Perhaps it’s unsurprising that many in the white working class have been attracted through the years to the divisive political style that former Gov. Scott Walker fostered in Wisconsin and President Donald Trump has supercharged nationally.
The GOP lionizes such voters and casts them as morally superior to urban “elites” and people of color.
More surprising is why so many conservative-leaning people among the educated professional class — bankers, business owners and senior executives — stick by Trump and the state GOP, whose incompetence is evident every day, never more so than in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Many years ago, these same people balanced their skepticism of government with something of a moral conscience. Now, by backing Trump and Wisconsin Republicans, they appear to rationalize going ever deeper into the rabbit hole of naked self-interest at the expense of decency and the common good.
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In this state, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, once a moderately right-leaning business lobby, is simpatico today with the scorched-earth brand of the Wisconsin GOP. Together, they make every topic a partisan brawl, as currently exemplified by attacks on Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ conscientious effort to balance public health with reviving the economy.
On the same day that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned of dire consequences if the nation reopens its economy too soon, a Marquette Law School Poll showed a large majority in Wisconsin support Evers’ careful policies.
Yet the next day, our state Supreme Court made us a national laughingstock by becoming the first state to overrule a governor’s prerogative during the pandemic. This comes as no surprise, of course, because Republican money has produced a court majority of boot-licking GOP toadies. These same justices put ideological purity over voter safety around the April 7 election.
But back to why affluent Republicans behave this way.
I’ve had theories. First is that wealthy conservatives foresaw years ago that they had better get ahead of an inevitable backlash against a worsening wealth gap from globalization and deindustrialization. So they demonized teachers and other public employees as well as people of color — especially immigrants — lest their insatiable greed be blamed instead.
In Wisconsin, they also recognized that demographic trends were moving against them, so they protected themselves by purchasing Supreme Court control to protect obscene gerrymandering and voter suppression.
Yet I still scratch my head at their wanton greed. These are people who already sit atop the pyramid of life, who will never want for anything. They have the best houses, the nicest cars, get their kids into the best schools and take the fanciest vacations.
What motivates them to want even more?
On that question, I’d point to an article in The New Yorker by Evan Osnos with the headline: “How Greenwich Republicans learned to love Trump.”
Greenwich, Connecticut, is a bastion of old conservative money that has morphed into a magnet for Wall Street billionaires, filled with people who create nothing but staggering personal wealth, a place called “the hedge fund capital of the world.”
Osnos grew up in Greenwich, and described how the local GOP was once exemplified by Prescott Bush, a former U.S. senator and the father and grandfather of presidents. Bush was a fuddy-duddy patrician, but he was also an outspoken critic of fellow Republican Joseph McCarthy, the demagogic Wisconsin senator, for creating what Bush called “dangerous divisions” in America.
Osnos wrote that Bush, who supported civil rights and access to birth control, “believed, fundamentally, in the duty of government to help people who did not enjoy his considerable advantages.”
That Bush version of the GOP is extinct in both Washington and Wisconsin.
Osnos was describing Connecticut billionaires, but his observations could apply to many of Wisconsin’s multi-millionaires. Osnos wrote: “The story of Trump’s rise is often told as a hostile takeover. In truth, it is something closer to a joint venture, in which members of America’s élite accepted the terms of Trumpism as the price of power.
“Long before anyone imagined that Trump might become president, a generation of unwitting patrons paved the way for him. From Greenwich and places like it, they launched a set of financial, philanthropic, and political projects that have changed American ideas about government, taxes, and the legitimacy of the liberal state.”
Osnos noted how Greenwich billionaires hired lobbyists who pushed through deregulations exacerbating the financial crisis of 2008, and then helped them dodge financial, legal or reputational fallout.
Osnos pointed to how in Connecticut, through tax ploys and shelters, the wealthy force ordinary citizens to pay taxes at much higher rates than they do. “Some of that shortfall just never gets made up,” Brooke Harrington, an economic sociologist at Dartmouth College, told Osnos. “Those are roads that don’t get improved, public transport that doesn’t get built, schools that don’t get fixed.”
Harrington then described how attitudes evolved among the wealthy. “For an earlier generation, even if your heart wasn’t in it, you’d say, ‘I’ve got to join the local charity board, to project that I deserve this wealth.’ ”
The current generation feels no such compulsion. “The underlying massive change is that wealth no longer needs to justify itself — it is self-justifying,” Harrington said. “I look back, and I think, that’s when we gave up on being a ‘we.’ ”
The Faustian bargain embraced by well-off conservatives is all about greed. Trump lied that his 2017 tax law was to help ordinary people. The top 1 percent of income earners got a tax break of $48,000 a year, while the bottom 20 percent got $120, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a nonpartisan think tank.
So, back to the pandemic in Wisconsin.
In this context, perhaps the hyperbolic attacks on a centrist governor who is simply listening to public health experts to protect our safety are understandable.
Because if Evers is seen as making government work effectively for everyone, he and other Democrats might become too strong politically and come up with some harebrained idea to force Wisconsin’s wealthiest to pitch in a bit more for the greater good to get us cleaner water, better schools and improved health care.
We can’t have that.
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