AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. We are “Breaking with Convention: War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman We’re broadcasting from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for this five days of the Republican National Convention. We will bring you the voices of people from the streets to the convention floor.

We turn now to The Fall of Wisconsin. That’s the name of a remarkable 2018 book by journalist Dan Kaufman that looks at how Wisconsin went from being a progressive bastion to becoming a laboratory for national conservatives. As the Republican national Convention opens today, Dan joins us now in our Milwaukee studio.

Dan, thanks so much for being with us. One of the people who’s going to be speaking tonight is Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters. Can you give us a history of labor activism in this state and how it has changed over the years? He, apparently, asked both the Democratic and Republican national conventions if he can address them. The Republicans said yes.

DAN KAUFMAN: Yeah, it’s very interesting that he’s appearing tonight, and it does dovetail with a lot of what happened in Wisconsin both recently, in the last — since 2011, but the earlier history.

And to go back a little bit, Wisconsin had a very pioneering progressive tradition. This was rooted in a movement in the turn of the 20th century. A famous progressive senator named Bob La Follette, “Fighting” Bob La Follette, kind of galvanized the state’s progressives. And there was a parallel movement in Milwaukee called sewer socialism. These were sort of a pragmatic, social democratic, European-style socialist party rooted in the city’s enormous working-class population. And together, they kind of pioneered some really remarkable progressive reforms, including the first workmen’s compensation law in the state. The state was the first to recognize collective bargaining rights for public employees. And largely, this was a bipartisan tradition for a long time. A Republican governor expanded collective bargaining rights in the late ’60s.

However, in 2011 — 2010, actually —

AMY GOODMAN: And Milwaukee had three socialist mayors, only major city in the country.

DAN KAUFMAN: Milwaukee had three socialist mayors, including Frank Zeidler, who finished his term in 1960. And they really had a remarkable ability to craft a sort of — I call it kind of an idealistic pragmatism, where they did a lot of really important reforms for their working-class constituents, making life better, including sewers, public libraries, beaches. It has one of the most remarkable park systems in the country.

AMY GOODMAN: And that sewers, I mean, the idea that it was used as a pejorative, in fact, it was something that socialists were very proud of, that they cleaned up after the Industrial Revolution.

DAN KAUFMAN: Absolutely. There was a lot of diseases that were passing through, and this made the city a lot safer. And, you know, the entire New Deal was really modeled on a lot of Wisconsin and Bob La Follette’s 1924 independent presidential campaign. The state had the first unemployment insurance program. And Social Security was crafted by a Wisconsinite. Medicare was crafted by a Wisconsinite. All of these people were steeped in this tradition. And then in —

AMY GOODMAN: And by the way, isn’t Bob La Follette’s statue, his bust, in Statuary Hall?

DAN KAUFMAN: Absolutely, absolutely. It’s in Washington. And also there’s a famous one in the Wisconsin state Capitol. And famously, every Wisconsin governor, until Scott Walker, would have their inauguration in front of that statue. And he deliberately chose not to. And that was interesting, because immediately after his inauguration, he launched a surprise attack, probably the greatest attack on labor since President Ronald Reagan’s breaking of the air traffic controllers’ union. It was called — it was a law that became called Act 10, and it basically destroyed the collective bargaining rights of public employees.

And it was also the first spark of a kind of nascent progressive revival in this country. There were protests that had more than 100,000 people at the Capitol. And Occupy Wall Street came right on the heels of that, and they kind of acknowledged that Wisconsin had sort of led the way. There had never been a labor uprising like that in 40 or 50 years.

So, there’s been these two strands kind of battling. And four years after Act 10 passed, Walker passed a right-to-work law. And he had famously promised the private sector unions — the building trades were very supportive of him — that he would not do this. Privately, he told one of his most important donors that we were going to use divide and conquer to split the labor movement between private and public sector workers.

