[This piece initially appeared on the
Progressive Magazine's webzine on June 21, 2012 -AR]
A number of post-mortem analyses surfaced almost immediately,
and they were somewhat helpful in conveying various understandings for
the defeat of the recall effort against Scott Walker in Wisconsin. They
got most of the immediate facts straight. But they were lacking in
various respects. We need a deeper social and political analysis to
understand some of the other factors behind the defeat. This is key for
the development of future strategies and tactics.
While the inordinate out-of-state amount of pro-Walker (and
anti-Barrett) money and media time, the weaknesses and shortsightedness
of the Democratic campaign, the failures of the trade union leadership,
the all-in emphasis on the electoral effort, and the structure and
timing of the recall process (“recall fatigue”), all had a part in
shaping the outcome, other factors helped give the victory to the right.
For instance, we have been told that, “59% of white people voted for Walker, as did most suburbs and small
towns,” and that “38% of union households (rather than unionists) voted
Republican.” Several pieces stated that support for either candidate was
largely related to the perception of how well Walker’s administration
had been creating new jobs.
Modest improvement (if any) in the number of jobs and improvements in
the state of Wisconsin’s economy, distorted and trumpeted by the
Republican’s propaganda mills, certainly were made a key issue. (The
Barrett campaign spent a whole lot of energy and resources responding to
the Walkerite’s framing of that issue).
But “jobs, jobs, jobs” was not the sole reason why people voted the
way they did. As in any election, various subjective factors, some of
which could be described as key “wedge issues,” played a significant
role. How else, might we otherwise begin to understand why “38% of union
households” (Up only 1% from 2010, according to a New York Times exit
poll) voted against their own (material) interests?
“Milwaukee”
Key among the “wedge issues” was that of race, utterly ignored by the
overwhelming majority of commentators. It is well known that Milwaukee
is one of the most segregated cities in the country, surrounded by bands
of predominantly white suburbs. (Walker was the former county executive of Milwaukee County, put there by a suburban “white flight”
Republican electorate.
Across the state, but especially in those suburban, small town and
rural areas that went for Walker, the TV images and radio airwaves
carried a barrage of anti-Barrett ads inundated with a racist subtext of
the mayor’s failings in regard to crime and the failure of his “liberal
policies” (despite the fact that Barrett has been in-step with the
neoliberal and austerity agenda pushed by the DLC Dems and Obama). The
sub-textual thematic line of all the ads was the same: “Barrett can’t
govern (manage? control?) Milwaukee. How’s he going to govern the
state?” Manipulation of white racist fear of “the other,” of “them,” of
“Milwaukee” and “Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett” as a code for the “out of
control, crime-ridden inner city,” filled the airwaves and exacted its
toll.
Reportedly in some up-state and out-state media markets, anti-Barrett
ads paid for by Super Pac or Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (WMC)
spoke of Barrett’s failures while showing images of people of color.
The county is comprised of the city of Milwaukee and an inner ring of
older suburbs, such as West Allis, very white working class and the
former site of Allis Chalmers and other heavy industry, now a classic
example of the rust belt, as is Milwaukee in general: the massive site
of AC is now basically strip malls. (Some of that “inner ring” contains
still contains well-to-do enclaves, it should be noted.)
Milwaukee-proper has experienced a lot of white flight over the last
30-35 years. Shrinking in population by about a third, and is now a
so-called “majority minority city” in which the African-American
population in particular is isolated and deeply impoverished. The Latino
population has also grown significantly.
A political sociologist friend familiar with the Milwaukee area’s social
geography found,* not surprisingly, that most of the support for Walker
in Milwaukee County came from the wealthier suburbs. According to his
figures, the population of the County in 2010 was about 950,000, 61%
“white” and 75% 18 or over, with a median household income of $43k.
Almost 393,000 people voted in the recall, about a 55% turnout. Walker
got 143,000 of those votes.
A second ring of newer suburbs, which extends beyond Milwaukee
County, has been one of the main bastions of support for Walker. For
example, Waukesha County immediately to the west, alone provided Walker
with another 154,000, nearly 100,000 more than Barrett, which alone
negated Barrett's advantage in Milwaukee. Waukesha is 91% white with a
median income of $75k and there was a 72% turnout of eligible voters
there!
Immediately to the north, in Ozaukee county, which is 95% white and
has a median income of $75k, Walker won by more than 20,000 (with a 73%
turnout) and to the northwest, in Washington county, which is 96% white
with a median income of $64k, he won by 36,000 (with a 69% turnout).
