It’s time to move past ugly politics
We need to find our way to a new American middle ground
Why, he asked me, is Wisconsin so polarized? My questioner was an official of the German government, charged with explaining our region’s political situation to his superiors in Berlin. How odd we must seem to him, I reflected. Our temperatures have been climbing for months, and now, on the eve of Election Day, many of us feel primed to explode. Not that Germany has been spared internal conflict in recent years, but we seem to have buried the needle on the discord meter.
Wisconsin, I told my questioner, has always been fertile ground for disagreement. In the 1800s, we fought over everything from the eight-hour day to English instruction in our classrooms. Our divisions intensified in the 20th century: urban and rural, native and immigrant, farmer and factory worker, Progressive and Stalwart Republican. Wisconsin was famously the home of both Robert La Follette and Joe McCarthy, and we are currently represented in the U.S. Senate by Ron Johnson, a Trumpophile Republican
businessman, and Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat, the first openly gay member of the upper chamber. Extremes seem baked into our landscape.
My answer was fine as far as it went, but it quickly began to seem inadequate. I’ve had the uneasy feeling lately that there’s a deeper change afoot in our country, a seismic shift in how we relate to each other and to our government. That feeling crystallized during a solo camping trip to Upper Michigan and northern Wisconsin this fall. The Trump signs there seemed as thick as the pine trees and, even though I was visiting a region I’ve loved since adolescence, I felt like I was in enemy territory. I was frankly embarrassed by the small-mindedness of my reaction, which was something like, “What’s wrong with these rednecks? How could they be so duped by that fakebaked carnival barker in the White House?” Then I wondered what they made of me, with the bike rack and the Milwaukee sticker on my Subaru Outback.
After taking more than one breath, I concluded that there is a singular tragedy in our current situation. Without giving our conscious assent, we have all allowed ourselves to be reduced to cultural stereotypes. People on the other side, whichever that side happens to be, have become little more than stick figures. Trump people bad, Biden people good — or the polar opposite.
‘Militarization’ of politics
That Neanderthal simplification flies in the face of common sense, not to mention basic charity. No one is one-dimensional. I’m an avowed liberal, but I also go to church, cheer the Packers, drink plenty of beer, and own at least five Lyle Lovett albums. I don’t doubt that there are Trump supporters who read Shakespeare, drink only French wine, and would swim a river to help a stranger. During my days up north, we were all washed by the same golden light in the forest, awed by the same towering waves on Lake Superior.
So what happened to us? Why have we lost our sense of shared humanity? The answer, I think, lies in what might be called the militarization of American politics. It’s no longer about policy, really; it’s about power —getting it, keeping it, and using it to inflict damage on your enemies, who were merely opponents in a friendlier time. Politics has become a zero-sum game in which if you lose, I win, and vice-versa. Reformers Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter offer a telling assessment of what they call the “political industrial complex.” The major parties, they argue, form a “duopoly” fueled by single-interest donors on either side of an ideological divide and unresponsive to the broader public interest. The result is a state of constant partisan warfare that leads inevitably to governmental gridlock.
I generally vote Democratic, but my favored party is obviously part of the problem. Obamacare did in fact pass with barely a whisper of Republican support. In recent years, however, Republicans have generally been in the driver’s seat, both here and nationally. Although Democrats might be just as heavy-handed if given the chance, the GOP’s tactics offer stark evidence of the prevailing problems. Following the 2010 census, Wisconsin Republicans completely redrew the state’s legislative map, packing Democrats like sardines into some districts and giving themselves a statistical edge in most others. The results are not only skewed electoral results but a rise in extremism. When everyone runs in a safe district, no one in either party has any reason to compromise.
Just as troubling are Republican efforts, on both the state and national levels, to make voting more difficult. Despite clear evidence that voter fraud is rare to nonexistent in our country, Republicans in Wisconsin and elsewhere have made voter IDs mandatory, limited the number of polling places, curtailed voting hours, and fueled distrust of mail-in ballots, all in a poorly concealed effort to suppress Democratic turnout. Shouldn’t our goal be to make it easier for every citizen to vote, rather than harder? Whenever one party retools the electoral machinery to its own advantage, democracy dies a little.
Perhaps the most permanent legacy of our current extremism is showing up on the federal bench. Mitch McConnell, a senator elected only by the people of Kentucky, spent years blocking the judicial appointments of Barack Obama, a president elected by a majority of the American people. When Donald Trump took office, McConnell moved quickly to remake the federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court, in his own conservative image. We liberals have also mobilized for “our” candidates, spending millions on a recent Wisconsin Supreme Court race. There was a time when “judicial” meant “impartial.” At our nation’s peril, it has come to signify partisans in black robes.
And so it goes, with one party blithely stacking the deck while the other howls in impotent outrage. Their positions could easily be reversed on Tuesday, but the underlying problems would remain the same: either a flagrant abuse of power by one party or a well-oiled stalemate, with each side refusing to give the other an inch, or even the time of day.
I find it remarkable that both the Trump and the Biden campaigns portray Tuesday’s election as a battle for America’s soul. Apparently, we’ll either descend into a “socialist” hell or become the Western world’s first dictatorship. As the parties move further apart and America’s middle ground shrinks to the vanishing point, we’ve become, to ourselves and to each other, rough caricatures, the crudest cartoons. A new tribalism now rules the land: red vs. blue, left vs. right, mask vs. no mask, butter side up vs. butter side down. Are there genuine policy differences behind the stereotypes? There are, and plenty of them, but they’ve been torched beyond recognition by the scorched-earth politics of 2020.
The underlying dynamic, the magma beneath the current volcano, is fear. One side fears runaway spending, oppressive taxation, and the death of individual liberty. The other fears runaway climate change, economic inequity, and the death of the common good. Isn’t there some place, even one, where we can all shiver together? An enemy we can agree to fight as a people united? A global pandemic couldn’t do it. Will it take an alien invasion? A burning planet?
Finding the middle again
It’s time to find our way out of the current morass. The most urgent task we face, and the hardest, is to depoliticize our politics and bring back the nation’s middle. It’s self-evident that neither side is going to go away, and it’s equally obvious that neither is going to get everything it wants. Thinking otherwise, for left or right, is a totalitarian fantasy.
Both parties need to start acting as if they understood that stark reality, and there are ways we can help them. Reformers Gehl and Porter favor final five nonpartisan primaries and ranked-choice voting in general elections. (Google “gehlporter” for the details.) A group called No Labels suggests something smaller but simpler: promoting bipartisanship by requiring every House speaker to win the post with at least 60 percent of the chamber’s votes. And gerrymandering must end. The legislature has the final say in Wisconsin, but the foxes shouldn’t be able to choose their own hens. UW-Madison has a highly regarded geography department. Why not let professionals rather than partisans draw our legislative maps, with a focus on competitive balance and geographic common sense?
Tuesday’s election will indeed be a pivotal moment in recent American history, but I’m just as concerned about what comes next. I for one am sick to death of discord, demonizing, and demagoguery. Whether we keep the old boss or trade him for a different brand of political aggression, it’s time to try something new. If we are to move beyond the manifest ugliness of current American politics, we all need to give up the feel-good self-righteousness of our entrenched positions. The only way forward is to embrace the creative discomfort of compromise. If our republic is to have a sustainable future, we need to move, together, toward a new American middle.
John Gurda writes a column on local history for the Ideas Lab on the first Sunday of every month. Email: mail@ johngurda.com