Dan Kaufman examines both the tiny details and the big picture.
Dan Kaufman’s great achievement in his new book, The Fall of Wisconsin, is that he sees the trees as well as the forest. The Wisconsin native, who now lives in Brooklyn, New York, and writes for outlets including The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, looks at what has happened in the Badger State, especially during the last decade, with an eye for both the big picture and the tiny detail.
The book, subtitled The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics, tells how the Progressive movement, spurred by the likes of Fighting Bob La Follette, grew to national prominence in the early 20th century, delivering huge gains to ordinary people; and how powerful players have set out to systematically demolish those gains, with no small measure of success.
“The Fall of Wisconsin is the story of how the state went from a widely admired ‘laboratory of democracy’ to a testing ground for national conservatives bent on remaking American politics,” Kaufman writes in his prologue. “It traces the ways Wisconsin’s century-old progressive legacy has been dismantled in virtually every area: labor rights, environmental protection, voting rights, government transparency. Those efforts have been wildly successful, culminating in Wisconsin’s startling deliverance of the White House to Donald Trump.”
The book, a blend of deep research and original reporting, is about Act 10 and right-to-work and legislative redistricting and voter ID. It’s about groups including the Koch Brothers, Bradley Foundation and American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and the opportunistic politicians, including Scott Walker and Paul Ryan, who have done their bidding. It’s about how Wisconsin has led the nation in shedding members of the middle class, with its poverty rate reaching a 30-year high, its roads rated second-worst in the nation, and its flagship academy, the UW–Madison, falling from the list of the country’s top five research schools.
But The Fall of Wisconsin is also about ironworker Randy Bryce putting his shoulder to the wheel, pushing back against the attacks on labor from Walker and the Republicans. It’s about state Rep. Chris Taylor (D-Madison) joining ALEC so she can attend its conferences, Kaufman in tow, to report back on what the conservative group that writes model legislation is up to. It’s about Lori Compas, a Fort Atkinson wedding photographer and mother of two, taking on Republican Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald when no one else would, and doing better than anyone expected.
In Kaufman’s telling, Wisconsin’s political progressives are continually being knocked down and pushed around. But then they get back up again.
Kaufman was first drawn to the story of what’s been happening in Wisconsin in 2011, during the protests that erupted against Walker’s plan to kneecap public employee unions and cut school funding. His mother went to testify against the bill; his father, the retired UW-Madison urban planning professor Jerry Kaufman, took part in a protest against it.
“He told me he sang ‘God Bless America’ at the Capitol with thousands of other protesters,” Kaufman recalls. Both of his parents have since died.
The Fall of Wisconsin presents an authoritative overview of events — some well known, some not — in the beatdown of Wisconsin’s progressive legacy. It tells how when GOP lawmakers discussed the state’s voter ID law in closed session, according to a legislative aide who was present, they were “giddy” at the prospect of disenfranchising Democratic voters, with state Sen. Leah Vukmir, now running for U.S. Senate, “frothing at the mouth” over the law’s potential to deliver wins to Republicans.
Kaufman tells how Walker in 2015 used his budget to purge language that had been on the books since 1913, pledging that the minimum wage for workers “shall not be less than a living wage.” Walker also tried to erase the so-called Wisconsin Idea, replacing statutory language calling on the state university system to “search for truth” with a directive that it “meet the state’s workforce needs,” but was forced to back down under protest.
And he tells how Walker’s recall election campaign coordinated with outside special interest groups to evade campaign spending limits. (“Corporations,” advised one consultant. “Go heavy after them.” Also: “Take Koch’s money.”)
But it’s not just Republicans and conservative pressure groups that get the blame in Kaufman’s book. He also documents the timidity of the Democrats and state labor unions in the face of unprecedented assault.
“The AFL-CIO leadership is scared of the masses,” Dave Poklinkoski, the president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, tells Kaufman about the decision to turn the outrage over Act 10 into a recall effort rather than, say, a general strike.
“They had more than 100,000 people out there and then they tell people to go home,” Poklinkoski says. Adds Colin Millard of the ironworkers union, “If correctional guards would have just sat down on the job, not even gone out on strike, this thing would have been over and Walker would have lost.”
And Kaufman describes how when ironworker Bryce visited Washington, D.C., in 2011, he tied a pair of sneakers to the White House fence. It was a bitter rebuke to Barack Obama, who vowed as a candidate to “put on a comfortable pair of walking shoes” to join workers on the picket line but as president sat on his hands as Wisconsin workers got clobbered with Act 10.
Much of the book deals with the erosion of state protections for the environment, tied to the ease with which resource extractors have been able to have their way with Walker and the GOP-controlled Legislature. He notes that mining company execs and others who got the state to revamp its mining laws “donated a total of $15 million to Walker and his Republican allies in the Legislature, outspending the mine’s opponents by more than six hundred to one.”
Scott Walker, in his memoir, argued that the triumph of conservatives in “the battle for Wisconsin” meant that “we can do it anywhere.” Kaufman writes that Walker’s “devastating success has allowed for the transformation of Wisconsin into a laboratory for corporate interests and conservative activists, a process that continues unabated.” And yes, conservatives in other states have looked to Wisconsin for inspiration for their own assaults on workers, voting rights and the environment.
There are signs, lately, that the winds may be shifting. Within the past few months, Wisconsin voters have elected Democrats to legislative seats in what had been solidly Republican districts, picked a liberal over a conservative for state Supreme Court, and rejected a GOP-led effort to abolish the state Treasurer’s Office.
But the damage that has been done to workers’ rights and environmental protection is serious, and it will be long-lasting. Kaufman reflects, no doubt correctly, that whatever happens in Wisconsin from this point forward, “it will prove more difficult to rebuild the state’s progressive traditions than it was to destroy them.”
And yet, his book continually comes back to people, and they are not giving up. Take Madison environmentalist Peter Anderson, the co-founder of Wisconsin’s Environmental Decade (which became Clean Wisconsin), who now works with the Madison chapter of the climate change combater, 350.org.
“So why do I continue?” he says to Kaufman, as they visit Enbridge’s Dane County pump station, which the state Legislature assisted by stripping the county of its ability to intervene. “I’m 70 years old,” he says. “I have maybe 10 good years left. I have four kids and two grandkids: How can you not try, you know?”
Dan Kaufman will appear at A Room of One’s Own on Wednesday, July 25, at 6 p.m. An excerpt from The Fall of Wisconsin appears on the website of The Progressive magazine.