Sunday, October 11, 2020

Weekend reading : WisGOP's white supremacist strategy

Wanted to direct you to this excellent article in the New Republic from Wisconsin native Emma Roller. The title says it all: "How Wisconsin Became a Bastion of White Supremacy."

Roller goes through a list of items that illustrate the economic and social apartheid that is part of the way things have been run in this state, and how central that is to the messaging and political strategy of Wisconsin Republicans.
Milwaukee is the most segregated metro area in the country, according to a 2018 Brookings study. Wisconsin locks up Black men at a higher rate than any other state, according to a 2013 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee study, which found that 13 percent of Black men of working age in Wisconsin are in jail or prison, compared to the 6.7 percent national average.

Evictions also fall disproportionately on Black tenants in Wisconsin. In his 2016 book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, Matthew Desmond found that more than one in eight Milwaukee renters were forced to move involuntarily, either through eviction, landlord foreclosure, or building condemnations, over the course of three years. And as in many American cities, race and class follow similar fault lines. Fully 79 percent of Black families in Milwaukee County are poor or low-income, compared to 39 percent of white families in the county, according to a 2018 UW-Madison report.

You cannot understand what Trump support looks like in Wisconsin without understanding how much white Republican grandpas here love AM talk radio. For the past 30 years, two names have dominated Wisconsin’s conservative talk radio market: Mark Belling and Charlie Sykes. Since 2016, Belling has doubled down on his role as the Badger State’s own Rush Limbaugh, taking to Trumpism like a muskie to lake water. Sykes is a more interesting case. He’s probably most famous for airing racist grievances about welfare queens living large off of whites’ hard-earned tax dollars. In 2013, Sykes published a book called A Nation of Moochers, arguing that “those who plan and behave sensibly are being asked to bail out the profligate.” Two years later, Sykes rebranded himself as a #NeverTrump Republican, and he has spent the past five years expressing shock and disgust at the GOP’s racism.
You built that, Chuckie. And we will never forget.
Roller notes that this mentality culminated in the election of a governor who promised his donors that he would "divide and conquer" the state, with his fellow Republicans also working to grab power by any means they could. This enables WisGOP to hold on to power long after the majority of the state has rejected their racist, regressive plans.
Walker has an unearned reputation for being placid and even boring, mostly because of his love of sad-looking ham sandwiches. But that characterization obscures the damage Walker inflicted during his time as governor. Wisconsin became a Koch-sponsored laboratory of the same regressive, anti-democratic policies that we’re seeing enacted all over the country during the Trump era. Walker shattered public employee unions, rolled back environmental protections, and gutted funding for public education. This agenda, wrapped in the language of white resentment, played well in the “WOW” counties—Washington, Ozaukee, and Waukesha—a trio of white-flight suburbs and exurbs that neighbor Milwaukee County and have historically acted as the engine of the state’s white grievance politics. But his most harmful work was passing the voter ID law and district maps meant to dilute the voting power of people of color....

2010 was the year that the Tea Party’s Ron Johnson ousted Feingold, a left reformist champion. As ill luck would have it, 2010 was also a census year, meaning that Walker and Republican lawmakers were able to draw one of the most absurdly gerrymandered [state legislative] maps in the country. “Wisconsin’s maps are so gerrymandered that Republicans can win close to a supermajority of House seats even with a minority of the vote,” the Brennan Center for Justice’s Michael Li wrote in April.

Ten years after the Tea Party wave, Wisconsin Republicans aren’t even trying to hide their agenda. After the 2018 midterm elections, state Assembly Leader Robin Vos all but lamented the fact that people who live in cities are allowed to vote. ​“If you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority,” Vos said. The midterms saw the election of a Democratic U.S. senator and the end of Walker’s reign, but gerrymandering was key to the GOP’s ability to hold on to the state Assembly and its seats in the House.
And this gerrymandering and racist strategy goes a long way toward explaining the recent absurdity and (in)activity at the Capitol. While Wisconsin was becoming the COVID Capital of America, with 175 people dying in the last 2 weeks, take a look at what the WisGOPs thought was important . But of course, they're trying to block any moves that Evers might make that would deal with COVID, while not having any bills or ideas themselves beyond "complain about the Governor."

And WisGOPs definitely didn't want to talk about the plot that white gun nuts had to kidnap the Governor of Michigan, or how those guys trained in Wisconsin. But here is what they want to talk about. All 4 of those sponsors of the ALEC-written "riot law" are from the WOW counties, and that is not coincidental. These lowlifes feel that a racially-tinged non-issue is winning politics over actually discussing things that matter. It's mostly worked for them so far, and they won't stop trying to maintain Wisconsin's apartheid going until they pay such a price at the polls that not even their gerrymander can save them.

Why is why we have to MAKE IT SO in this Fall's elections. WisGOPs don't want this state to progress into a diverse, intelligent place with a high quality of life, because they feel it doesn't help them win elections. So if you want that, you have to do your part to give them the boot.

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