David Michael Miller
In the summer of 2013, an unusual group of Madisonians started meeting for coffee.
Libertarian-leaning tea party activists Kirsten Lombard and Jeff Horn had, together, been fighting the implementation of Common Core in Wisconsin. To them, the education initiative promised only to enhance corporate profits, while dehumanizing students and denigrating the craft of teaching.
The two were joined by Dr. Tim Slekar, dean of the Edgewood College School of Education, and his Edgewood colleague, Dr. Jed Hopkins. Though they are political progressives, Slekar and Hopkins were as alarmed by Common Core as Lombard and Horn.
The ostensibly strange bedfellows advanced swiftly from coffee to serious action. Over the past couple of years, the four have made joint lobbying trips to the state Capitol. They co-signed a high-profile open letter to Gov. Scott Walker in which they demanded he follow through on his commitment to repeal Common Core statewide. Slekar and Hopkins have interviewed Horn and Lombard for BustEDPencils.com, their education policy blog. And the two academics contributed an essay to a book that Lombard edited and published, Common Ground on Common Core.
The standard “left vs. right” media narrative obscures just how much anti-establishment types from both sides of the political spectrum have in common these days. As a matter of fact, when the power elite of the Democratic and Republican parties agree on something, the muckrakers on both parties’ outskirts probably agree that it’s bad news. So when the centrist establishment unites to fund massive bailouts, wage endless war, implement corporate-managed trade deals and abridge civil liberties, it makes sense for those who oppose such travesties to unite, in resistance.
History shows how effective such unified resistance can be. In his 2014 book Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State, Ralph Nader recounts how, in the 1980s, fiscal hawks from the right teamed up with environmental activists from the left to shut down construction of an immense nuclear reactor in Tennessee. To the conservative hawks, the project was a boondoggle. The environmentalists had safety concerns. Working closely together, they defeated the powerful senators and lobbyists who backed the project.
But just as bootleggers and Baptists supported Prohibition for very different reasons, the hawks and environmentalists had independent motives for fighting the reactor. Naturally, they dissolved their marriage of convenience once their goal was achieved.
Today’s “convergers,” by contrast, share many of the same fundamental motives. As such, their long-term prospects seem more promising. Take our local education activists. They each oppose Common Core for precisely the same reasons. All four are wary of corporate influence over government policy. All four believe that a one-size-fits-all approach to education severely shortchanges students.
Other convergence-ready issues are much the same. Left or right, we want to abolish the NSA because we value privacy. We want the Federal Reserve brought under control because it systematically enriches the already-rich. We want the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation shuttered because it’s a corporate welfare slush fund disguised as a jobs program.
Such “shared humanity” fuels Slekar’s hopes for enduring synergies. His vision goes beyond “alliances” to a full-blown “left-right awakening.” “We all get the bigger oligarchic threat, that there is this group of people out there who really don’t give a shit about us. The longer we stay ‘left’ or ‘right,’ and fail to recognize that we need each other, the longer we’ll stay peasants.” Kirsten Lombard echoes this sentiment. “What if we’re not as far apart as we think? What if the truth is that we’re not necessarily enemies at all?”
Indeed, insofar as we confine ourselves to our assigned ideological ghettos, we cooperate with the divide-and-rule strategy of the corporate state.
For those willing to venture out of their comfort zones, the time could not be better. The establishment is at its weakest point in memory. The Trump phenomenon has the Republican old guard on its heels. In light of Bernie Sanders’ surprising success, The Atlantic columnist Molly Ball sees “a reckoning coming” for the Democratic Party elite: “There is a much larger constituency for the ‘political revolution’ than they ever thought.” How much longer can the center hold when fewer than 30% of Americans believe that the country is going in “the right direction”?
Robert Reich recently predicted that “the biggest political contest in the future [will] be between, not Democrats and Republicans, but the anti-establishment populists and the establishment.” If we prevail, the left and right blocs of the anti-establishment will still have significant differences to reconcile.
But as a person of the libertarian “right,” I look forward to a time when my primary political rivals are honest brokers like Dennis Kucinich, Bernie Sanders and Ralph Nader. Until then, as Nader himself points out, working together will not compromise our respective principles, but instead bring us ever-closer to seeing them fully realized.
Michael Cummins is a Madison-based business analyst.