Now, to get to your question, Amy, Sean O’Brien, I think, is reflective of this tradition, that’s been going on for a long time in the Republican Party, to try to cleave off a portion of the working class, the labor movement. And he’s going to be speaking tonight. And he’s met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. And this tradition goes back to Richard Nixon and the hard hats, trying to divide the labor movement against itself. And I think it’s very interesting. And Trump, of course, has made inroads with working-class voters. And I think that’s partly a reflection of the deep distress, economic distress, in places like Milwaukee, with this deep deindustrialization, that goes back to the Reagan recession, and then NAFTA, the China deal. And there is a lot of discontent in a place like Wisconsin, both in economic discontent, both in Milwaukee and other deindustrialized places, and also in the rural communities, where farms have been kind of vanished because of the monopolization of agriculture.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted you to talk about Wisconsin and how seminal it was in Trump’s first victory, and what happened, as you talk about the changing nature of the state. Scott Walker, who started at Marquette, right here —

DAN KAUFMAN: Right, right.

AMY GOODMAN: — in Milwaukee, didn’t end up graduating, but —

DAN KAUFMAN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — also led the anti-abortion movement —

DAN KAUFMAN: Right, right.

AMY GOODMAN: — headed up an anti-abortion organization there. You write in your book, in The Fall of Wisconsin, Trump won by flipping Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and how Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign — I mean, she never once stepped foot in Wisconsin. They were so sure that they were going to win, because Democratic presidents had won before here. Talk about what changed. I think — didn’t Trump hold a rally here midnight, night before the election?

DAN KAUFMAN: He held many rallies here. I don’t recall the midnight before. It’s possible. He was all over the state holding huge rallies. And, yes, the Clinton campaign was the first campaign since Richard Nixon in 1972 not — of either party, to not campaign in Wisconsin during the general election. There was a tremendous amount of taking it for granted.

And I think what you had was an enormously disaffected and angry electorate. Again, this economic malaise that had been building for decades through deindustrialization, the collapse of rural economies, had led people into a kind of hopelessness.

You have to remember, eight years prior, the state had voted for Barack Obama by 14 points. And that campaign, he really ran as an economic populist. He criticized NAFTA. He also was critical of the Department of Agriculture. He called it the “Department of Agribusiness.” So, he was really campaigning on an old-school, kind of Midwestern populist campaign. In Wisconsin, he won by 14 points. He won Iowa by 10 points. And then, nothing really happened.

I think there was tremendous support for the 2016 Sanders campaign. And when that was defeated, the energy just vanished, and a lot of it went to Donald Trump. He won narrowly, but I think it was remarkable that Clinton didn’t once set foot once here. And I think that sense, it was both a really meaningful, practical thing, but it was also a metaphor for the abandonment of states like Wisconsin.

AMY GOODMAN: You talk about Wisconsin as a lab for progressive politics, but also for conservative politics. Can you talk about Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race? Wasn’t it the most expensive Supreme Court race in U.S. history, around the role in gerrymandering, voting rights, abortion access, how it, well, led to Wisconsin’s abortion ban?

DAN KAUFMAN: Right. Well, the court had been controlled by conservatives until last year, 4 to 3. It was the most expensive race in American history, $40 million, which I think gives you a sense of the importance to both sides. You know, Wisconsin only very narrowly — one conservative judge ruled not to throw out several hundred ballots during the 2020 election. So, election issues were tremendously important. And if that judge had not, the state could have been thrown into chaos, and the whole election result could have been thrown into chaos.

But the court consistently, from Walker’s election, had supported this radical agenda for the state. And now it’s flipped, 4 to 3, and you’ve seen a lot of rulings. The abortion ban was struck down. And they have allowed dropboxes in this current election. They even struck down — a Dane County judge has struck down portions of Act 10.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain who won. Who won?

DAN KAUFMAN: Well, who won is a woman named Janet Protasiewicz. She was running — it’s a nonpartisan race, but she was clearly running as a liberal.

