How Scott Walker’s Wisconsin Paved the Way for Donald Trump’s America – Jacobin magazine

It seemingly came out of nowhere. In 2010, Scott Walker, who was then the Milwaukee County Executive, did not campaign on it. In fact, he had said a couple of weeks prior to the election that he would use collective bargaining to win concessions over pensions and health insurance.

However, the demise of public employee unions had been a long-standing goal of a powerful right-wing network thats spearheaded by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and includes groups like the Bradley Foundation and the Koch brothers Americans for Prosperity.

Walker was very connected to this network. In fact, he was almost auditioning for it. There was a lot of posturing in 2010 by a number of Republican governors who were looking to attract attention from the Kochs in particular.

So Walker went furthest. Act 10 essentially eliminated collective bargaining rights for the states public employees both municipal employees and state employees except for nearly all of the police unions and all of the firefighters unions. Many of those unions had endorsed Walker.

Walker framed it as a way to save money: communities would gain flexibility. And, of course Act 10 played into economic resentment that had been building. The 2008 financial crisis was severe and lasting for many people, especially in rural America. So Walker was able to stoke resentment against public employees because they had decent benefits pensions, health insurance. They might, for example, be among the few people in a small community who even had employer-sponsored health insurance.

So there was this opening for a new Republican assault on labor. And prominent Democrats in some ways abetted this effort, with rhetoric attacking the public sphere. (Arne Duncan, Obamas secretary of education, in particular, had a lot of ideas that deeply antagonized public school teachers.)

There were these huge protests in Madison against Act 10 at least a hundred thousand people, some people say more showed up. They occupied the statehouse for three weeks, and Democratic state senators fled for Illinois (much like how the Texas Democrats are doing now over voting rights) in order to prevent a quorum on the bill. But there was little support for this among national Democrats. Neither Obama nor Joe Biden came to Wisconsin.

In the piece, I talk about how Obama had promised that he would walk on the picket line and protect collective bargaining rights if they were ever attacked. So that was a really important thing that people in Wisconsin, especially those who were part of the protests against Act 10, were keenly aware of and felt deeply betrayed over. Tellingly, I think many establishment Democrats wanted to distance themselves from that movement; Walker even boasted about that in his book. He bragged that Obama was too frightened to come to Wisconsin and defend labor.

Why has labor weakened so much? On one side you have these direct attacks; on the other side you have a negligence that is, in a way, a more subtle attack.

One of the criticisms made by some labor activists in Wisconsin was that this grassroots movement was quickly subsumed by an electoral effort, which in the end favored Walker because of the massive influx of dark money that flooded into the state to aid him. You had a hundred thousand people mobilized, and then all of a sudden they were told to go home and put their energy into a recall petition drive with the goal of ousting Walker. They did get a million signatures, and it was a remarkable grassroots effort not just centered in Madison or Milwaukee, it was really all over the state.

But ultimately, Walker was able to frame the recall as unjust and undemocratic, even though recall elections come out of a democratic reform thats been a part of Wisconsins political tradition for nearly a hundred years.

So Walker won, narrowly. Obama didnt campaign with Walkers opponent and even distanced himself from the whole episode, because he was worried about his own reelection. That was the most bitter blow for a lot of people in Wisconsin who had been activated by the fight for labor rights. All the energy at the Capitol just vanished.

However, in the piece I talk about the ways in which the Act 10 protests were an underappreciated spark for Occupy, the Sanders 2016 campaign, and the wider revival of a social-democratic strain which is firmly rooted in the labor movement and goes back to the New Deal, or even earlier.

You hadnt seen that kind of mass labor action in the United States in decades. It was so shocking. And even though it was defeated, it resonated and continues to resonate. Although in Wisconsin itself the situation is very bleak as far as any kind of turnaround because the Republicans have so thoroughly gerrymandered the state legislature. Theres no hope, in the near future at least, to restore the labor rights that were taken away.

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How Scott Walker's Wisconsin Paved the Way for Donald Trump's America - Jacobin magazine