Wisconsin…Hands-Off
Day 73 of first 100.
Tuesday was an important Election Day in Wisconsin. There were also two elections in Florida. I choose to focus on Wisconsin because I’m about ten miles “as the crow flies” from Wisconsin, and the Twin Cities media carried much of the advertising seen by Wisconsin voters. (I’m the dot on the edge of western Wisconsin, below! In reality I’m far smaller than the one on the map. At the same time, I know that I am one of 75,000,000 who can do something, everyday, everywhere!))
My apologies to Alaska and Hawaii…You are states in good standing; and apologies to Mexico and Canada, countries in good standing as well!
I avoid predicting outcomes of events such as elections, so my last post was the day before the election in Wisconsin. Anyone who is interested knows all about how that election is being spun: how much money was spent; the power actors, on and on and on.
The long and short of it is that the election was decided by individual voters for all of the many reasons they had to vote as they did. Like me, every single citizen is the critical vote in every election in our still-democracy.
Saturday, April 5, will likely be a major beginning point for a continuing program of advocacy in the United States. This is being organized by a group called Hands Off, and at the website is a link that identifies events in your area. Check it out.
Strategies: Much of my work career was involved in the imperfect practice of the art of organizing people in Union settings. Many years ago I sketched a couple of symbols about the dilemmas and potential of organizing. The original sketch is here:
In my opinion, people tend to collect in groups of diverse sizes and purposes, and generally somebody becomes a leader. These groups might be autonomous but ultimately they tend towards larger coalitions. You can simply look at the groups with which you personally interact, and how they are led and with whom they have common cause. This could be a church, or a club, almost anything. Most of the people are at the base. Without care a leader, even with the best of intentions, will become separated from the group he’s leading, symbolized by the cloud bank. He or she may has started with the best of motives, but time brings changes. He or she tends to find common cause with other leaders. They are, as my illustration suggests, above the clouds. The base is down there, to be manipulated.
Over the years working with organizations small and not so small, I noticed that leaders in various ways became bottlenecks, interfering with inputs to and outputs from their base. They had more information, but controlled what they shared.
in the contemporary political world, the leaders and the managers of communication control what their base has access to. The base, for instance, does not decide what the 6:00 TV news will contain. That is decided by the producers who in turn, in our society, depend on advertisers, who are attracted by potential customers. “Informing” is not the primary purpose of this model, in my opinion.
I think we see this every day in most every political act. As I have said on numerous occasions, we, the people, are the “politics” we despise. Only we can be the solution. And apparently in Wisconsin on Tuesday of this week we saw an example of this.
The two elections earlier this week demonstrate that the body politic has considerable power if it so chooses. We – each of us – are in the drivers seat, but only if we so choose. The future is ours to make – not anyone else’s responsibility, rather our own, in the endless ways we can do this. Let’s go to work.
Tesla in Woodbury April 1, 2025
A FINAL THOUGHT: Strictly by chance I happened to park behind a Tesla earlier this week. Nice car….
As I mentioned in an earlier post, customers for Tesla’s as for any automobiles are no different than the rest of us. In the case of Tesla, the Uber-wealthy sullied the reputation of his own claim to fame and incredible monetary wealth. The car itself doesn’t deserve a bad reputation, but the brand is badly damaged. We need to keep that in mind. There are, after all, people like ourselves who built, sell, and maintain items like this vehicle, and they are part of our greater economy as well.
Some personal comments on Politics generally here.
COMMENTS (also at end of post):
from Fred:
from Dick, afternoon April 5: I drove over to the State Capitol area in St. Paul late Saturday morning. The crowd was incredible and orderly with lots of signs. Parking was an impossibility. I managed to drive around the Capitol area before I headed home. I would suspect the same report comes from other places as well. The “proof of the pudding” will be the long term. A large percentage of people engaged is less necessary than sustained effort – doing something every day wherever one lives.
from James: When I read this (link in 4th para below) today, I immediately thought of some of our more recent conversations, both in person and on line. So I thought I’d share it with you.
I don’t think I’ve told you (because I make a point of not telling anyone) who I voted for for President in the last three cycles. Largely because, from my perspective, there is MUCH more information value in communicating HOW DIFFICULT a decision I regarded it to be each time. I think partisans on both sides (or at least the extremes of both sides) quit listening – and surely quit truly hearing – the instant you tell them who you ultimately voted for (either way!) You know how much I read politics, and talk politics, and work campaigns, and so does almost everyone else I interact with, so there is “information value” in telling people that I (literally!) decided which candidate to vote for on my way into the polling place each time. I try to avoid allowing anyone to conclude that I was all-in with Hillary-Biden-Harris or all-in with Trump, because… well… I WASN’T, and the way to get EITHER party to change – at all – is to help partisans understand that there are still “Persuadables” and it is NOT just “all about turning out the base”. So the farthest I will go is to say that I have voted for at least one Republican and at least one Independent for a major public office… somewhere in the span of 1976-2024…! But I will tell anyone about decisions I thought were “tough” (From an earlier time, the jumbled ideologies of the Skip-Ventura-Coleman Governor’s race come immediately to mind…)
There have been other opinion pieces that try to put into words my own sense that, while I still maintain roughly 90-95% of the core values and beliefs I held at any point from, say, 1980 to 2012, the Progressive Movement and the Democratic Party have changed to a great extent – and, with the arrival/triumph of Trump and “MAGA”, so have the Republicans. (I was never one of those Dems who agreed with 100% of the party’s majority positions – but back then, 70 or 80% was good enough, and we didn’t try to kick anybody out over being on the “wrong” side of one or two or even several. As a Catholic, I’m sure you can remember anti-abortion Dems, and there are lots of other examples… until only the last 10 years or so, when we started to insist on “purity”. The harsh criticism that Gavin Newsome just took from leftists for saying out loud what 80% of all Americans, and 60% of all Dems, believe about the unfairness of biological men competing against women in sports astounds me…) This piece, though, does the best job I’ve seen so far in capturing what I and a lot of other folks have sensed/felt/experienced/realized about the shifts in the parties of the last 10-15 years.
[I include the link provided by Jim to a column by a “MAGA Lefty” but note that it is pay-walled and long and (in my opinion) doesn’t add much to the conversation, and it is simply another opinion among the millions out there. I have read it.]
I am not a “MAGA anything”. I still regard myself as a Pragmatic Progressive – but I have to concede her point that when I say “progressive”, I mean something very different from what those who are all-in with “The Movement” mean today. She sums up my issues with the progressive movement’s last 10-15 years exceptionally well – I think the fact that she and I each have such difficulty expressing out current political “identities” in simple terms, and, in fact, express them very differently from each other – speaks to how bizarre the political moment in which we’re living truly is.
On a related note, I recently read a piece on Cesar Chavez (who I heard speak in Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza – with Gov. Jerry Brown! – and with music by Donovan! …back when I was in grad school) That piece was written entirely to remind readers that Chavez had been – entirely – an ECONOMIC liberal/progressive, and, today, would be on the non-Progressive side of almost every SOCIAL issue – but especially everything having to do with the border, with “identity”, and with equity-over-equality. Sometimes I almost get convinced that contemporary Progressive extremists might NOT be “gaslighting” me, so it’s good every now and then to read a piece like that or a piece like the one I’ve linked to above, to remind me that my memory is still good and my ethical/moral/policy instincts are, at the least, no less pure than they ever were. There really WAS a time when the Democratic Party and liberal mainstream values were the ones I still hold.
response from Dick: Jim and I are good friends and have good conversations.