AMY GOODMAN: She had an ad that just simply said, “This is how you say my name.”

DAN KAUFMAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. She is, yeah, a kind of — she was Polish American from South Milwaukee. And they’ve gotten rid of the gerrymandering. There’s now fair maps. And so, the control — the Republican Legislature had a — virtually was impervious to elections, and that allowed them to continue to just control the state and really implement a very radical agenda. Walker himself boasted that “If we can do it here, we can do it anywhere.” So, in terms of becoming a national laboratory, it became an important symbol for the transformation of Republican politics.

AMY GOODMAN: You write in your chapter, “Which shall rule, wealth or man?” that the cost of the conservative war in Wisconsin’s political legacy is borne by the state’s citizens. Since 2011, Wisconsin has experienced a dramatic increase in child poverty rates, nonexistent wage growth, steep cuts to K-through-12 public schools and the state university system, and a significant decline in water quality. I mean, overall, you have the UW, the University of Wisconsin, system, one of the finest research universities in the country, has dropped down in those ratings.

DAN KAUFMAN: Totally.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk more about how the people have borne the brunt.

DAN KAUFMAN: Yeah, well, just briefly, that university system was a legacy of that La Follette tradition. There was tremendous public investment in the state. And Walker and his Republican allies had tremendous dislike for any aspect of the public sector. These people were steeped in Milton Friedman. Paul Ryan, the famous congressman from Janesville, was an acolyte of Ayn Rand. That was his favorite book, was The Fountainhead. And there was a tremendous war on the public sector, that included Act 10.

And I think the legacy of that, although it has changed to a degree — you have a Democratic governor, Tony Evers, now — but has been a diminishment of daily life for a lot of ordinary citizens, in terms of there’s been large CAFOs that have diminished the water quality. Voting rights have been attacked. All of these bedrock principles have been undermined.

AMY GOODMAN: In this last minute that we have, in this first day of the Republican convention, you lay out in your book the vast infrastructure of conservative political organizations. Can you talk, in particular, how they connect to Project 2025, the conservative infrastructure of Heritage Foundation, founded by Paul Weyrich, how it links to Wisconsin, who also founded — key in founding ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council?

DAN KAUFMAN: Right. Well, Paul Weyrich is a seminal figure in building this right-wing infrastructure. The Heritage Foundation was one example. That was supposed to work on national politics. And the American Legislative Exchange Council was focused on state politics. They would introduce model bills that were disseminated in states across the country.

AMY GOODMAN: That were written by lobbyists.

DAN KAUFMAN: Written by lobbyists, corporate lobbyists, and then just modified slightly to appeal to whatever it was. So, a lot of legislation that was passed here during the past 14 years had no origin in the state, and it was written by these dark money lobbyists at these conventions, passed around, and that’s how it worked. And the Heritage was a bigger-picture one, working on the federal government. And there was a vast infrastructure built up in the early ’70s, and Weyrich was a key linchpin of that. And he was actually a Wisconsinite.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you so much for being with us, Dan Kaufman, Wisconsin native, author of The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics. He’s also a contributing writer at The New Yorker magazine.

That does it for our show. Democracy Now! is currently accepting applications for a director of development to lead our fundraising team at Democracy Now! Learn more and apply at democracynow.org.

Democracy Now! is — we work together as a remarkable team, produced with Mike Burke, Renée Feltz, Deena Guzder, Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Messiah Rhodes, Nermeen Shaikh, María Taracena, Tami Woronoff, Charina Nadura, Sam Alcoff, Tey-Marie Astudillo, John Hamilton, Robby Karran, Hany Massoud, Hana Elias, Denis Moynihan. Our executive director, Julie Crosby. Special thanks to Becca Staley, Jon Randolph, Paul Powell, Mike Di Filippo, Miguel Nogueira. I’m Amy Goodman. We’re broadcasting from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.