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A review of The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics by Dan Kaufman (W.W. Norton, 2018).

Amid some mixed and intermittently disappointing results earlier this month, the defeat of Scott Walker was an unambiguous moment of catharsis. Acting proudly as tribune for the national conservative movement and its billionaire backers, the two-term Wisconsin Governor spent eight years waging ceaseless war on the state’s public education system, its environmental laws, its social safety net, and, critically, its labor movement. Despite fierce and often heroic resistance from unionized workers, activists, and citizens, Walker leaves office with a catastrophic legacy to his name, having successfully implemented many of the Republican Party’s most toxic planks in the face of strong headwinds. Following a protracted battle in 2011, which resulted in a weeks’-long occupation of the Capitol Building, collective bargaining rights were stripped from most public employees. After a concerted and nearly successful effort to recall him failed, Walker won reelection in 2014 and continued the assault: tax cuts, a voter ID law designed to suppress turnout, draconian welfare rules, the expansion of school vouchers, abortion restrictions, and relaxed gun control laws all followed. Notably, in 2015 Wisconsin became the twenty-fifth state with a repressive “right-to-work” law on the books, consolidating Walker’s reactionary crusade and dealing a further body blow to organized labor. The following year, Hillary Clinton would become the first Democratic presidential candidate to lose Wisconsin since the Reagan landslide of 1984, as Donald Trump narrowly captured the state and its ten electoral votes. The Republican conquest of a progressive bastion, it seemed, was complete.

The Midwestern Fulcrum “Yes, we wanted sewers in the workers’ homes; but we wanted much, oh, so very much more than sewers. We wanted our workers to have pure air; we wanted them to have sunshine; we wanted planned homes; we wanted living wages; we wanted recreation for young and old; we wanted vocational education; we wanted a chance for every human being to be strong and live a life of happiness. And, we wanted everything that was necessary to give them that: playgrounds, parks, lakes, beaches, clean creeks and rivers, swimming and wading pools, social centers, reading rooms, clean fun, music, dance, song and joy for all. That was our Milwaukee Social Democratic movement.” – Emil Seidel “If we can do it in Wisconsin, we can do it anywhere.” – Scott Walker Dan Kaufman’s The Fall of Wisconsin chronicles this eight-year Republican onslaught and the various efforts to resist it from within, weaving history with interviews and testimony from key figures such as Randy Bryce, the ironworker who this month ran a strong second in the race for Paul Ryan’s recently-vacated House seat; Lori Compas, a local activist who in 2012 challenged Republican state senator Scott Fitzgerald; and Mike Wiggins Jr., an Ojibwe community leader. Though Kaufman is a native of the state, his choice of subject is neither arbitrary nor merely personal. As he details, its history is a radical, populist one punctuated by struggles that often resulted in major progressive victories with national implications (America’s first workers’ compensation program and a progressive income tax, to name but two). Briefly a beachhead of the Socialist Party, Wisconsin elected the first socialist mayor in the US (Milwaukee’s Emil Seidel) and was the only state won by Robert La Follette in his insurgent campaign of 1924. Its significance as a target of Republican belligerence should therefore not be understated. Indeed, as Kaufman shows, the state became a key battleground during the Tea Party ascendancy and a veritable laboratory for the power of big donors and unrestricted dark money following the Supreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United decision. Using their astroturfed American For Prosperity advocacy fund, Charles and David Koch spent tens of millions on the 2010 elections — the latter making a personal donation of $1 million to the Republican Governors Association. Even more money was poured into subsequent elections, with Walker out-fundraising his Democratic opponent in the 2012 recall contest by a whopping $30 million to $4 million. Another institutional antagonist is the American Legislative Executive Council (ALEC), a nonprofit charity whose donors include Exxon, Koch Industries, and major pharmaceutical interests. An example of lobbying at its most efficiently dystopian, ALEC assembles conservative ideologues, lawmakers, and corporate interests with the goal of crafting model legislation, targeting unions, environmental laws, public schools, and voting rights, to be imposed on jurisdictions throughout the country. Versions of several laws, including a right-to-work bill with virtually identical language, were successfully implemented during Walker’s control of the statehouse. Wisconsin’s story is therefore an alarming illustration of the Republican Party’s long-term strategy at work and what its vast political and financial infrastructure is ultimately capable of even in the face of strong opposition. Its goal, as Kaufman’s book makes clear, is not just the passage of specific pieces of conservative legislation and laws that favor corporate interests, but the destruction of all obstacles to permanent Republican control of the legislative process and the reconfiguring of politics with the aim of consolidating those interests in perpetuity. As with the restrictive voter ID laws pushed by Republicans across the country, which disproportionately target working class voters of color, Walker’s attack on Wisconsin’s unionized workers was thus anything but incidental. Indeed, as the resistance it inspired so clearly demonstrates, the labor movement and the ethos of community and solidarity it still represents – despite being in a position of relative weakness — remains one of the major popular impediments to a complete corporate takeover of America. “At eight percent of the population, or even fifteen, what makes us such an enemy?” Colin Millard, an ironworkers staffer, puts it to Kaufman: “I’ll tell you: Labor is the enemy of capital. They really won’t be happy until we’re starving in the street.” Since the beginning of Walker’s assault on Wisconsin’s labor movement, union density in the state has reportedly fallen by nearly forty percent.