Contemporary Authors

• The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics W.W. Norton & Company (New York, NY), 2018

1. The fall of Wisconsin : the conservative conquest of a progressive bastion and the future of American politics LCCN 2018016668 Type of material Book Personal name Kaufman, Dan, 1970- author. Main title The fall of Wisconsin : the conservative conquest of a progressive bastion and the future of American politics / Dan Kaufman. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2018] Projected pub date 1807 Description pages cm ISBN 9780393635201 (hardcover)

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  Dan Kaufman has written for The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker. Originally from Wisconsin, he now lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.

• Slate - https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/07/wisconsin-used-to-be-progressive-dan-kaufman-on-what-happened.html

  Wisconsin Used to Be Progressive. What Happened?
  The author of The Fall of Wisconsin on how the state went from celebrating unions to vilifying public servants.
  By Isaac Chotiner
  July 18, 201811:00 AM

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  President Donald Trump holds a hat reading, “Make the Bucks Great Again,” given to him by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker upon arrival at Snap-On Tools in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on April 18, 2017.
  Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
  As much as any noncoastal state, Wisconsin was long known for its progressive traditions and liberal activism, which stretched back all the way to the birth of the (slightly different) Republican Party. But in The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics, Dan Kaufman examines how it came crashing down. Wisconsin, now known for voting Republican in the 2016 election and for the governorship of Scott Walker, has become a laboratory of right-wing, anti–organized labor politics. The book examines how and why Wisconsin changed and whether progressives are likely to take back power in the state.
  I recently spoke by phone with Kaufman, a journalist and Wisconsin native. During the course of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed what Wisconsin can teach us about the rise of conservatism over the past several decades, the ways in which the state highlights the need for progressives to pursue structural reforms of politics, and the Wisconsin legacies of Scott Walker and Paul Ryan.

  Isaac Chotiner: What was it that gave Wisconsin this reputation as a progressive bastion, and how long does it go back?
  Dan Kaufman: The foundations for it were laid in the 1840s and ’50s. The Republican Party was founded in a little one-room schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1854. Part of the reason for that was that abolitionism was very strong in Wisconsin. There were waves of Scandinavian and German immigrants. They came for different reasons, but the Scandinavians were fleeing a very harsh environment, and they had a communitarian ethos. They formed agricultural cooperatives and would go on to disproportionately support the trade-union movement. The Germans were coming because they were fleeing a failed revolution in 1848. They settled mainly in Milwaukee, but they really gravitated strongly to the abolitionist principles of the Republican Party.
  There was another movement called the Grange, which was an agricultural agrarian populist movement that rose up in opposition to the railroad companies, which were gouging farmers on shipping their crops. This movement really influenced this guy named Robert La Follette, who’s the spearhead of Wisconsin’s progressive movement. He was a governor, senator, district attorney, congressman, and ran for president on a third-party ticket in 1924. He forged a strong relationship with the University of Wisconsin to develop both idealistic and pragmatic legislation that would benefit the citizens of the state. He was very adamant that democracy could only be preserved by active citizenship, so he wanted to limit corporate contributions to candidates. The Wisconsin state Legislature had been very corrupted because basically the railroad companies and the timber companies dominated who was chosen for the parties and so on. La Follette just kept persisting. When he was governor, he instituted a lot of reforms—not only progressive legislation like the workers-compensation law, but for clean government. That allowed for a lot of these things to happen because these outside forces weren’t influencing policy really anymore. Citizens were very involved.

  “The state Democratic Party has not been very effective as a force at all, with some exceptions.”
  — Dan Kaufman
  There’s been a conservative revolution in this country over the last 40 years or so. How did it happen in Wisconsin specifically?
  Like in a lot of places, money was being injected into Wisconsin politics since 1976, with Buckley v. Valeo, and then it kept increasing with Citizens United, but the real proximate cause was the Tea Party wave in 2010 that swept Scott Walker into office as well as gave Republicans complete control over both houses of the state Legislature. Scott Walker was somebody who was very ambitious and had cultivated as Milwaukee County executive a lot of conservative national political organizations, including Americans for Prosperity, which is the Charles and David Koch political arm, and a very important component of the conservative national infrastructure, called the Bradley Foundation, which is actually based in Milwaukee but has almost $1 billion in assets and gives grants across the country.
  He picked a fight with the public employees’ union as Milwaukee County executive, and when he was elected governor, he immediately launched what became known as Act 10. You can see it telegraphed in his inaugural address, where he says, essentially, that the public employees can no longer be the haves and the taxpayer the have-nots. So it’s the politics of resentment. You’re looking at it in the context of the financial crisis. People are really hurting. A lot of places in Wisconsin, particularly in the rural areas, have been hollowed out for decades, so you might have places where some of the few people with health insurance are the people who work for the school or the state.

  It was almost like an audition for him. He clearly had national aspirations and was trying to curry favor with people like David Koch. He wouldn’t take interviews with local reporters, but when a blogger impersonated David Koch, he took the call.
  How would you describe his political style or appeal?
  I think he sold himself with a form of right-wing populism. People forget, but he always emphasized that he took a brown-bag lunch. Every year, he would take a Harley-Davidson tour around the state, which a lot of people just thought was for his gubernatorial ambitions. This is when he was Milwaukee County executive. I think what’s lost with Scott Walker is that he was, on the one hand, cultivating these billionaire donors, but also managed to present himself as something of an angry common person, although he doesn’t have an angry demeanor, but a sense of outrage that the taxpayer was being abused and taken advantage of by these profligate public employees, who have, heaven forbid, health insurance and decent pensions. What was forgotten is their wages weren’t that great and Wisconsin had a long tradition of exemplary public servants and civil servants. This goes back to La Follette. And people for many generations venerated these people. It was a very admirable thing to work for the state of Wisconsin, the Department of Natural Resources, these agencies that were seen as doing the common good. That was undermined, and it was partly undermined because he could stoke this resentment in a time of really profound economic insecurity.

