Let’s Stop Losing

With the looming Trump Presidency that starts tomorrow, I am thinking, in part, about the people he has nominated for his cabinet. People who oppose the values and purpose of the departments they are charged with overseeing.

Including the person who has dedicated her life to privatizing education, now picked to oversee the nation’s public schools.

And the person who, when running for president in 2012, vowed to eliminate the Department of Energy (though he could not remember the name of it) is now nominated to head… the Department of Energy.

And the Attorney General of Oklahoma, who has made a name for himself with the oil and gas industry for fighting on their behalf by suing the Environmental Protection Agency nearly nonstop. Well, now he’s the nominee to oversee that agency that he has made a career opposing.

But those who are more troubling than the legion of Trumpettes — the chosen ones appointed #draintheswamp — are the opposition. The quote that I can’t get out of my head since it became clear that Trump had won enough electoral votes to become the 45th President of the United States is from the fictitious character Will McAvoy in the (short-lived) HBO show Newsroom:

“If liberals are so fucking smart, how come they lose so goddamn always?”

In brief, I hope to use this medium to try to answer that question. Case studies will mostly come from the greatest state in the US: Wisconsin. As has become increasingly clear, especially with the 2016 election, Wisconsin’s politics and electoral preferences are varied and complicated.

We have a history of supporting progressive Governors and Senators like “Fighting” Bob LaFollette and Gaylord Nelson, while also being the state that brought Joseph McCarthy to fame. Oddly enough, during the McCarthy era, Wisconsin’s largest city, Milwaukee, had elected and re-elected a socialist mayor.

Wisconsin’s politics have almost always been politics of contradiction. Progressivism and McCarthyism. Socialism in the county that empowered Scott Walker. A major city that’s among the most segregated in the country but has only elected liberals and socialists for the last hundred+ years. A publicly-owned NFL team in a right-to-work state.

It is that contradiction, however, that gives me hope. Someone I admire very much once told me “live in a way that doesn’t make a mockery of your values.” During this time that our values of education, environmental protection, and democracy are being made a mockery of, we will stand up for those values. That’s why we will be fighting. And that’s why I’m writing.

I’m not sure how often I’ll be writing these (maybe weekly?!), but I hope to use this as a platform to lay out how we can live in a way that doesn’t make a mockery of our values and start winning elections.

Oh, and listen to Bruce Springsteen. Always.