I’m worried about the fate of our democracy, here in Wisconsin and nationally.
After the coup attempt on Jan. 6, I thought the Donald Trump fever would break. But it broke for only about 24 hours, and then it came raging back.
The combination of the Trump cult, white nationalism, irrationalism and the 24/7 right-wing media ecosystem that feeds it all represents a clear and present danger to our democracy.
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Here in Wisconsin, former state Supreme court Justice Michael Gableman’s biased and costly fishing expedition into last November’s elections and the reckless statements by hyperpartisan elected officials have further undermined the faith of many Wisconsinites about the fairness of our democratic process.
It’s extraordinarily bad sportsmanship to still be blaming the refs more than a year after the game has ended. But that is where we’re at with the McCarthyite attacks on the commissioners and the staff of the Wisconsin Elections Commission.
And if the Republicans follow the proposal of U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Oshkosh, to go over the head of the Wisconsin Elections Commission and to hand its functions over to the Legislature, this would not only be a grotesque abuse of power. It also would foreshadow the prospect of partisan officials sabotaging the will of the people by declaring, by fiat, that their preferred candidate won the election, regardless of the actual vote count.
These are new and unprecedented threats to our democracy. And they arise on top of a whole mountain of problems that I tried to address in my book, “12 Ways to Save Democracy in Wisconsin,” just published by the University of Wisconsin Press.
These problems include, of course, gerrymandering. Last month, we saw the Republicans ram through the newly rigged maps. Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, confessed in his testimony at the lone hearing on the maps that he did, indeed, tilt the maps in favor of Republicans. Never mind that the vast majority of Wisconsinites are in favor of nonpartisan redistricting.
Then there’s the problem of money in politics. Right now, super wealthy people can spend as much as they want in Wisconsin to try to elect their favorite candidates. The average Wisconsinite is being reduced almost to the role of spectator as billionaires on the left and on the right throw record-breaking amounts of money around in every election here, even though they may not even live here.
This money contaminates our judiciary as well. In Wisconsin today, if I’m a lawyer with a case before a judge, I can give that judge’s reelection campaign $2,000, and neither I nor the judge need to inform the lawyer on the other side of the case. We need much better rules on judicial recusal.
Some of the solutions are easy in theory but difficult in practice, given the composition of our Legislature. We could simply pass a law banning gerrymandering, or placing limits on campaign donations, or requiring judges to get off cases that involve parties that have contributed the maximum to their campaigns, for instance, if we elected politicians who were committed to these reforms.
Some of the solutions are harder because the problems are so entrenched. Two of these — racism and economic equality — are national and deeply rooted. But we can chip away at these by confronting racism interpersonally and institutionally.
As far as addressing racial economic injustice, Michael Johnson of the Boys and Girls Club of Dane County has come up with a visionary public-private partnership to make it easier for Black people to start businesses and own homes in Madison, which could serve as a model.
And to move toward economic democracy overall, Wisconsin needs to strengthen unions — that means overturning Act 10 — and reinstate an inheritance tax.
It was Teddy Roosevelt who said more than 100 years ago, “There can be no political democracy unless there is something approaching economic democracy.”
Justice Louis Brandeis echoed that decades later when he said: “We can have a democratic society, or we can have the concentration of great wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both.”
On this and many other issues, we’ve been going in the wrong direction. A lot of rot has been eating away at the foundations of our democracy for many years.
And now the Trump fanatics in the Republican Party and his white supremacist supporters have come along to place dynamite at those foundations.
We all need to recognize this dire threat and defend our democracy before it’s too late.
Rothschild is executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign: wisdc.org. He is author of “12 Ways to Save Democracy in Wisconsin,” published by the University of Wisconsin Press.