Real and Present Danger
This post was originally published on December 13, 2021
Vol. 14
In this Issue: Essay |Read Local | The Big Picture | Now Read This | Nature! | Final Frame
I’ve said or written the phrase “I’m angry, but not surprised” hundreds of times in the last year alone. I’m sure I’m not alone. I understand more and more each day that what’s happening now is not unprecedented, that abuses have been heaped on people less privileged than me and mine for a long, long time. But I refuse to give up my anger about it. I need that anger to drive me to act. I need to harness and shape it to help me do something to push back on the outrages and attacks on everything and everyone I hold dear.
Today, I’m thinking about the recent decision by the Wisconsin State Supreme Court’s far-right majority to take a “least change” approach to our gerrymandered maps.
After all, this is part of a long-term campaign by Republicans and other extremists to permanently rig the system in their favor--to dismantle our (albeit imperfect) democracy and turn it into a white supremacist, fascist state. Think that’s hyperbole? There’s a mountain of evidence to support the idea. Wisconsin has consistently been a proving ground for that movement. What happens here tends to show up nationally a short time later. A hundred years ago that took the form of progressive reforms. These days, it’s the exact opposite.
Taking a “least change” approach to already heavily gerrymandered maps means being stuck with our undemocratic representation--i.e. a Republican Party currently hell-bent on an agenda that the majority of Wisconsinites don’t support: restricting voting access, overtturning democratic elections, undoing civil rights, and helping force the country into a white-Christian-corporatocracy.
Essentially, the State Supreme Court’s argument is that, “if you want to change the maps, you should elect different representatives, but also good luck with that, since the current maps make it impossible to do so.” It’s a big FU to everyone who believes in fairness and democracy.
(For more background on Wisconsin’s gerrymandered maps and how we got here, check out WPR’s excellent “Mapped Out” podcast)
Experts agree that Wisconsin’s maps are unfair. At this point, it’s well-documented. The majority’s ruling is a clear sign of the successful partisan takeover of the court. It's even more alarming in light of the ongoing, nationwide effort by Trump and his acolytes to completely subvert elections oversight in order to force whatever results they want in future contests.
This, too, is no longer hyperbole. Barton Gellman, writing for The Atlantic, lays out an excellent, exhaustive, and deeply troubling overview of the dangerous situation we now find ourselves in as a country in “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun.” In it, he cites interviews with numerous January 6 insurrectionists and supporters, in-depth research and polling, as well as the historical timeline itself to paint a picture of a democracy on the brink of collapse, thanks to years of concerted, pre-meditated attacks by rightwing idealogues and opportunitists.
Importantly, research Gellman highlights shows that the vast majority of the people who participated in the attack on our Capitol were not motivated by “economic anxiety,” as has been so often touted in the media. Rather, they represent a relatively affluent middle-class group of people fearful of demographic change--in other words, white folks terrified of losing their majoritarian status and rule:
“Pape’s team mapped the insurgents by home county and ran statistical analyses looking for patterns that might help explain their behavior. The findings were counterintuitive. Counties won by Trump in the 2020 election were less likely than counties won by Biden to send an insurrectionist to the Capitol. The higher Trump’s share of votes in a county, in fact, the lower the probability that insurgents lived there. Why would that be? Likewise, the more rural the county, the fewer the insurgents. The researchers tried a hypothesis: Insurgents might be more likely to come from counties where white household income was dropping. Not so. Household income made no difference at all.
“Only one meaningful correlation emerged. Other things being equal, insurgents were much more likely to come from a county where the white share of the population was in decline.”
We’ve seen this type of backlash and regression before in the United States. Every time people of color or other marginalized groups begin to make real progress--legislatively, economically, socially--there is an outsized response to subvert that progress. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the initial gains of Reconstruction (which benefitted poor white folks in the South as much as anyone) were almost completely dismantled within a few decades, ushering in the era of Black Codes, Jim Crow, lynchings, and a penal system designed to essentially re-enslave Black people.
Toward the end of World War I, when Black veterans began returning from their service and many Black people had moved into jobs left open by white men who went off to war, lynchings and mob attacks by white people against Black people and communities spiked.
Again, in the wake of the Civil Rights era of the mid-’60s, white people resorted to violence but also increasingly to only slightly more subtle tactics of re-segregation and discrimination via the private school movement, the “wars” on drugs and crime, and so on.