  Did he sell his populism in noneconomic ways, or was there also a large cultural and racial element?
  Nothing is ever clearly one thing—since 2016, since Trump’s election, much more of the same racialized right-wing populism. There’s a wonderful political-science professor, Kathy Cramer, who wrote the book The Politics of Resentment. I interviewed her. She mentions that for years she was going out to these small, rural communities, and no one would mention immigration. She wouldn’t prompt people; it just never came up. But then, recently, there was a really disturbing incident in Beloit, Wisconsin, when the Beloit soccer team, which had a lot of Latino and African American soccer players, were playing a largely white team, or I think entirely white team, and some of the fans started chanting, “Build that wall.” This was new to her. That said, Milwaukee is the most segregated city in America.
  How much success has the left had in the last couple years fighting Walker?

  Not so much success. But I think Walker’s popularity is down. I think people are a bit fatigued. He has restored some school funding, particularly for rural schools, because those were a lot of his supporters, and he was cutting very deeply into K–12 public education. But the state Democratic Party has not been very effective as a force at all, with some exceptions.
  Wisconsin’s an unusual state, and I think most of the state’s Democrats, particularly after the Act 10 protest, are probably to the left of the national party. You saw that Bernie Sanders won by 13 points. His campaign really resonated with the La Follette tradition. It was a very strong message of too much money in politics and railing against economic elites, and for social programs, and even in rural conservative areas, he was quite popular. A Republican state senator whom I talked to, Dale Schultz, he’s retired now, but he said he’d never seen anything like the Sanders campaign in his district. Once that energy vanished, once Sanders is out of the race, the anti-establishment ceiling went toward Trump, who, people forget, was defending Social Security and Medicare in most of his rallies. It was a kind of welfare chauvinism, but some of his message was a standard Democratic message. Also, his attacks on free trade agreements resonated. Milwaukee has been hollowed out. A lot of the southeastern part of the state—it’s heavily industrial, and they’ve lost a lot of jobs from NAFTA and China’s admittance to the WTO. I think it resonated.

  What do you think progressives need to do to be more successful? Is it just, in your mind, a more economically progressive message?
  One thing, I think, is a long-term plan. I talk about in the book, and Jane Mayer talks about this incredibly well in Dark Money: This is a 40-year, 50-year war of attrition going back to Paul Weyrich and Lewis Powell, a galvanizing, building up of this conservative infrastructure. Conservatives are willing to accept short-term losses or piecemeal gains, but they have a very clear long-term vision. There is not equivalent infrastructure on the progressive left side at all. I don’t think there’s anything close to it. That is one thing where they are different. I honestly think sometimes Republicans are willing to lose on principle for a longer-term gain, whereas somebody like Bill Clinton was willing to triangulate and appropriate certain Republican messages that then undermined the party long-term.
  I’ll give you a Wisconsin-centric example that I think is really important and little known. In 2010, the outgoing governor was a Democrat named Jim Doyle. After Walker had won in December, he gave an interview where he said, “I’ve cut more state workers than any governor in history.” He doesn’t do Act 10, but rhetorically, he’s kind of paving the way for that. Nobody is defending the principle that these people are dedicated public servants, they’re doing good things, and it’s not costing us, actually, that much money, and everyone should have health insurance. It’s not a very proactive, positive message. I think all those things factor in.

  Paul Ryan’s retiring. Does he have any legacy, either symbolically or actually in Wisconsin politics, or is his legacy at the national level, and pushing the GOP, at least before Trump, in one certain direction?
  I think he had a part of the same legacy that Walker did, which is basically uprooting what had been a native, indigenous progressivism to the state. They both have this intense belief in a radical libertarianism in the sense that the state should do nothing to alleviate people’s economic conditions, suffering, and so on. I think they’re birds of a feather, in a way. I think Ryan spoke more, in a way, honestly. Walker has claimed that Act 10 was progressive, and he’s appropriated some of that history in an unusual way because the word has a real resonance in Wisconsin still, and not just among Democrats. You know, a Republican governor was the first one to make collective-bargaining rights for public workers. That was in the 1960s. So there was a bipartisan tradition of this. I think Ryan was very clear. He was like, “I don’t believe in this at all.” He gave an interview to Glenn Beck in which he said, I want to uproot Wisconsin progressivism completely. I’m just paraphrasing, but it was quite clear that he thought it was antithetical. I think they’ve succeeded to some degree, but I also feel like there’s the people, whom I chronicle in the book, who are trying to re-establish it. It’s unknown yet, but you have people who refuse to give up on the Wisconsin that they knew and loved. That’s kind of the heart of the book.

• Tone - https://www.tonemadison.com/articles/a-conversation-about-the-fall-of-wisconsin

