What the Resistance can learn from the Wisconsin Protests

Valentine’s Day, 2011: Only days into office, and (cheekily) part of a “budget repair bill,” designed to fixed immediate shortfalls (as opposed to sweeping changes in legislation), Scott Walker proposed Act 10 effectively eliminating public unions in Wisconsin. Within days, a graduate student sleep-in protest at the Capitol evolved into a movement. 100,000s soon descended upon the Capitol. We marched. We boycotted Koch Brothers products. We entertained Michael Moore and Jesse Jackson at The Old Fashioned.

Most people didn’t want to be photographed, so I didn’t take more of these. I apologize now for my crappy mobile phone pics. I got a new camera half way through the protests. They are authentic, I guess.

What started as a few grad students sleeping at the Capitol evolved into a weeks long occupation.

We had no problem getting 10,000 steps that winter.

We applied lessons from History. We were disciplined. Virtually no damage was done to the Capitol and very few were arrested. Each week, we added energy to the movement. One week it was a flash mob, the next a zombie walk. We cultivated geographic, social, and cultural diversity by calling farmers hurt by cuts to Badgercare to bring tractors. My favorite friends were the state prison guards. They are a twisted group.

Participatory Media, in action. We kept coming back to see what people would do next. Did anyone document the flash mobs?

Discipline requires training, and the near zero arrests & damage after months of protest weren’t accidental.

I had a small hand in organizing farmers (which were mostly CSAs). “Tractors!” Al Giordano told me. Why aren’t I seeing tractors! Walker’s cuts to education and Badgercare were bad policy for rural communities, but rural resentment reigned.

Prison guards & gamers got on surprisingly well. Drank a few beers with both these guys and the fire fighters.

The cards were stacked against us, and we knew it. Scott Walker won, fairly, and was mostly doing things legally. But, he was also overplaying his hand. There was no mandate to tear Wisconsin apart. He was violating decades of norms and, seemingly, bringing people together in a fury against corporate kleptocracy.

The Koch Brothers weren’t a household name until the protests.

Signs of coming together: Businesses pointing out that Aaron Rodgers is a Union Member.

I can still recall the one moment I thought we might win. On Thursday, February 17th at about noon, 1) Wisconsin Democratic legislators, “The Wisconsin 14” left the State for Rockford Illinois (presumably to hang out with Rick Nielsen from Cheap Trick), and 2) Thousands of Madison area high school students emerged from the throng up State Street, louder, more raucous, and frankly, more pissed off sounding than anything I’d heard before. The tidal wave of public support was changing, and we wouldn’t go down without a fight. We could win this thing.

Yet, here we are 6 years later, almost to the day. Not only did Governor Walker survive a recall, he was re-elected for a second term. The bulk of his policies, including Act 10, are in place. They’ve enacted some of the most repressive voter suppression laws in the country, explicitly going after minority communities so as to retain power. They’re extracting another round of revenge on the UW this year, slashing budgets, trashing tenure protections, and doing whatever they can to dismantle the State’s crown jewel. The project of remaking the state to a low-wage, oligarch kleptocracy for the extraction industries is almost complete.

Those who think the public will wake up and see the effects of policies at the national level should be forewarned. While neighboring states, like Minnesota thrive, Wisconsin continues to slide backwards, driven by a downward spiral of resentment, and there’s no signs of it changing in a state that just re-elected Ron Johnson.

Well, that was depressing. Let’s pause a second.

So what can we learn from all of this? What can we, students of social movements, learn from the experiences in Wisconsin that can be applied to resistance in an age of Trump?

First, let’s just acknowledge that Trump isn’t Walker. He is far worse, but ultimately that might help. He has no ideology, other than an unapologetic kleptocratic authoritarianism, mixed with nativism. Our biggest hope lies in this basic corruptness, combined with his total lack of discipline, understanding of government, or willingness to learn. If OTPOR can overthrow Milosevic, certainly we can rid ourselves of this buffoon.