The white suburbs and urban outskirts have also witnessed the growth
of “industrial parks” detached from the city, often employing
non-unionized workers, who but a generation back remained tied to the
urban core. They now travel the outer rings for their work and leisure
and as consumers, and rarely enter the now alien city, except for an
occasional night out or a weekend event.
The one “bright spot” hailed by liberals and progressives was the
recall victory (currently being challenged) of Dem. John Lehman over
Republican state Senator Van Wanggaard in de-industrialized Racine
County, on the lake shore south of Milwaukee. In the county as a whole,
Walker won by 45,480 to 40,191. That total represented 58.3% of eligible
voters, based on the 2010 census. 74.4% of the county is white and it's
got a median family income of $54k.
So what happened there? The Lehman plurality of 840 votes came about in
large part because of the city’s Latino and African-American turnout,
people who came out not in lockstep as so many Democratic faithful, but
as those who already had some real sense of worsening results if the
recalls failed.
From what I have been told, a well-organized grass roots activist
effort won the day there, at least as of this writing. (One might ask
why the voter turnout by people of color in Milwaukee proper was not
higher, based on their previous experience with Walker as County Exec?
The short and simple: Milwaukee’s already hard-pressed inner city was
already well-acquainted with Barrett on various fronts.)
Other than Dane County with Madison at its heart, 85% white with a
median income of $60k, where Barrett beat Walker by 98,000 votes (with a
66% turnout), and a few other counties, primarily in the far northwest
up by Lake Superior and toward La Crosse in the west where he beat
Walker by fairly small margin, the Dem contender (sic) got his butt
kicked in most of the rest of the state.
“Those Liberals in Madison”
Other “wedge issues” contributed to the outcome. The right wing
assault, the absolute vilification of all things “liberal,” pushed not
just by the Tea Party, but by the conservative movement as a whole over a
longer period of time, took its toll. “Liberal” in the minds of many
has replaced “communism” as the bogeyman of the post-Cold War era. For
some these days, it has become interchangeable with “socialism”! (One
only had to witness the signs at any of the right-wing mobilizations in
the state over the last year to get a sense of that.) “Liberal” for
many, with their ears tuned to the omnipresent demagoguery of Fox and
the non-stop squawkery of conservative blab radio, has come to mean the
“tax and spend” interventionist and regulatory state. The now
decades-long ideology of neoliberalism has taken its toll.
That, of course, leads to another significant, yet different code:
“Madison.” Long a liberal and progressive center as home of the
University of Wisconsin and heart of the state’s progressive tradition,
the city and its Dane County environs have long been viewed as out of
step, unreal, and out-of-touch by out-state residents; the home of
“those protesters” and “hippies” ever since the 1960s.
The city has also been viewed as the home of well-off intellectual
elitists, as well as the source of “big state government” policies, the
birthplace of regulation and state taxes hampering and burdening the
“little guy,” a citadel of “pampered and overpaid” state employees and
their unions. A legitimate concern at various levels, “What has the
state done for me while increasing what I have to shell out in taxes and
fees?” has effectively been taken up, and manipulated by the right.
Anti-intellectualism, always a key ingredient of right-wing populism,
certainly figured in as well as conservatives looked to the state
capital over the span of 2011-2012. The University at Madison, in an
earlier time was largely perceived across the state as an institution
directly serving the needs and interest of Wisconsin’s residents through
its Extension and in-state accessibility, a key of the “Wisconsin
Idea.” In recent years, it has been transformed into a largely
corporatized research university, now increasingly cost prohibitive for
the state’s middle and low income kids and is now increasingly seen as a
rest home for overpaid “do-nothing” tenured faculty spreading
“subversive” ideas.
“Kirche, Küche and Kinder”
There’s been very little, if any, discussion of the role of the
Christian right – the conservative evangelical and fundamentalist
Protestant and Catholic churches. Those very same elements who have been
“pro choice” in regard to public school privatization and the
(primarily) Republican push for school vouchers and charters paid for
with school district funds, have also stood opposed to women’s right to
choose and other liberal heresies.
Sex education and the teaching of evolution in the public schools
have continued to be salient issues propelling the popular movement for
charter and voucher schools in many cases; i.e., the shift of funding
from what the Catholic and Protestant right refers to as “government
schools” to parochial school education. Part of the agenda of Walker and
his cohorts in the Legislature has been the expansion of that
“privatization”.