  A conversation about "The Fall Of Wisconsin"
  politics, read, events, activism, books
  Journalist and musician Dan Kaufman shares his new book on July 25 at A Room of One's Own. (Photo by Andrew T. Warman.)
  Just about anyone living in Wisconsin would agree on one thing: The state's political landscape has undergone a drastic transformation since Republican Gov. Scott Walker took office in 2011. Walker, who is now seeking a third term, has worked with strong Republican majorities in the state legislature to demolish public-sector unions, weaken private-sector unions through a 2015 right-to-work law, roll back environmental protections, impose new restrictions on voting, secure billions in state subsidies for Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn, and draw aggressively gerrymandered legislative maps—to name just a few items on the agenda. In 2016, Donald Trump became the first presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan to win Wisconsin's electoral votes. Trump in large part won through Walker-like appeals to Middle American grievance (wrecking Walker's own bid for the GOP nomination in the process), and has exported Walker's norm-shattering style of governance to the federal level, albeit with his own chaotic and xenophobic stamp.
  Madison native, journalist, and musician Dan Kaufman sets out to capture the enormity and broader significance of the state's political transformation in his new book The Fall Of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest Of A Progressive Bastion And The Future Of American Politics. Drawing in part on reporting he's done for The New Yorker and The New York Times since 2011, Kaufman offers what he calls "a street-level view" of Walker-era struggles over labor rights, environmental protection, and corporate influence in politics. Even for politically engaged people around the state who've been marinating in this stuff non-stop for the past seven years, Kaufman's deep reporting and his passionate but not idealized portrayal of Wisconsin political history—a history defined as much by Tail-Gunner Joe as by Fighting Bob—should prove refreshing. Ahead of his July 25 book-tour stop at A Room of One's Own, Kaufman spoke with me about the erosion of the public sphere, the important role of Native American activists in his book, and how Madison has changed.
  Tone Madison: Was there any wrestling over the language in the book's title, and what "the fall" might mean to readers?

