WILLIAM CRONON | Dateline: March 15, 2011

A Study Guide for Those Wishing to Know More
[With original select reply and comment threads]

After watching the sudden and impressively well-organized wave of legislation being introduced into state legislatures that all seem to be pursuing parallel goals only tangentially related to current fiscal challenges–ending collective bargaining rights for public employees, requiring photo IDs at the ballot box, rolling back environmental protections, privileging property rights over civil rights, and so on–I’ve found myself wondering where all of this legislation is coming from.

The Walker-Koch Prank Phone Call Reveals A Lot, But Not Nearly Enough

The prank phone call that Governor Scott Walker unhesitatingly accepted from a blogger purporting to be billionaire conservative donor David Koch has received lots of airplay, and it certainly demonstrates that the governor is accustomed to having conversations with deep-pocketed folks who support his cause. If you’ve not actually seen the transcript, it’s worth a careful reading, and is accessible here:
http://host.madison.com/wsj/article_531276b6-3f6a-11e0-b288-001cc4c002e0.html

So…who is?

Conservative History Post-1964: A Brilliant Turnaround Story

I can’t fully answer that question in a short note, but I can sketch its outline and offer advice for those who want to fill in more of the details.

I’ll start by saying–a professorial impulse I just can’t resist–that it’s well worth taking some time to familiarize yourself with the history of the conservative movement in the United States since the 1950s if you haven’t already studied the subject. Whatever you think of its politics, I don’t think there can be any question that the rise of modern conservatism is one of the great turnaround stories in twentieth-century American history. It’s quite a fascinating series of events, in which a deeply marginalized political movement–tainted by widespread public reaction against Senator Joe McCarthy, the John Birch Society, and the massively defeated Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964–managed quite brilliantly to remake itself (and American politics) in the decades that followed.

I provide a brief reading list at the end of this note because many people from other parts of the political spectrum often seem not to take the intellectual roots of American conservatism very seriously. I believe this is a serious mistake. One key insight you should take from this history is that after the Goldwater defeat in 1964, visionary conservative leaders began to build a series of organizations and networks designed to promote their values and construct systematic strategies for sympathetic politicians. Some of these organizations are reasonably well known–for instance, the Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, a Racine native and UW-Madison alumnus who also started the Moral Majority and whose importance to the movement is almost impossible to overestimate–but many of these groups remain largely invisible.

That’s why events like the ones we’ve just experienced in Wisconsin can seem to come out of nowhere. Few outside the conservative movement have been paying much attention, and that is ill-advised.  (I would, by the way, say the same thing about people on the right who don’t make a serious effort to understand the left in this country.)

It’s also important to understand that events at the state level don’t always originate in the state where they occur. Far from it.

Basic Tools for Researching Conservative Groups

If you run across a conservative organization you’ve never heard of before and would like to know more about it, two websites can sometimes be helpful for quick overviews:
Right Wing Watch: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/
SourceWatch: http://www.sourcewatch.org
I don’t want this to become an endless professorial lecture on the general outlines of American conservatism today, so let me turn to the question at hand: who’s really behind recent Republican legislation in Wisconsin and elsewhere?  I’m professionally interested in this question as a historian, and since I can’t bring myself to believe that the Koch brothers single-handedly masterminded all this, I’ve been trying to discover the deeper networks from which this legislation emerged.

Here’s my preliminary answer.

Telling Your State Legislators What to Do:
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)

The most important group, I’m pretty sure, is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which was founded in 1973 by Henry Hyde, Lou Barnett, and (surprise, surprise) Paul Weyrich. Its goal for the past forty years has been to draft “model bills” that conservative legislators can introduce in the 50 states. Its website claims that in each legislative cycle, its members introduce 1000 pieces of legislation based on its work, and claims that roughly 18% of these bills are enacted into law. (Among them was the controversial 2010 anti-immigrant law in Arizona.)

If you’re as impressed by these numbers as I am, I’m hoping you’ll agree with me that it may be time to start paying more attention to ALEC and the bills its seeks to promote.
You can start by studying ALEC’s own website. Begin with its home page at
http://www.alec.org
First visit the “About” menu to get a sense of the organization’s history and its current members and funders. But the meat of the site is the “model legislation” page, which is the gateway to the hundreds of bills that ALEC has drafted for the benefit of its conservative members.
http://www.alec.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Model_Legislation1

You’ll of course be eager to look these over…but you won’t be able to, because you’re not a member.