Reproductive justice (also now before the Supreme Court and looking dire), LGBTQ rights, and other progressive gains of the past century are also in the crosshairs. The right has successfully packed many courts--from top to bottom--with its partisan ideologues who will help the cause. Now they’re so emboldened that they’re taking aim at our elections--no longer content to argue with individual decisions and intent instead on taking over the system itself--attempting to pass laws that would turn elections over to partisan bodies that could, if they wanted, overturn the results of elections with which they disagreed.
Right here in Wisconsin, this is being tried in a two-pronged approach: the first is to discredit and presumably dismantle the Republican-created Wisconsin Elections Commission in favor of installing a hand-picked partisan body to oversee the process, and the second is to bypass Gov. Evers’ veto and pass laws to severely restrict voting access.
Well along their delusional but dangerous journey, the GOP-controlled Assembly’s Committee on Campaigns and Elecitons last week held a farce of a hearing on alleged “Election Abuses.” At the hearing, they 1) did not invite anyone from the Wisconsin Elections Commission or anyone else familiar with Wisconsin election procedure or law, and 2) did invite testimony from attorney Erick Kaardal, notable for having been referred for possible sanctions by a federal judge for his role in a lawsuit attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The other “expert” invited to testify was Doug Frank, a member of the My Pillow Guy Extended Universe who has been making the rounds to lob unsubstantiated claims of election fraud in various places, all without a seeming shred of knowledge of how voting and elections work.
The hearing was filled with gross ignorance and wild accusations, all of which could have been instantly cleared up and debunked by simply having done some very basic, very easy research beforehand or, you know, inviting actual elections officials to testify.
I won’t dig into the mind-numbing details of the hearing, though (you can get the jist of it from this Twitter thread by a real life election official), save to say that there was absolutely no good reason for it to have happened in the first place. This is all theater intended to further rile up the GOP’s fear-stricken base and help pave the way toward their ultimate goal: taking over elections and all duties of state government, separation of powers be damned.
All of which is to say that we are in a very precarious place as a state and a nation. We can’t afford to downplay, write-off, or sleep on any of what’s happening. We need to hold our leaders’ feet to the fire. We need to hold the media accountable for their coverage. We need to support grassroots efforts to empower and embolden more people to take positive action.
It’s exhausting and overwhelming, but we must refuse to give in. No matter how many times we hear ourselves saying, “What the actual fuck?!”
Read Local
The Big Picture.
“Grapefruit Is One of the Weirdest Fruits on the Planet” [Dan Nosowitz for Atlas Obscura]
A fascinating history of grapefruit and an important warning about its serious impact on many prescription drugs you might be taking!
“Behind the Founding Foodie, a French-Trained Chef Bound by Slavery” [NPR]
Meet James Hemmings, a French-trained chef enslaved by Thomas Jefferson.
“Loving Your Job Is A Capitalist Trap” [Erin A. Cech for The Atlantic]
“Working for pay can be tedious, disappointing, even crushing, and having meaningful work is one way to make the hours pass more pleasurably. But the solution to those challenges should not necessarily be to position work as a centerpiece of our identity. By understanding the traps of passion, we can be better equipped to envision alternatives to it. Follow your passion if you must, but also find places outside of work to anchor your sense of self.”
Now Read This
“Everywhere, America” [Lyz Lenz/Men Yell At Me]
“History is a series of revelations. Stories our children learn about things we couldn’t admit to ourselves.”
“What Really Happened to Malaysia’s Missing Airplane” [William Langewiesche for The Atlantic]
Incredible investigative writing about a tragic and enduring modern mystery.
“We Eat at the Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever” [Everywhereist]
This blistering review of a truly terrible-sounding restaurant in Italy has rightly gone viral. It also elicited the most hilariously on-brand response from one of the head chefs and owners. Worth your time!
Nature!
I love how many just-barely-hidden parks and trails you can find in and around Madison. For all this city's complexities and faults, one of the things we do really well is making sure people have access to green space.
One of those sorta hidden gems is Quarry Park (3102 Stevens St.) on the city's west side. Tucked away in the Rocky Bluff Neighborhood just off University Ave., it features a small but mighty network of walking, hiking, and mountain bike trails - all of which is dog-friendly. There's even a pump track! On a recent visit, I was amazed to discover a giant arch made of branches that straddled the path at one point.
Final Frame.
‘Til next time.
Thanks for reading! Hit me up with questions, comments, suggestions, and tips on great hiking spots.