  Sponsor
  Dan Kaufman: Yeah... Nothing can capture it all, and obviously I know some people might think it's too definitive. I wasn't saying that this fall was permanent or anything like that. I do think it accurately conveys what has happened to the state over the past seven years from where it was. I haven't seen that revival—I mean, I think it's still fallen. The book does chronicle people that do not accept this state of affairs and follows them, and it's sort of their stories that are at the heart of the book.
  So, yes, I'm aware that it might strike certain people in a certain way—myself included!—but I do think it's accurate and telling about what has happened to the state. And it doesn't mean just this economic issue or that, but a kind of division among citizens that has settled in, you know, that Kathy Cramer talks about in the book, and part of that division is what drove Donald Trump to win Wisconsin. I think that didn't come out of nowhere, although the state has always had different moments of division. There's never been anything quite like this. So I guess the long answer to your question is, the title maybe is provocative but I think it does convey what's happened to the state. Anything from the university to people's wages to the public school system to the environment, you can't really claim that removing half of the hilltops in central Wisconsin [for frac sand mining] is anything but a fall from what the state's past was, especially regarding the environment, or rewriting a mining law to serve a corporation owned by a billionaire right near the most pristine watershed in the state.
  Tone Madison: You do end the book on somewhat of an optimistic note—
  Dan Kaufman: Well, I try. And I do feel that way. I think there's people in the state that care deeply about bringing people back together and back to a Wisconsin that wasn't so bitterly divided.
  Tone Madison: So the bigger point is capturing the scale or totality of what's happened, basically.
  Dan Kaufman: I think so, and it's not permanent. I didn't say that there can't be a revival, but for the moment, I think it's not in a good place. You still have environmental laws being shredded and labor is very much weakened and there's an incredible sense of division....so that's what the book largely follows. But it does it through people that refuse to accept that as a permanent state. I do think that there's a hopeful note, and their refusal, the memory of what existed before, is still there and still possible to recapture a state that in a bipartisan way, for decades, shared a lot of values that many people admired, not just in Wisconsin but across the country.
  Tone Madison: At what point did you realize that the story was bigger than Act 10, or a few specific policies or politicians?
  Dan Kaufman: Well, I think right from the beginning. I don't know if you remember in 2011, but [UW-Madison professor] Bill Cronon wrote a blog post about the involvement of ALEC in possibly drafting Act 10 and some other policies that were being quickly introduced. And it was clear from right then and from the infamous phone call of a blogger that impersonated David Koch that there were outside interests trying to shape Wisconsin's policies. These interests were operating in states across the country. Wisconsin was particularly interesting because it did have this progressive past, and that's also made it an important target for conservatives. Scott Walker said as much in his—I don't know if you'd call it a memoir, but in his book Unintimidated he said, "If we can do it here, we can do it anywhere." And in a sense that's true, and you saw that the resistance to these policies was much greater in Wisconsin than virtually anywhere else. However, when that resistance was overwhelmed, when the recall was defeated—it did seem to effect the national mood. That said, there has been an uprising recently, in Oklahoma and West Virginia and so on, around teachers' issues and labors. But I think it was clear because Bill Cronon wrote this blog post and the Republicans demanded that the university release his emails, because ostensibly he's a state employee, although nothing like that had ever happened before, and I think it was clear that these were national influences.
  Tone Madison: In the book, you touch on a lot of the events that happened in early 2011 that at the time felt like very Wisconsin-specific things, and unpack them in a greater national context, including the palm-tree footage incident. That's still an in-joke around Madison but it's telling in its own way.
  Dan Kaufman: [Laughs] I agree, and I mentioned that detail in the book because it really captured Madison, and the humor. And you have to remember that the people who were protesting were from all over the state. The idea that they were just from Madison was ludicrous. It was very different than a lot of the protests in the '60s. It was people driving five or six hours, simply just to testify for two minutes, from Hayward, Wisconsin, to register their opposition knowing that they weren't going to be listened to—but doing this nonetheless because they had this, I find touching, belief that this was their government. So I think that was part of it, but there was a lot of humor in there too.
  Tone Madison: The book spends a lot of time trying to examine the role of organized labor in Wisconsin politics in a more nuanced way. People forget that there were Republicans who courted union support for a long time, and that even Walker, as you point out, courted unions for support and made promises to them. Were you trying to challenge the conception that the labor movement is an exclusively Democratic Party-aligned force?
  Dan Kaufman: I think so, and that was a theme throughout the book, was that Wisconsin was never just a Democratic state. First of all, there was always right-wing populism that had resonance there. I mean, two things stick out: They elected Joe McCarthy twice, and George Wallace actually started his [1964 presidential] campaign there. That said, for decades there was a bipartisan acceptance around certain issues. For example, government transparency, or voting rights, very antithetical to the spirit of the voter-ID law that they passed. And labor rights. Warren Knowles was the one that codified collective bargaining—he was a Republican in the late '60s—for the state. He put it into law. He was the one that signed it. Fred Risser, I think he's the longest-serving state legislator in America today living anywhere, he told me that there was never a partisan vote on the public-employee contracts. It was always, in the Assembly, like 98 to 2 or something.
  But if you look at Scott Walker's inaugural address in 2011, he lays it out very clearly. He says, "the time is over for the public employees, they can no longer be the haves and the taxpayers be the have-nots." I'm quoting it badly, but that's the gist of it, was that the public employees were the privileged class and everyone else wasn't. And privately, of course, he laid out his agenda in the remarkable footage captured by Brad Lichtenstein, where he is telling his most important donor probably, Diane Hendricks, a Beloit billionaire, that he's going to use "divide and conquer" to make Wisconsin a right-to-work state, and more than that, make it a red state. That's what she was referring to. So he was actively trying to change the political culture by attacking labor.
  What I was trying to remind people of was that everybody was—well, most everybody accepted it. In the '50s, 35 percent of the population were in unions. Dwight D. Eisenhower famously said that if anybody tried to end the New Deal, that would be the end of them. But that wasn't always true. Underneath it, what he was responding to, was that there were powerful industrialists—including Harry Bradley, who later set up the Bradley Foundation—who never accepted the New Deal. Two of them were prominent Wisconsin industrialists who were very involved in the John Birch Society, Harry Bradley and William Grede. Part of the book tries to capture the relentlessness of the effort to not have the government do anything like Social Security or Medicare. They basically felt this was tantamount to socialism and the end of freedom. Now, whether they were sincere or just masking greed, I can't say. But many of these powerful industrialists never accepted the New Deal and they would chip away at it.
  That effort had a second wind in the early 1970s when ALEC and the Heritage Foundation and all these groups were founded, galvanized by the secret memo from Lewis Powell. Wisconsin for a long time was not really part of that, but then even there, it wasn't just Scott Walker. Tommy Thompson would go to ALEC meetings, and in fact he famously was quoted at one saying, "I like to come to ALEC meetings because I get ideas here, I disguise them a little bit, and I say that they're mine." Well, he launched the first charter school program in the country in Milwaukee. It succeeded because the African-American community was terribly ill-served by the schools. Some leaders signed onto it, understandably, but ALEC's real goal has always been to privatize education, and they're willing to do it piecemeal, and now they're getting very far in that effort. They're really fighting a sort of attritional war on things that had been well-settled in Wisconsin and elsewhere.
  Tone Madison: It's interesting that you mention Thompson, because people often see him as a remnant of a time when there was more consensus and cooperation in state politics. And in hindsight, he has more of a connection to what's happening now than his public image suggests.
  Dan Kaufman: That's right, and it's attritional. And relatively speaking, he was that way, and he did sometimes listen to the other side, and he won reelection by two-thirds of the vote partly because he did govern that way. But at the same time, he was undermining it, and I would say the same of many Democrats too. For example, Jim Doyle, as he was leaving in 2010, after Walker had won, he bragged about making more cuts to state employees than any governor's ever made. Well, that sends a very powerful signal that those people's work and what they do is not really valued. Bill Clinton did a similar thing on the national scale. He appropriated Thompson's model both for welfare reform and for school choice. Wisconsin has been a laboratory for conservatives for quite some time as well, even though its previous history was as a laboratory for progressives.
  Tone Madison: UW-Madison political scientist Kathy Cramer and her book The Politics Of Resentment are a big part of the public discussion in Wisconsin right now, and you touch on that in The Fall Of Wisconsin. As you were growing up in Madison, were you aware of this tension that Cramer talks about between Madison and the rest of the state?
  Dan Kaufman: I think I was probably less aware of it than I should have been. That effort goes back a long time. [Republican Governor] Lee Dreyfus famously said that Madison was 30 square miles surrounded by reality. Not to get pedantic, but it's 50 square miles. [Editor's note: The figure is higher now.] We were all aware of it, and there were proud Madison T-shirts that said "30 square miles surrounded by reality," or something. But at the same time, I think that was always present, and Kathy talked about it. And one thing where, I'm not sure if I differ with her, but this is more my focus, is that I don't think these things come out of nowhere. I think that they are very appealing in times of scarcity. And certainly the Vietnam War was a big part of it, but what has often been the fuel of it I think is that it's a time of real economic insecurity for a lot of people. If someone presents a narrative like "these people are to blame," it's very easy to be convinced, especially when the other side isn't saying, "No no no, we need to lift everyone up. These people have good health insurance and you should, too." That message I don't think was very clear.
