Divide and Conquer in Wisconsin and Beyond

The post mortems on the disastrous recall defeat in Wisconsin have begun and many of them rightly focus on factors such as the role of money, the failure of Democrats and labor unions to get their message out, and the flawed strategy of channeling activist energy solely into electoral politics.  But I want to focus on a more fundamental problem, one that preceded Governor Scott Walker’s first election and the historic protests, and that extends beyond Wisconsin.  That problem is exemplified by this story from a Charles Pierce article in Esquire magazine.  Pierce was reporting on Monday night campaign rallies prior to Tuesday’s election.

Out in the parking lot, I fell into conversation with Phil Waseleski, who was wearing a T-shirt celebrating the U.S. Postal Service that was festooned with Scott Walker buttons. Phil was a letter carrier in the neighborhoods around the Serb Hall for nearly 40 years, but he retired last year when his days were cut back to three a week as part of the fiscal crisis forced upon the USPS by Republican legislators who would like to see it go away entirely.

“A friend once told me, ‘Well, we only need mail three or four days a week,'” Phil told me. “I politely told him, ‘Dave, we’re gonna have to agree to disagree.’ I could have told him, ‘Dave, you know, maybe at that engineering place where you work, they only need you three days a week, and then you could come help us.’

“The politicians, I think, it’s a tough call, because if you don’t keep the postal service in business — you and I will both agree that there’s nothing more personal than taking pen in hand to write to your mother, sister, or brother. Until June of last year, I gave my heart and soul to my job. I worked right through lunch most days.”

Eventually, I asked him why he was here, at the Serb Hall, supporting Scott Walker, whose politics were far more in tune with the people who are trying to strangle the postal service than they are with the people who still work there. Phil told me that it was about his sister-in-law. “The problem is that, when you start handing out free health care out to teachers, that annoys me to no end,” he said. “I never got free health care. My brother’s wife is a teacher and I once asked her, when I was getting my teeth worked on, what it cost her and she said, ‘Nothing.’ It should never get to that point where somebody’s getting free health care. Something’s way out of whack there.”

This story resonated with me because I can tell so many similar ones.  They’re stories of envy and resentment successfully exploited by a strategy of divide and conquer – a strategy that Walker explicitly told his wealthy funders during his first gubernatorial campaign he planned to use.  It’s a story of otherwise intelligent people ignoring some facts and choosing to take out their frustrations not on the distant elites that created the economic problems they’re experiencing, but rather on those near to them, neighbors, relatives, and friends.

In this story, Phil, whose work schedule was cut due to a fiscal “crisis” at the USPS concocted by those who would destroy it, doesn’t empathize with state workers who, before Walker’s first election, were also forced to take furlough days for two years running to help remedy state fiscal problems brought on in large part by our national economic crisis.  Instead, he focuses on his sister-in-law teacher who supposedly receives “free” health care.  Phil surely knows that her health care is not “free.”  But undoubtedly she has good health insurance benefits.

Years ago, when I was a state worker, I had major surgery and never saw a hospital bill.  I was aware – and deeply grateful – that, unlike many Americans, I had great deal on my health insurance.  Our monthly premiums were $240 a month for my husband and myself.  But it certainly wasn’t “free.”

Here’s another story:  A friend of mine who is a Wisconsin state worker told me back during the protests in 2011 that her neighbor, with whom she’d previously had good relations, had informed her that he sided with the governor.  State workers were draining the taxpayers and the cuts to their pension and health care benefits were justified.  The protests were just spoiled Madisonians throwing a tantrum.

My friend was bewildered.  “I never begrudged him all the money he made during the housing bubble,” she said. “I thought, ‘Good for you!’”  Her neighbor is a plumber who made money hand over fist during the go-go days of the latest housing boom.  After the crash, however, work has been scarce.  Does he blame the banking industry and Wall Street – the folks who engineered the whole thing, got rich at our expense, and tanked the economy?  No, he thinks his neighbor deserves a pay cut.  “I’ll never make the kind of money he [the plumber] made,” my friend told me.  “But I was okay with that.  I needed a steady job and good health care benefits for my family.”

The problem is deeply entrenched, extends beyond Wisconsin, and includes people who are not stereotypical right-wingers.  For example, when the protests were going on, I had long conversations with an out-of-state relative, a college-educated woman who generally votes Democratic.  She sided with Walker and even invoked his rhetoric, calling state workers the “haves” and taxpayers the “have nots” – as if state workers are not also taxpayers.  (This framing had also been adopted in her state and a number of other states.  Clearly it was a national strategy of the Republicans.)

I explained about the furlough days; I pointed out that the state fiscal bureau had projected we would finish the year in the black – before Walker took office and gave over $100 million in tax breaks to corporate and other interests. I explained that the “crisis” was, in part, manufactured by Walker to justify his agenda and that it wasn’t that big of a “crisis” anyway.  We’d faced bigger deficits and come out of them without this kind of drastic action. I argued that this was about larger issues, about union-busting, making ordinary workers pay for the economic problems created by elites, and a privatization agenda.  I invoked Pulitzer Prize-winning financial writer David Cay Johnston to explain that state workers weren’t getting “free” health insurance and pension benefits.  These were instead part of a total compensation package, where negotiated wages were divided among current and deferred income and benefits.  Walker had framed the issue as making state workers pay a little something toward the “free” benefits they were receiving.

