If polls are correct, the recall election that opponents hoped would rid the State Of Wisconsin from its present governor, Scott Walker, will end leaving Walker in office. Many analysts attribute Walker’s apparent success in overcoming this recall effort to the Big M — money. Millions of dollars have poured into Wisconsin from right-wing billionaires, money Walker has used to gain an advantage. He outspent recall advocates more than 10-1 before his recall opponent was even nominated and legally able to raise his own recall funding.
It’s pretty clear to me, however, that money isn’t the only Big M explanation for Walker’s apparent current lead in the polls. Perhaps not even the most important one. The more important M Factor at work here is Mean-spiritedness.
Why have so many people in Wisconsin bought into the Walker way of political thinking? Why have public service unions proven such a popular target? Are members of the public service unions Walker has been bashing so successfully wallowing in luxury at the public’s expense?
Of course not. These union members have simply enjoyed, through the process of collective bargaining, a traditional American standard of living no longer accessible to so many others.
A growing number of these others in Wisconsin have lost many of the rights and perks that make up our traditional standard of living. The job security. Wages that grow faster than inflation every year. Benefits like health insurance paid for by employers.
The Walker mean-spirited pitch? These union people are getting something you don’t have. I won’t make your own lives better, but you’ll at least feel better if state employers can be brought down, that the unions protecting rights and perks you no longer have protected can be undermined.
Similar billionaire underwritten mean-spirited politics is at work in other realms like with food stamps and Medicaid. Why should others get free food when you work so hard to buy food for your your own family, just because these others are so poor? Why should others get free health care with Medicaid when your own health care costs are so high, just because these others are so poor?
You can govern in difficult times by bringing people together, by appealing to their better angels. Or you can take the 50-percent-plus-1 approach to governance, turn a tad more than half the voters into a nasty-minded mini-majority conned into identifying their own interests with those of their financial betters, while also turning them hostile towards anyone less well-off than themselves.
A line from a famous poem by W.H. Auden runs: “We must love one another or die.” The State of Wisconsin has died a little since Scott Walker took office. The cruel mean-spiritedness of many Republic Party nostrums these days is driving the whole country further and further away from communion with our better angels.