Lessons Learned

• Traditional protests have limited value for social change. Protests are great for generating enthusiasm, making the general level of outrage known to the world, and gathering information for grassroots organizing (collect names emails and phone lists at every event!). They do not change policy and infrequently change the minds of those who disagree with you. They may be manipulated by the ruling class to meet their narratives, which leads to a sub-point…
• Regimes can and will eventually drive narratives about protests, which limits their effectiveness as a venue for communication, particularly to constituencies that do not share our media consumption patterns. Wisconsin folks: Remember the time we did $7.5 million in damages? Neither do I. But go ask a random person in rural Wisconsin and they’ll likely tell you about it. They (right wing radio, tv, government) lied about us, continuously, without repercussions. I don’t see this changing any time soon. On a lighter note, I’ll leave this here.

If you don’t know this reference, Google it.

• We will not outlast those in power. Protests and other actions to “slow” down autocracy are good, but they are only stop gap measures. Retired revolutionary Ivan Marovic made this same point to me in describing protests and strikes in Serbia. They are in power and paid to be there, doing just what they are doing. You are not. You have lives that eventually, will need attending to. You can’t stay eyes affixed to Twitter to learn what he’s doing, or rushing to the airport every other day to uphold justice indefinitely. You will burn out. To the case of Wisconsin: Yes, the Capitol sleep-in, protests, and Wisconsin 14 walk-out slowed down the implementation of Act 10. Six years later, however, Walker, the Republican legislature, and Act 10 are all in place, and the state has mostly given up. Always remember, we can’t out-stall a bureaucracy, and we need clear goals, with direct actions designed to attain them.
• Social media (i.e. Twitter) is unbelievably useful for rapid response to events, such as convening to stop or delay a specific action. Already, we’ve seen this with the Muslim ban at airports. In Wisconsin, this became the weekly responses to the legislature, which always passed the shadiest legislation at 4:30pm on Wednesdays. When the legislature acted, #wiunion was there within minutes. This most certainly slowed things down and limited damage, as we’re doing now with the Muslim ban. Great job!

That time we all almost got arrested for entering the Capitol through the women’s restroom. Ask me about that some time.

• We cannot rely on “norms, traditions, decorum, process” or any of that stuff to do crap to protect us. Walker broke every norm in the book in Wisconsin, and his supporters loved it. The right applauded every shady deal that broke process, because it was “getting shit done.” Trump is that, multiplied by thousands. People with professional governmental experience and expertise (i.e. Foreign Policy Roundtable, Keeping it 1600 podcasts) hang on to this ideal for good reason. These traditions matter (to us). But every complaint about process sounds like what Chris Arnade would call “front row kids complaining about the back row,” and Trump’s back row kids (and Trump himself) love it. We must all learn and relearn that much of the country wants to blow up the system. They hate the way we argue about language, appropriateness, or process, and they hate when these same things interfere with their lives, whether it’s in their personal lives (e.g. “political correctness”) or “processes” that they perceive as red tape.
• Try to build public support by critiquing the Administration with positive social values that work within a conservative frame (to borrow from George Lakoff, who also saw this coming). We can call out the Trump regime as the autocratic kleptocracy that it is within their frame. I’m still working on this, but Alexandra Erin offers a good starting point. We can say, “I don’t feel any safer keeping out refugees, when terrorist attacks are committed by radicalized citizens.” Likewise, and maybe more importantly, “I don’t see how a Con Man President who is using the office for personal gain while America suffers is making us great again.” Christopher Stroop is also fantastic at describing the Christian Authoritarian frame (which still boggles me).
• We can’t focus all of our energy on electoral change. One mistake — I believe the biggest mistake Wisconsin made was to put all of our eggs in the “Recall Walker” basket. We can see that same thing happening now, as people gravitate toward the 2018 House races as a way to check Trump. We need to work diligently on exposing the flaws of the administration, building a case against it, and ultimately turning the tide of public sentiment.
• We can’t place all our faith in established organizations. A second place I think that Wisconsin went wrong was deferring too much power to the established union structure. Doing so made sense at the time; afterall, they are paid to worry about these things. But they operate within an existing frame, which colors the perception of the movement (particularly as being self-serving). I worry about this now, as people begin looking to the Democratic Party for solutions. As a group, they work within the paradigm that got us here in the first place and are generally playing the wrong game. All real change happens from small groups of dedicated people working diligently.
• Real change happens from small groups of dedicated people. In Wisconsin, we had success with small groups of likeminded people (in our case graduate students) developed a strategy and took direct actions. In our case, it was helping reform the Defend Wisconsin website, which became a useful tool for coordinating direct action locally. Al Giordano is writing about how to do this: Get together in local groups, identify values and issues of concern, train, and be ready to take action.