In early April, Walker signed a bill repealing the state’s 2009 Equal
Pay Enforcement Act, which allowed victims of workplace discrimination
to seek damages in state courts for “equal pay for equal work” discrimination. That Walker move may have pushed some voters in
Barrett’s direction, but the repeal bill was aimed squarely at a tier of
white male voters, for whom women, like people of color, are seen to
have taken away their jobs, dignity, authority, etc., ad nauseam.
(According to New York Times polling, inconclusive on this theme, 59% of
males went for Walker, up 2% from 2010, while women gave him only 47%,
down 2% from the preceding election cycle.)
The Small Towns
We need to take a closer look at the social geography of small town
Wisconsin. One results of the longer term de-industrialization and
rust-belting of the Lake Michigan cities like Milwaukee, Racine,
Kenosha, Manitowoc and other formerly heavy manufacturing and lake trade
centers was not just the shipping of production and jobs to other
regions of the country or “offshore,” but the dispersal of light and
medium manufacturing to small and medium towns throughout the state.
There hardly exists a town or village in the state that does not have
some light industrial firm manufacturing you name it. As small and
even medium farms disappeared and more families were forced off the
land, various “developers” and entrepreneurs took advantage of
relatively cheap non-union labor, lower land prices and tax incentives
to set up new firms producing various parts and components, agricultural
equipment, and capital and consumer goods ventures, often but not
always tied to the agricultural economy. Often locally owned and family
run and employing local labor, such firms often belonging to the WMC,
have become lynchpins for the local economies in communities where
people know each other, some of them tied together for generations
through the churches, schools and extended families. Many of them, it
can be imagined, have felt the effects of the “Great Recession”.
Often socially conservative, they have looked for redress not
necessarily coming from Washington or Madison. Some have consciously
turned to the Tea Party while others have readily taken to a broader
populist ideology appealing to the “little guy” with its promise to
“take back” whatever – “our government,” “our democracy,” “our freedom” –
from “big government” with its faceless, far away bureaucrats.
What can be said about the “opportunity lost” when the “Wisconsin
Uprising” became channeled into an all but singular focus on the
recalling Walker and his cronies? It isn’t clear if other options were
possible based on the correlation of forces in the field -- the
proscribed nature of the movement, its inability to go from the initial
level of protest to forms of resistance and mass civil disobedience; the
atrophied memory of labor’s mass struggle experience; the deference to a
conservative leadership, and narrow understandings of “politics” and
the possible all played a part. Things certainly could have been
different if there had been an organized left pole alternative to the
Democratic and trade union’s conservative leadership. A huge “if,” for
sure.
What remained surprising, indeed puzzling to some during the Walker
recall effort was the lack of support for the Barrett campaign from the
national Democratic Party – the silence and invisibility of Obama, the
Democratic National Committee, or for that matter, the national
leadership of the major trade unions. While that could be explained by some assessments of the current
political terrain at this, the lead up to Obama’s increasingly uncertain
re-election bid, there are other concerns at work.
A kind of mistrust of an uncontrolled mass movement exists; a
downright mistrust, if not fear of an uncontrolled popular insurgency
from below. The Democratic leadership and its labor allies absolutely
dread a return of those kinds of movements and mass mobilizations,
dating back to the Great Depression and extending through the strike
wave immediately following World War II, the Civil Rights Movement of
the early 1960s, and the Anti-War Movement later that decade, that
challenged power from below succeeded in exacting concessions from the
system.
Such insurgencies, polarizing in their effect, also provoked the
kinds of reaction that led to the ascendancy of Nixon and Agnew, the
McGovern beating in ’72, the rise of the “New Right,” Carter’s loss in
’80 to Reagan and worse, subsequently. In response, the Democratic
leadership chose a more conservative course, one leery of its own social
base.
The Point is to Change It
What has been offered here are some preliminary thoughts, hopefully a
contribution to a deeper collective assessment that needs to take place
if we are going to move forward. Clearly, a lot more needs to be
fleshed in and understood and the way out of the wilderness is going to
be long and hard. The point is not just to understand our history, but
to change it.
____________________
* His calculations were based on the 2010 census figures for total
population, percentage of the population 18 or over, and median
household income. That data was then compared that to the vote totals
for the two candidates. An obvious caution: It should be noted that one
cannot draw too many conclusions regarding a direct correlation between
income figures and voter preferences. Such numbers do convey some sense
of class composition (based on income, exclusive of wealth) and voting
preferences.
