The Broad and Worthy Aim of One Wisconsin Now

I want to draw attention to a new Wisconsin organization called One Wisconsin Now (OWN), which is aimed at serving as a grassroots advocacy group and clearinghouse for progressive ideas in the state.

The group’s website can be found here and its blog – penned by our friend from Eye on Wisconsin, Cory Liebmann – is here.

In the front page article on OWN in the Journal-Sentinel today, one quote in particular jumped out at me. According to conservative activist Mike Theo: “If the public truly isn’t as liberal as these organizations are, they can try ‘til hell freezes over to craft a message... but if the public's not there, they’ll always lose.”

This is wrong on a couple of levels.

On a practical level, Wisconsin is not a conservative state. While the GOP currently controls the state legislature, Dems have a hold on the governor’s mansion, the attorney general’s office, both US Senate seats, and 50% of the House delegation. Plus, no Republican presidential candidate has taken Wisconsin since Reagan defeated Mondale over 20 years ago.

More importantly, though, on a theoretical level the political culture in the US has been anything but stagnate over time. Public perceptions are malleable, and I don’t just mean people’s minds can change on a specific issue or candidate – I mean the way the public perceives society and the world as a whole does change over time.

Historians have long held that the power of language and perception is at least on par with the power of physical force. And since the US is not a military state, language and perception take on even greater significance in our political culture.

In his book The Story of American Freedom, historian Eric Foner discusses the various ways the idea of freedom has been conceptualized and re-conceptualized over time in the US, often – but not always – for explicitly political purposes. As the public perception of the idea of freedom changed, so too did the political culture of the country.

And it’s not just specific stump-speech phrases and words like freedom that change over time – more subtle ideas like fairness also have shifted throughout American history. Alice Kessler-Harris, for instance, wrote an award-winning book called In Pursuit of Equity that discusses this very idea. Kessler-Harris traces how public perception of what was considered “fair” shifted over the course of the twentieth century and subsequently helped to create opportunities for women to participate in what the author terms “economic citizenship.”

All of this is my long-winded way of saying that the purpose of One Wisconsin Now is not to simply convince voters to pull the lever for the Dems, but, more broadly than that, to infuse the public with a vision of the world that is decidedly progressive. In other words, the notion that the public might not be “as liberal as these organizations are,” in the words of Mike Theo, is tangential to the overall task at hand (although, as it happens, a public that consistently votes in favor of Russ Feingold is plenty progressive).

And this is hardly an insidious endeavor – just ask the Republican establishment, which has been chasing this same goal for decades with a host of think tanks and advocacy groups (which have really become one-in-the-same in recent decades) along with a handle on various strands of the media. The goal of the movement wasn’t to necessarily elect a candidate that year, but rather to alter the perception of the public to a view of the world that was decidedly conservative.

Indeed, what better state to lead a similar charge for instilling progressive ideas into the public mindset than Wisconsin.

UPDATE: Xoff has more on the formation of One Wisconsin Now.