Matt Gaydos taking a break from administering defend wisconsin from within the Capitol. We redesigned the site to be a useful organizing tool.

• We need to directly engage “the other America,” including rural areas. We did not do this well enough in Wisconsin. Partly, we underestimated rural resentment and believed support for him had eroded. Partly, we focused too strongly on the recall. Partly, we may have all been a little lazy. In Force More Powerful, which is mandatory viewing, Ivan Marovic describes a key moment in the overthrow of Milosevic being when OTPOR fanned out to rural communities. OTPOR engaged local youth as leaders in local resistance, which I believe is a recipe for success here. To truly be a movement we need to a nationwide (or global) partnership. My small contribution here is to suggest that we work through affinity groups (hobbies like video games), looking especially for local young people eager to lead on issues of interest to them.
• To affect change, we must be honest about what we face, and we cannot underestimate the public resentment that fuels it. As Walker continued overstepping, alienating one constituency after the other and his polls slid to the low 40s, recall seemed inevitable. Surely Wisconsin would not re-elect a corrupt administration fueled by and for big business hell bent on selling the state off for parts. (Anyone remember no bid coal plant contracts)? Well, we did, in part because Walker sold them a story of lashing out against Madison (out-of-touch liberals) and Milwaukee (blacks). Sadly, as Sarah Kendzior reminds us, these themes ARE American. Wisconsin is the state of McCarthy, and USA is Andrew Jackson, Jeff Sessions, and Herbert Hoover. The public is not as automatically repulsed by authoritarianism as we’d think. Now is a good time to take a sober look at how we got here, and be realistic about what the fight ahead entails. I believe we can, and will win this fight. But we will not win just because Trump acts like an idiot, or large crowds come out to protest.
• Moving forward, we must fearlessly assess the challenges we face, creatively and courageously imagine new ways to fight the fight, and ruthlessly evaluate our successes and failures. In Wisconsin, once energy coalesced around the recall, broader conversations about how to expose Walker’s agenda died down. Direct actions fizzled, from a combination of fatigue and summer break happening. (Un)fortunately, all signs are that we will have ample opportunities to resist Trump in the upcoming months.

We are just getting started. I’ll leave you all with some favorite memories of 2011. Because for all of our challenges, the Wisconsin protests woke up 10,000s and energized a new generation in civic engagement.

I love these people.

Simple, elegant, well done Sarah.

You’d never know it from the media, but the regional police were all with us. Walker had to bring police in from the Milwaukee suburbs to work inside the Capitol, because the locals were with us. Many would literally get off duty, change, and start protesting.

Inside the war room, courtesy the Democratic caucus.

The excellent record of protesters wasn’t accident. Notice the blue painters tape, which did not cause $7.5m in damages.

It was so cool watching the TAs figure out how to cover courses and keep real life going amidst the chaos.

Thank you everyone who sent snacks & pizza.

The boys did a lot of marching that winter.

For years, Warner would sing “Hey hey, ho ho, Scott Walker has got to go!”

A lot of time was spent at the Capitol that winter. The video of this is great.

The children’s museum was a common place for taking a break for families.

I’m cold just looking at it.