None of this seemed to penetrate her skull.  Her 401k had taken a beating due to the economy; why shouldn’t state workers also take a hit in their pensions?  She was paying through the nose for health insurance; why should state workers get a better deal?  We can’t afford these generous benefits now, she said.  Beginning teachers where she lived received better compensation than she did when she was starting out as an accountant.  Ergo, teachers are overpaid.

Divide and conquer is a successful tactic because it taps into basic human emotions – negative ones, to be sure, but very common human weaknesses, like envy and resentment.  In yesterday’s Counterpunch article, Steve Horn argues that working class people succumb to right-wing populism because “the Left” – by which he means unions and the Democratic party – have abandoned them.  There is some truth to that, but it wasn’t just working class or uneducated people who bought into the “haves” and “have nots” framing.  And the people they turned against weren’t only generalized institutions like unions and the Democratic party.  They were specific people – their own neighbors, friends, and relatives.

Another reason divide and conquer is so successful in the United States is because we have for decades been propagandized into an extreme individualist ethos.  As a result, the ability of many Americans to understand where their collective interests lie is deeply impaired.  They are vulnerable to strategies that persuade them to ally themselves with powerful elites rather than other workers.

So what is the solution?  How do we overcome the susceptibility of human beings to the divide and conquer strategy?  The tendency to fight among ourselves for scraps while ignoring the elites pulling the strings?

I don’t pretend to know the answers.  I have only one suggestion and a story of hope.  My suggestion is to keep talking to one another and to do so with respect.  We can’t wait until important elections come up and emotions are high to have relevant conversations on the issues at hand.  We can’t afford to let off-hand, ill-informed remarks go by.  Somehow we have to find ways to talk – not preach – but engage in dialogue, even if only in short conversations here and there, so that we can begin to understand and bridge our differences.  (That’s my weakness – I tend to preach.  I’ve been practicing asking pertinent questions and listening – it’s a work in progress.)

The dialogue can’t be patronizing.  Noam Chomsky and the late great Joe Bageant are right.  Talking down to and ridiculing Tea Partiers and “low information” voters is not a winning strategy for getting people to understand where their true class interests lie.

My story of hope is from a panel presentation on water rights at the Democracy Convention here in Madison last summer.  Water rights activist Ruth Caplan (chair of the  Defending Water for Life Campaign) made the startling claim that “the most radical work being done in the US today is in rural conservative Republican communities.”  Caplan was discussing the push back against water privatization and the assertion of water rights for both people and nature.

Caplan explained that in Barnstead, New Hampshire, in March of 2006, citizens passed a water rights ordinance declaring that “water is essential for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, both for people and for the ecological systems which give life to all species.”  The ordinance further declared that

all our water is held in the public trust as a common resource to be used for the benefit of Barnstead residents and of the natural eco-systems of which they are a part.  We believe that the corporatization of water supplies in this community… would usurp democratic processes and result in tyranny and that we the people are therefore duty-bound under the New Hampshire constitution to oppose such usurpation and tyranny.

Caplan went on to describe who was leading the charge:

The chair of the select board of Barnstead, New Hampshire, is a Vietnam vet who voted for George Bush.  And he got it.  And when he was told by the lawyer working with them that this would take on settled law of more than 100 years of Supreme Court decisions, you know what he said?  He said, “Well, I understand that.  And I’m ready to walk point for you.”  Walking point means walking ahead and flushing out enemy fire.  That’s walking point.  He understood that they were taking this on.

In the room, I cried. And every time I tell this story, it just touches me so deeply that he understood it in this very, very deep way.  And who did he work with, hand in glove?  A Rastafarian biodynamic gardener.

And that’s why I think that while twittering and blogging and all of these new communication devices are important, it is the person to person that is so important in our organizing.  And I don’t want us to lose sight of that.

Caplan urged us to deal “person to person,” giving the example of another town where similar water rights legislation was passed, and where a key individual who made it happen was a Tea Partier.

So it can be done.  It is being done, in some places on some issues – although I admit haven’t personally experienced it.  I don’t for a minute imagine that it’s easy.  In some cases, it may be impossible.  I’m not talking about Democrat and Republican politicians working “across the aisle.”  I’m talking about finding ways for different segments of the 99% to work through differences, identify common ground, and unify against the class warfare perpetrated against us by the oligarchs and their puppets, the politicians.  For if a large segment of the 99% continues to ally itself, against its own economic interests, with financial elites, we are doomed to continued failure, despite the heroic efforts of people like the Wisconsin activists who worked so hard to defeat the austerity agenda and monied interests.

Katherine Acosta is a freelance writer currently based in Madison, Wisconsin.  She blogs at UndisciplinedPhd.com.