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I grew up in Wisconsin - and attended its state university for two degrees - and was so deeply involved in its politics to have been elected a Republican committeeman there when I was 18 years old. My family has been there so long that some of my relatives held office in Milwaukee in the Nineteenth Century. When I grew up in Wisconsin, it was a state with a proud tradition of open government, honesty, integrity, and a strain of progressive legislation that inspired the rest of the country. (Worker's Compensation laws, comparative negligence in tort law, and unemployment compensation all started there along with many other innovations that are commonplace throughout the country today.) Fightin' Bob LaFollette, and all that. And it's a state that produced - and survived Fightin' Joe McCarthy, too. Significant chunks of the people who founded and ran the John Birch Society came from Wisconsin, too.
It saddens me beyond belief to see what Wisconsin has become during the past two years - Governor Walker has ripped this state in half as though with a butcher knife and it will bleed profusely for a long time to come. It historical legacy as a laboratory for the idealistic exploration of new public policy to better serve society is already gone. It has become a place of political brutality, the battleground of a war paid for by the infusion of tens of millions of dollars from outside the state, and its people have become pawns in a battle being stage-managed in corporate board rooms across the country.
What troubles me more is that people I knew and grew up with, in what seems to me to be another lifetime ago in the Young Republicans, are at the center of this self-destruction. I distanced myself from them long ago, sensing something about them even then that troubled me, a certain meanness and recklessness and eventually I stopped being a Republican at all. It now embarrasses me that I was ever part of that.
This election has resolved nothing; it has made the rupture a semi-permanent feature of the Wisconsin landscape just as much as the ruins and residue of World War II bombing survived in European cities for decades after the war. The good people of my home state will some day begin to pick up the rubble and rebuild. But before that happens, the war must come to an end, and I see no signs of that taking place for a very long time. If you have a religious bent, pray for Wisconsin, because even harder times and harsher treatment of workers there seems quite inevitable from yesterday's result.
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Extremism in the defense of Liberty is no vice. . . Restraint in the pursuit of Justice is no virtue.
Senator Barry Goldwater, 1964
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