  When you go into these rural communities, oftentimes a schoolteacher is the only person who has health insurance. It's become very unaffordable, whereas previously farmers might have been able to buy it for themselves. And that's a big part of the book, too—the depletion of these rural communities. I think about it as something that's also been stoked by people like Walker, and also people like Jim Doyle. If rhetorically you're undermining the idea that people are serving the community and doing a really good job—and often their wages are less than they would make in the private sector, even though they have better benefits—there's also a cost to that. That wasn't very clear from the Democratic side, and I think especially when Walker announced Act 10, that was still right in the financial crisis and people's livelihoods were slipping away. When somebody says, "these people have something that you don't"—and in fact Walker ran an ad about his brother, about how he would like to have health insurance and a pension—but his solution was to take it away from people, essentially. He didn't totally take it away, but he made them pay a lot more for it and took away their right to have a unified voice in the conditions of their employment.
  Tone Madison: The book focuses quite a bit on the role of Native American activists, who often get overshadowed in the state and national conversation. Why did you place so much emphasis on those communities and their stories?
  Dan Kaufman: I was really captivated by what they were doing. The issue of the mine, the GTAC mine in northern Wisconsin, became very emblematic of how policy was written, who it was written for, and their fight against it was probably the most compelling fight. For a lot of labor activists it was too, but [for Native Americans] it really is a life-or-death issue. They survive on the bounty of the land still, the walleye they catch, the very sensitive wild rice beds. Their connection to the land, particularly in Lake Superior, is a religious experience, and I was very moved by it. They were very welcoming to it. I became particularly close to Mike Wiggins but also to Joe Rose. They helped me and led me into the story. It was captivating to me because I've always been interested in their culture and particularly their environmental ethos. Several thousand years before Aldo Leopold, they operated on a kind of land-ethic mentality, their own version. It's very profound and very moving, and they're willing to fight. This is their home. I mean, it's everyone else's home in Wisconsin too, but it's their home in a very profound way. The lake is their home as well. And I just felt that there's so much wisdom here, particularly in the era of climate change, this idea of the seventh generation, and thinking things beyond this short-term mentality.
  For example, the GTAC press releases would tout that there would probably be jobs for 50 years. Well, that's, like, two generations. Nothing. I mean, so to deplete a whole area without any kind of long-term consideration, one of the most pristine watersheds in the state, feeding Lake Superior with 10 percent of its freshwater surface? It just made little sense from their point of view, and their point of view, sadly, was written out from most of the discussion. There were some incredibly racist things said about them in the state legislature. I mean, basically, this is what [retired Republican State Senator] Dale [Schultz] would tell me, [that legislators would say] "Oh, we don't have to listen to them." It was heartbreaking. Where I come from, I'm always attracted to the underdog a little bit, or the person that doesn't have a voice. That's why I feel compelled to write journalism. There were a lot of victims of these policies in Wisconsin, but [Native American communities] were some of the most compelling to me. And I enjoyed spending time with them and learning from them. I have a profound respect for them and was very grateful that they were so open with me, because they obviously haven't been treated well, and often haven't been treated well by the media, so it was an honor to spend time with them and get their story out to a national audience.
  Tone Madison: Not to spend too much time on this, but the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel published a story earlier this month about some things Randy Bryce says about unions in the book, and the story presents it as Bryce basically disparaging the role of unions in politics. There's been some debate over whether it's been taken out of context. What do you make of that?
  Dan Kaufman: I think it was taken out of context, yeah. Randy wasn't saying that the unions precipitated Act 10, but that there was a passivity in the unions that allowed this to happen. What he was saying is that we have to really get our act together, the labor movement, and it was more of a call to arms. The headline in particular was taken out of context. The quotes themselves were actually published three years earlier. Portions of the book had been published in different articles that I had written, which is acknowledged in the front of the book. Those particular quotes were from that. That article was a 6,000 word article and that book was 80,000 words.
  If you can take from that book that Randy Bryce is somehow undermining the labor movement, it just doesn't make any sense. I just encourage people to read the whole thing. And I understand that nothing is perfect. Newspapers are trying to attract readers. I don't want to get into a sparring war with anyone, but it's hard in this day and age to get more than just quick sound bytes to everybody's social media and so on. But that's one of the joys and pleasures of a book, or a long magazine piece—it can make things make sense. When you read the whole piece, you can see exactly what Randy is saying. I don't think he was saying anything that many labor leaders weren't saying, and I don't think he was saying that they propagated Act 10 or that they themselves were dinosaurs. [Editor's note: The direct quote is: “People think that unions are useless today, that we’re dinosaurs."] Well, how did that happen? And he was saying, we haven't been active enough and we need to get away from our bubble. They need to reach out to the community. One thing Randy started doing was going to marches for Black Lives Matter, for immigrants' rights. That was the labor movement's role historically. I mean, the labor movement was instrumental in the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr. said as much.
  Tone Madison: On your book tour, you're stopping in Madison and Milwaukee, but also Oconomowoc and Spring Green—places where not necessarily everyone that shows up is going to be receptive to the message of your book. What kind of conversations are you hoping to have?
  Dan Kaufman: I hope to have the same kind of conversation I'm having with you, and like I said, I think there's a lot of Republicans that sort of have the view of Dale Schultz as well. I think there used to be certain areas that were agreed upon by both sides. I spoke to Eric O'Keefe [a right-wing political activist based in Spring Green], Scott Fitzgerald [the Wisconsin State Senate's Republican majority leader], I love talking to anybody as a journalist to uncover what really happened. So I'm anxious and excited to talk to anyone, people that disagree with me, too.
  I do think that at a fundamental level, most everybody would like a connection as a citizen between themselves and their representatives. I feel like given Citizens United and previous rulings, that's very difficult to have. Money in my view really does make that kind of politics difficult, when you have to spend a million dollars for a state assembly race. It's challenging to maintain your integrity, to maintain your access to your constituents without too much in between that...you used to be able to run for State Assembly for $8,000, and you used to have more dairy farmers in the State Assembly, just working citizens. I think that's one thing that's captivating about, say, Randy Bryce—or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—just citizens. It isn't necessarily a job that has to be for a professional class. Originally it was supposed to be citizen representatives, and it's gotten far from that, partly because of the difficulty of doing that. But in Wisconsin, that tradition lasted a long time. And one of the most admirable traditions, and I think a lot of Republicans agreed with this, is that there was very little money in Wisconsin politics. That was something that Bob LaFollette really emphasized, was trying to limit that money in the public sphere. And you can have conservative views within that. It doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be a progressive.
  Tone Madison: What's next on your plate?
  Dan Kaufman: I'm following politics, of course. I wouldn't mind a very brief break when my travels around the book are finished. A little vacation with my family—it's been a pretty intense period. But I hope to keep following the characters that I followed, but also I feel like it is a decisive moment in the country, and a lot of what happened in Wisconsin is very relevant to that and in fact emblematic of it. So I plan to keep writing and I plan to keep playing music. I'm going to be in Spain and Portugal for a couple of days for a very quick trip for a couple of shows later this month. And I'm looking forward to talking about the book in Wisconsin, particularly. But also in Minneapolis and Chicago.
  I've been in New York for a long time but the Midwest is still in my heart. What motivated me to write this book and to write all my articles was a real passion for this state and a sense of gratitude, I suppose, for what it provided for me. And I covered a lot that I didn't know, a lot of this remarkable history around Milwaukee socialism and Fighting Bob, things that I knew something about but not enough. It's a really incredible state that still has so much to offer, and I think you see that these questions are not settled. You can see a resurgence of some of the movement around Act 10 in things like Randy Bryce's campaign and other aspects. I don't think people want to let go of those previous ideals. That said, the state has changed a lot too—every place has. That's not just Scott Walker. I mean, even by the early '90s, Madison became a fair bit fancier than I remembered it. It just changed. And that maybe also contributed to some of the resentment. When I was growing up, in some ways I didn't feel like Madison was as different from the rest of the state as it is now. It was kind of sleepy, honestly. I mean, there was always the '60s movements and remnants of that, but it didn't feel quite as—you know, restaurants and so on—the culture changed. There were good things with that and less-good things. It became more alien to maybe some people from rural areas. We used to have lunch at Walgreen's—well, it was called Rennebohm's. The Square, nothing was happening there. It was failing business or shuttered businesses, largely. It was just a very different place, and maybe that is part of the story as well. There's been a lot of money in Madison, Epic and so on, and it's gotten a little bit more distant. And some of these rural places are struggling even more than they were. There were 150,000 dairy farms in 1945, and there's less than 9,000 today. You're talking about an incredible depletion of rural life and these communities. And you go to some of them and there's a lot of shuttered businesses, Main Streets that you don't see a car going down. That was a part of the anger that fueled both Walker's ascent and Trump's.
  Tone Madison: What do you make of the Governor's race so far?
  Dan Kaufman: Not sure what to make of it! It seems like a bit of a free-for-all stage. I've paid attention a bit. I know Paul Soglin's running, Kelda Roys. I know most of the names but it doesn't seem like there's a clear path. I'm as baffled as you. What the book is trying to do is look at politics from a different perspective. The reason I got interested in Randy Bryce has nothing to do with his Congressional race, it had to do with him as a labor organizer. I follow politics very intensely, but less so electoral politics. It's not the focus of my work journalistically. I'm looking for a little bit more of the unseen perspective, less-noted stuff like the battle against the mine and what that did. [Madison State Representative] Chris Taylor is a politician and somebody who figures prominently in the book, and I was interested in her role in ALEC as a member trying to go there to expose what they were doing, rather than her as an elected official.

