Political observers lately have attached the phrase “politics of resentment” to the swath of rank-and-file, working-class Americans upset with increasing economic inequality, and governance that by-passes their needs to support well-heeled special interests. Katherine J. Cramer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin — Madison, spent five years interviewing scores of rural Wisconsin residents for a study that is now her new book, “Understanding the Politics of Resentment,” users.polisci.wisc.edu/… She summarizes her findings this way:
The book argues that when people in rural areas make sense of their economic interests, they often rely on social identities rooted in their identities as rural people and their perceptions of distributive justice. I call this rural consciousness, and it looks roughly like this: Many people in rural areas see themselves as rural people who live in a place that is routinely ignored by decision makers and the distribution of resources. In addition, they often see themselves as fundamentally different from urbanites in terms of values and lifestyles (Walsh 2012). The result is an understanding of politics in which government (and public employees) are the product of anti-rural forces and should therefore be scaled back as much as possible.
It’s no accident that Cramer’s own, urban-based campus and the UW in general is under attack by conservative and Republican forces, both of which base entire campaigns on such voter resentment. Wisconsin’s single most powerful politician has political resentments of his own, aimed at public education. That and one other reason — the now overriding importance of huge amounts of mostly out-of-state, mostly dark dollars washing over Wisconsin campaigns — is feeding Gov. Scott Walker’s personal animus against UW despite private calls to reason from the Wisconsin business community that has supported him.
Republican Walker is, after all, the man who early on told an in-state, billionaire contributor on video that his strategy for promoting an eventually successful “right to work” law would be, quote, “Divide and conquer.” [Walker later appointed that billionaire, business owner Dianne Hendricks, to the UW Board of Regents.]
Beyond Walker’s personal resentments, which have been documented before and which we’ll touch on later here, another compelling factor seems to have figured into his efforts to weaken the University of Wisconsin System, one of the nation's original land-grant institutions of learning and science — and, up until Walker, one of its greatest.
Matthew J. Flynn is one of Wisconsin’s leading attorneys and a graduate of the UW Law School. He wrote an opinion column today for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that adds confirmation to what many progressives long have believed.
Headlined “Gov. Scott Walker is vandalizing UW System,” Flynn’s piece discussed Walker’s fiscal and policy attacks on the UW System, including $250 million worth of cuts in state funding over the next two years. One result of that latest UW clawback has been to lower student financial aids and increase student debt, a problem Walker and statehouse Republicans so far have failed to rectify.
Then there was Walker’s attempt — withdrawn after public outcry — to change the university’s core mission away from research, empirical thinking, and “The Wisconsin Idea” of serving the state’s residents and institutions. His staffers tried rewriting UW’s long-standing mission statement, replacing “the search for truth” with “meeting the workforce needs of the state.” Beyond turning UW into a technical college was the new Walker-driven law that basically guts academic tenure, replacing it with what Flynn calls “fake tenure.”
Rebecca Schuman, education writer at Slate.com, wrote that Walker’s move, approved by the GOP-dominated Wisconsin legislature, also severely weakened shared faculty governance and effectively destroyed professor tenure at state universities. “Specifically, any professor in the system — tenured or not— could be dismissed or laid off by the 18-member Board of Regents using maddeningly vague criteria: ‘when such an action is deemed necessary due to a budget or program decision requiring program discontinuance, curtailment, modification or redirection.’ ”
Like other UW graduates, myself included among many past critics, Flynn expresses dismay over these moves, which already has knocked the school out of its traditional ranking within the top ten American universities and shows signs of knocking UW off the list of the top 50 universities in the world. Top professors are departing along with huge research grants for greener pastures, while chancellors struggle to stem the brain-drain while making ends meet financially. Worse, the UW economic engine’s slide into mediocrity will further harm the state’s job and fiscal status, already near rock bottom after five years of Walkernomics.
In the course of his comments, Matt Flynn shared an anecdote that will generate knowing nods from Wisconsin progressives and should alarm state residents in general. It’s a smoking gun: Guys like the billionaire Koch brothers now hold sway over in-state business leaders when advising Walker. We knew that, but not the scope of its influence. Here’s Flynn, writing about how Walker ignored the advice of his contributors within the state’s business community in favor of guys like the Kochs: www.jsonline.com/...
How could responsible and decent [Wisconsin] businessmen, some of whom I know personally, have permitted all of this to happen without speaking privately to Walker and telling him to knock it off?
What I discovered was disturbing. A number of Wisconsin businessmen, supporters of Walker, did speak to him privately. They did tell him that the University of Wisconsin was off limits to this kind of tampering.
But Walker has ignored his Wisconsin business supporters because he has acquired wealthier patrons. Out-of-state billionaires have meddled in Wisconsin government, including but not limited to the Koch brothers, who are far wealthier and far more powerful than the people who got Walker elected in the first place. I was reminded of the song in Evita: "Goodbye, and thank you Magaldi." When Wisconsin businessmen went to Walker to say "knock off the tampering with the University of Wisconsin," it was too late. He had gone on to be the consort of wealthier men.
Flynn doesn't mention it, but as others have written, there is another factor involved here: Walker’s own resentment toward higher education and its bias towards, well, knowledge and enlightenment. Walker is a college dropout. He left the private, Jesuit, Milwaukee-based Marquette University during his undergraduate years. Soon after entering MU in 1986, he became a student senate officer and promptly began an investigation of other council members.
One of those fellow students, Glen Barry, wrote about the incident a couple of years ago, and summarized it this way: “Walker’s debut in Marquette student politics as a freshman began by stirring up the campus with a McCarthyite investigation into misspending by the Homecoming committee.” A couple of years later, Walker ran for president of the council. The student newspaper endorsed Walker’s opponent – a progressive activist working on social justice issues in the community. However, the editors said both would make a good student body president. Barry continues: dissidentvoice.org/...
But this tepid endorsement changed after Walker was sanctioned for illegal campaigning on numerous occasions, and brutal personal attacks upon his opponent’s character. Walker distributed a mudslinging brochure about his opponent that featured statements such as “constantly shouting about fighting the administration” and “trying to lead several ineffective protests of his own.”
Meanwhile Walker’s campaign was secretly and systematically throwing out copies of the newspaper that endorsed his opponent. In an unprecedented move, the newspaper retracted itself and declared Walker “unfit for office.” He lost in a land slide and was deeply humiliated by his poor conduct.
So there you have it: Walker’s rough handling of UW is arguably the result of two factors: His own animus against higher education — possibly enlarged by his own unhappy experiences — and the dark-money billionaire corporatists from afar who have now supplanted the business voices within Wisconsin. Opinions and counsel from Wisconsin’s business community — vital to his election as governor — are now less relevant to Walker, because he’s got the backing of powerful, out-of-state billionaires, who have similar dislike for, to borrow a George Wallace phrase, “the pointy-headed intellectuals.” But it’s Walker and his cronies have been through the budget-axing pencil sharpener.