portion of US will care. Decades of uninterrupted prosperity sufficient to keep the mainstream comfortable have separated American politics from reality. We all know that Right Wing propagandists have labored for over half a century to construct an ideological fantasy that reached its highest possible apex in Trump’s MAGA nonsense.
But what I would point to in all of this, the core of the whole edifice, is the manufactured myth that, in wholly abstracted terms, government is the enemy. Of course, there are rich and complex historical roots for segments of the American electorate distrusting government. But if we ask after the core ideological shift that Ronald Ray-gun used to transform the nation’s political dynamic, it keeps coming back to one bullshit notion. You all know the phrase I am citing: “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.”
Virtually every ideological success of the post-Reagan GOP stems from those words. GOP propagandists have convinced their base to loathe Democrats precisely for representing government initiatives. Environmental regulations. OSHA. Civil Rights initiatives attacking racism. LGTBQ and gender initiatives. Government-sponsored health care. On and on. All of it is vilified as “socialism,” invoking the specter of government interfering with individual freedoms.
It’s all horse manure, of course. But what I want to stress is that a big portion of the American electorate, larger I imagine than even the GOP base, is conditioned to feel revulsion at the notion of virtually any government initiative other than the police and military. Hell, the worst failures of the Democratic Party flow directly from us internalizing the notion that Big Government must be suppressed. From Bill Clinton’s ideological surrender to the crippling of the health care initiative that became Obamacare, our party is at its worst when it channels the GOP’s knee-jerk horror of government.
Ever since Reagan won speaking those words, progressives, liberals, Democrats—whatever name you wish to use—have been crippled by a national paranoia about government as an actor in society. We o our side look at the thousand very real problems that face us, including the environmental threat to our species, and we see all sorts of ways to use government positively. And almost none of them get anywhere because, in America, everyone assumes that government is the problem, never a channel for solving a problem. We can’t even manage to gain consensus in our own party for actually DOING anything because we’re always bucking the assumption that government itself is always undesirable.
Now, the Trump Era has, I think, eroded the national consensus on that assumption. The resistance has gained energy through the appalling spectacle of Trump/McConnel levels of corruption and ineptitude. I have looked at the steady stream of actual election victories since January of 2017 and felt that we were getting stronger while the GOP base was hollowing out. I have a lot of hope for the 2020 election, assuming our vote machinery is allowed to work. (See the significance of the WI election above.)
But this COVID crisis has the potential to actually transform the paradigm. This crisis is hitting ALL OF US! There is no segment of the population that is unaffected by the virus, the threat of death, and the disruption to our economy and way of life. Sitting back complacently as the malaise hits THEM is not an option. One can’t even escape it all singing in a church choir. THIS IS HAPPENING TO US! AAAALLLLL OF US!
So what do we turn to? Government. We want competent leadership to deal with the health threat. Governors who are supplying that leadership are reaping political rewards. (I know—the Thugs are fighting back. I love the job our MN Governor Walls is doing, and of course the creeps are pushing back.) We want government to provide support for our collapsing economy, and Trump’s venal appropriation of funds for profit is an on-going scandal. And unlike the impeachment, this one is being experienced by people with their lives at stake.
Right now, the Reagan refrain is not playing well. The government being here to help is NOT terrifying. Its failure to help is terrifying. And this isn’t being experienced just by poor people in New Orleans or parents of individual students attacked by gun violence. THIS IS HAPPENING TO US! AAAALLLLL OF US!
I believe there is reason to hope that the myth of government as the problem is collapsing in this moment. Oh, it will never go away and die hards will hate just as so many hated FDR for the New Deal and Social Security. But the political hegemony of that ideology in American government since Reagan may well be collapsing as people demand help from government. Unless one is either vastly wealthy or willing and able to turn away from the system and live in the woods, one needs government desperately right now. I don’t see how the GOP is going to retain its grip on enough people to re-inflate the mythical balloon of undifferentiated anti-government paranoia.
So I look at Judge Karofsky beating the Koch-bought snake by 10 points with Milwaukee largely suppressed and I think I see political landscape is changing. They will fight and claw and cook up any nasty, corrupt trick they can think of. But there is NO REASON to despair. We won in ’18 because there are more of us than there are of them. And in November, people will be willing to risk their flaming lives to vote for our side. Just ask Wisconsin!
Remember: Corruption can ONLY win them an election if it is close enough to steal!