Kaufman, Dan: THE FALL OF WISCONSIN

Kirkus Reviews. (May 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Kaufman, Dan THE FALL OF WISCONSIN Norton (Adult Nonfiction) $26.95 7, 10 ISBN: 978-0-393-63520-1
A Wisconsin native who identifies as a progressive advocate contrasts the history of his state with the drastic changes during the past decade that have surprised politicians, journalists, academics, and countless voters.
As Kaufman reports, Wisconsin's progressive ethos had been taken for granted over so many decades that it seemed entrenched not only within the Democratic Party, but also most segments of the Republican Party, as well. For example, a Republican governor and Republican-controlled legislature favored collective bargaining for state employees, and a different Republican governor created accessible health insurance for poverty-level families with children. The author marks the beginning of the shift away from widespread progressivism to 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed limits on contributions to political candidates by individuals and groups. The money from anti-labor union forces and other self-identified right-wing radicals--many from outside Wisconsin--chipped away at historical progressivism. Early in the book, Kaufman identifies Scott Walker as the leading agent of change. Walker moved to Wisconsin in third grade, when his father became minister of a Baptist church in the town of Delavan. By the time he entered college at Marquette in Milwaukee, Walker aggressively advocated tax cuts for the wealthy and outlawing abortions. He never completed college, later proudly citing his lack of a degree. Walker entered electoral politics as a Republican state legislator, later choosing to seek, successfully, the top executive job in Milwaukee County. In 2009, when Walker's anti-union fiscal cutbacks vaulted him into contention for governor, he won. Two years later, he survived an attempt to recall him from the governorship. As Kaufman focuses on Walker as governor, he advances the narrative by weaving in stories about avid Walker opponents from the shredded Democratic Party. Paul Ryan, Hillary Clinton, and other prominent national figures appear throughout, but this is not a book focused on Washington, D.C. Still, these tales from one state have national implications.
Kaufman's disdain for Walker and other hard-line conservatives is clear, but his research underlying the antipathy is solid and important.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Kaufman, Dan: THE FALL OF WISCONSIN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538294012/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=aaba2735. Accessed 25 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A538294012

Wisconsin Spring

Charles J. Sykes
National Review. 70.14 (July 30, 2018): p37+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 National Review, Inc.
http://www.nationalreview.com/
Full Text:
The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics, by Dan Kaufman (W. W. Norton, 336 pp., $26.95)
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.
Mr. Sykes was a longtime conservative talk-radio host in Wisconsin and is the author, most recently, of How the Right Lost Its Mind.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sykes, Charles J. "Wisconsin Spring." National Review, 30 July 2018, p. 37+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A546959555/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4ee74650. Accessed 25 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A546959555

The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics

Publishers Weekly. 265.22 (May 28, 2018): p88.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics
Dan Kaufman. Norton, $26.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-393-63520-1
A deep blue state has turned choleric red with far-reaching consequences, according to this incisive study of Wisconsin state politics. Journalist Kaufman examines the collapse of Wisconsin's left-liberal heritage--in the 20th century the state pioneered welfare policy, labor rights, and environmental regulation, and Milwaukee had a socialist mayor for decades---after the 2010 election brought Republican governor Scott Walker to power. The state became a laboratory for right-wing nostrums, Kaufman contends, as Walker and the Republican-controlled legislature stripped public-sector unions of collective bargaining rights, gutted environmental protections, cut taxes, and slashed education funding. Kaufman interviews labor organizers, Democratic candidates, Republican operatives, academics, Native environmental activists, and others. He spotlights both the long-term Republican strategy of taking power in states, aided by right-wing think tanks and deep-pocket donors like the Koch brothers, and the mistakes of Democrats who alienated their working-class base with Republican-lite policies; he focuses cogently on the decline--and suppression--of unions as the key to Wisconsin's rightward lurch. Kaufman's leftist leanings sometimes make his analysis seem one-sided, and the book's invocations of Native American spirituality when discussing environmental policy feel awkward. Still, the author's vivid reportage and trenchant insights illuminate America's changing political landscape. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics." Publishers Weekly, 28 May 2018, p. 88. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541638852/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2bf4feba. Accessed 25 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A541638852

"Kaufman, Dan: THE FALL OF WISCONSIN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538294012/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=aaba2735. Accessed 25 July 2018. Sykes, Charles J. "Wisconsin Spring." National Review, 30 July 2018, p. 37+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A546959555/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4ee74650. Accessed 25 July 2018. "The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics." Publishers Weekly, 28 May 2018, p. 88. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541638852/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2bf4feba. Accessed 25 July 2018.

• NPR
  https://www.npr.org/2018/07/11/627988819/the-fall-of-wisconsin-puts-the-states-2016-presidential-choice-in-context
  Word count: 1529

  'The Fall Of Wisconsin' Puts The State's 2016 Presidential Choice In Context
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  July 11, 20181:44 PM ET

  Ron Elving

  Samantha Clark/NPR
  The election night map in 2016 brought many surprises, but none more stunning than Wisconsin's switch from blue to red — marking its first vote for a Republican presidential ticket since 1984.
  Michigan and Pennsylvania also ended long Democratic streaks that night. But the Badger State was the big shock, because Barack Obama had carried it twice by comfortable margins and Hillary Clinton had led all through the fall in the most respected statewide poll.
  President Trump himself has since seemed fixated on his Wisconsin win, if fuzzy on the details. Last month, while visiting that state, Trump claimed to have been the first Republican to win there since Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s. (In fact, the GOP's presidential nominee won the state five times between Ike and Trump: Reagan in 1984 and 1980 and Richard Nixon in 1972, 1968 and 1960.)
  But the president is not the only one getting Wisconsin wrong. Assumptions based on fleeting impressions have long led outsiders to misinterpret what goes on between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi.
  Enter Dan Kaufman, who grew up in Wisconsin and now writes for magazines in New York. In The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics (Norton), he tries to explain what happened in 2016 as part of a far larger story.

  His message is twofold. First, he explains that the shock of Trump's win in Wisconsin in 2016 was misplaced. Yes, Obama had won there twice, but his wins stood in stark contrast to what was going on in the state during his years in office — a drastic rightward shift in the state's power arrangements from the top statewide jobs to the local precinct level.
  Second, Kaufman argues that what's been happening in Wisconsin has historical significance because it made the state a model for conservative activists who, with corporate backing, were remarkably successful in reversing the state's deeper tradition of progressive populism that dates from the 1800s.
  Even casual students of history have heard of Robert La Follette, champion of the common man and longtime statewide hero. The original "Fighting Bob" served as governor, senator and presidential candidate in the early 20th century and remains a beacon to progressives today. Some also know that Milwaukee routinely elected socialist mayors for nearly half a century.
  But Wisconsin's political history is nothing if not complicated and often contradictory. The state that produced "Fighting Bob" also gave the world Joseph R. McCarthy, the notorious red-baiting senator who made "McCarthyism" an epithet.

  The Fall of Wisconsin
  The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics
  by Dan Kaufman
  Hardcover, 319 pages
  purchase
  The state that sent to the Senate Gaylord Nelson, the father of "Earth Day," also elected Sen. William Proxmire, the maverick known for his "Golden Fleece awards" that pilloried government waste. And the state's current brace of senators, Republican Ron Johnson and Democrat Tammy Baldwin, share little in common beyond the state flag.
  Kaufman does include in these pages some of the elements of Wisconsin history that further cloud its image as a "progressive bastion." There were generations of fierce resistance to unionization, strikes that lasted for years, violence that took lives. He even unearths a particularly eye-opening episode in the 1960s, when Alabama's segregationist Gov. George Wallace came to the state and did rather well in the Democratic presidential primary – not once but twice.
  Perhaps no one can reconcile all this and establish a single narrative for the Wisconsin story. And Kaufman does not try to disentangle all the strands of populist versus intellectual progressivism. Instead, his account returns repeatedly to the trials of the present moment.
  That more contemporary story begins as Republican Scott Walker wins the governorship in 2010, the Tea Party year, running against Obamacare and the Democratic power structure in Madison, the state capital. Walker would drive legislation known as Act 10 to take down the public employee unions (including their right to collective bargaining). He would then survive a recall, win re-election and push new legislation to make Wisconsin a right-to-work state in 2015, breaking a promise he had made to the private sector unions.
  Kaufman spends relatively little time on the cities of Milwaukee and Madison, taking the reader instead to South Wayne and Ashland and Baraboo Hills. Here is where he finds the roots of what has been happening to Wisconsin politics and where he spreads his conclusions farther across the political landscape.
  The lens widens to take in the struggles of the Upper Midwest, the hollowing out of small-town America and the complicated ways in which working people sometimes work against their own best interests.
  In this regard, Kaufman's work belongs with well-known recent studies such as J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy and Arlie Russell Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land — examinations of alienation among rural (or until recently rural) Americans. Kaufman finds much the same core values and deep resentments in the Upper Midwest that these authors have found elsewhere.
  But Kaufman is not satisfied with blaming the people's anger alone for what has happened in Wisconsin. He explores other more deliberate and systemic factors that dragged down Clinton and other Democrats in recent election cycles.
  He argues that Walker's voter ID law suppressed turnout in Milwaukee and that the influx of money from conservative political action committees taking advantage of Citizens United inundated candidates at the local and statewide level. For example, he reports the Democratic candidate against Walker in the 2012 recall election spent $4 million to Walker's $30 million.
  He also devotes a chapter to the famous legislative district maps that allowed Republicans to win a supermajority of the seats in the State Assembly in 2012 despite receiving less than half the statewide vote for those offices. (A lawsuit challenging these maps made it to the U.S. Supreme Court this spring but was sent back down on a procedural issue.)
  Perhaps the one issue that recurs most often in Kaufman's diagnosis is the near extinction of unions as a political force. Private sector union participation was down to 8 percent by 2016, he says, and those who remained were not nearly numerous or generous enough to compete with the GOP's coffers.
  Kaufman marshals copious data in making his case. But his story comes to life through his profiles of key players in his home state. Most are progressive Democrats or activists who have been resisting the state's rightward shift for years. These include current and former legislators such as Tim Cullen and Chris Taylor and candidates who ran quixotic challenges to entrenched incumbents.
  One whose name may already be familiar is Randy Bryce, an ironworker who grew up in Milwaukee and now lives in the congressional district of Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House. Bryce had been running a long-shot campaign against Ryan this year until the speaker decided to retire. Now Bryce, known as "IronStache" for his facial hair and social media handle, has at least a chance to go to Washington.
  Bryce is an Army vet, raised by a Milwaukee beat cop as a conservative. As an ironworker, he has helped build some of the iconic structures in his original hometown — the ballpark, the Harley-Davidson Museum. But he was politicized by veterans' health issues, then by labor issues and finally by Walker and the campaign against unions. He took part in the massive protests that tried to block Act 10 in the Legislature and he tried to rally organized labor against Walker in his subsequent campaigns.
  We do meet a few Republicans. One is Eric O'Keefe of the Wisconsin Club for Growth, who has been involved in the Republican revolution of the past 10 years and makes a case for lower taxes and paring back the power of public employees. Another is Dale Schultz, who represented a rural southwestern Wisconsin district in the state Senate for decades but bailed out after resisting Walker.
  Schultz provides a pithy analysis of what happened in the fall of 2016, recalling how many of his constituents were attracted to Bernie Sanders: "Once [Sanders] was out and it was just Hillary and Donald Trump, the anger shifted over and got behind Trump because they didn't care. They just wanted to crush the establishment."
  In his final chapter, Kaufman returns to the quotation that begins his book. It is from Edward G. Ryan, who was Wisconsin's chief justice in 1873 and foresaw the protracted struggle of the next century and a half with striking clarity.
  The question will arise ... Which shall rule: wealth or man? Which shall lead, money or intellect? Who shall fill public stations, educated and patriotic freemen or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?
  Kaufman's overarching point is that this question from 1873 is not asked once and answered. It is a question posed repeatedly in every generation, and every generation must provide its own answer.

• https://bookpage.com/reviews/22866-dan-kaufman-fall-wisconsin#.W1id6_ZuLIU
  BookPage
  Word count: 370

  Web Exclusive – July 10, 2018
  The Fall of Wisconsin
  Dairy land takes a turn
  BookPage review by Deborah Mason

  On Election Day in 2016, pundits were confident that Wisconsin would be a “blue wall” that would lead Hillary Clinton to victory. The next day, however, revealed a different story. Instead of showing Clinton the same support they had given Obama in the previous two presidential elections, Wisconsin went for Trump by 22,748 votes.
  Political commentators were flummoxed. How could Wisconsin, historically the most progressive state in the Union, have turned overnight to the right? After all, Wisconsin had served as the legislative laboratory for the rest of the country, passing reform laws that later inspired the New Deal. Furthermore, Wisconsin’s unions could be reliably counted on to turn out the vote for Democrats. What had caused such a sudden shift?
  According to journalist Dan Kaufman, the answer is that the shift did not occur overnight. A native Wisconsinite now based in New York, Kaufman argues that Wisconsin’s swing to Trump is the product of a decades-long effort by conservative think tanks, PACs and donors to dismantle Wisconsin’s progressive ethos and replace it with a right-to-work, anti-regulatory government. The result, according to Kaufman, is a gerrymandered state with weakened environmental laws, poor educational results and increased poverty.
  Democrats do not get off lightly, either. Kaufman claims that the Democratic Party’s neglect of the industrial workers who made up the bulk of their union support had a significant impact on the outcome of the 2016 election. He also observes that job losses from NAFTA and the recession made union workers particularly susceptible to Governor Scott Walker’s divide-and-conquer tactics. Democrats, he argues, took Wisconsin for granted, and gave the unions little or no support in devastating political battles. Weakened, they had neither the ability nor the desire to turn out the vote for Clinton.
  Kaufman weaves recent political events, Wisconsin history and the stories of real people caught in the political whirlpool—union leaders, Native Americans, grassroots organizers—into a meticulous and compelling exploration of a consequential political metamorphosis. It is essential reading to understand how we arrived where we are today.

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