Becoming a Member of ALEC: Not So Easy to Do

How do you become a member?  Simple. Two ways.  You can be an elected Republican legislator who, after being individually vetted, pays a token fee of roughly $100 per biennium to join.  Here’s the membership brochure to use if you meet this criterion:
http://www.alec.org/AM/pdf/2011_legislative_brochure.pdf
What if you’re not a Republican elected official?  Not to worry. You can apply to join ALEC as a “private sector” member by paying at least a few thousand dollars depending on which legislative domains most interest you. Here’s the membership brochure if you meet this criterion:
http://www.alec.org/am/pdf/Corporate_Brochure.pdf
Then again, even if most of us had this kind of money to contribute to ALEC, I have a feeling that membership might not necessarily be open to just anyone who is willing to pay the fee. But maybe I’m being cynical here.

Which Wisconsin Republican politicians are members of ALEC? Good question. How would we know? ALEC doesn’t provide this information on its website unless you’re able to log in as a member. Maybe we need to ask our representatives. One might think that Republican legislators gathered at a national ALEC meeting could be sufficiently numerous to trigger the “walking quorum rule” that makes it illegal for public officials in Wisconsin to meet unannounced without public notice of their meeting. But they’re able to avoid this rule (which applies to every other public body in Wisconsin) because they’re protected by a loophole in what is otherwise one of the strictest open meetings laws in the nation. The Wisconsin legislature carved out a unique exemption from that law for its own party caucuses, Democrats and Republicans alike. So Wisconsin Republicans are able to hold secret meetings with ALEC to plan their legislative strategies whenever they want, safe in the knowledge that no one will be able to watch while they do so.
(See http://www.doj.state.wi.us/dls/OMPR/2010OMCG-PRO/2010_OML_Compliance_Guide.pdf for a full discussion of Wisconsin’s otherwise very strict Open Meetings Law.)

If it has seemed to you while watching recent debates in the legislature that many Republican members of the Senate and Assembly have already made up their minds about the bills on which they’re voting, and don’t have much interest in listening to arguments being made by anyone else in the room, it’s probably because they did in fact make up their minds about these bills long before they entered the Capitol chambers. You can decide for yourself whether that’s a good expression of the “sifting and winnowing” for which this state long ago became famous.

Partners in Wisconsin and Other States: SPN, MacIver Institute, WPRI

An important partner of ALEC’s, by the way, is the State Policy Network (SPN), which helps coordinate the activities of a wide variety of conservative think tanks operating at the state level throughout the country. See its home page at
http://www.spn.org/
Many of the publications of these think tanks are accessible and downloadable from links on the SPN website, which are well worth taking the time to peruse and read. A good starting place is:
http://www.spn.org/members/

Two important SPN members in Wisconsin are the MacIver Institute for Public Policy:
http://maciverinstitute.com/
and the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI):
http://www.wpri.org
If you want to be a well-informed Wisconsin citizen and don’t know about their work, you’ll probably want to start visiting these sites more regularly. You’ll gain a much better understanding of the underlying ideas that inform recent Republican legislation by doing so.

Understanding What These Groups Do

As I said earlier, it’s not easy to find exact details about the model legislation that ALEC has sought to introduce all over the country in Republican-dominated statehouses. But you’ll get suggestive glimpses of it from the occasional reporting that has been done about ALEC over the past decade. Almost all of this emanates from the left wing of the political spectrum, so needs to be read with that bias always in mind.

Interestingly, one of the most critical accounts of ALEC’s activities was issued by Defenders of Wildlife and the Natural Resources Defense Council in a 2002 report entitled Corporate America’s Trojan Horse in the States. Although NRDC and Defenders may seem like odd organizations to issue such a report, some of ALEC’s most concentrated efforts have been directed at rolling back environmental protections, so their authorship of the report isn’t so surprising. The report and its associated press release are here:
http://alecwatch.org/11223344.pdf
http://www.nrdc.org/media/pressreleases/020228.asp
There’s also an old, very stale website associated with this effort at
http://alecwatch.org/

A more recent analysis of ALEC’s activities was put together by the Progressive States Network in February 2006 under the title Governing the Nation from the Statehouses, available here:
http://www.progressivestates.org/content/57/governing-the-nation-from-the-statehouses
There’s an In These Times story summarizing the report at
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2509/
More recent stories can be found at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/miles-mogulescu/alec-states-unions_b_832428.htmlview=print
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/6084/corporate_con_game (about the Arizona immigration law)
and there’s very interesting coverage of ALEC’s efforts to disenfranchise student voters at
http://campusprogress.org/articles/conservative_corporate_advocacy_group_alec_behind_voter_disenfranchise/
and
http://www.progressivestates.org/node/26400

For just one example of how below-the-radar the activities of ALEC typically are, look for where the name of the organization appears in this recent story from the New York Times about current efforts in state legislatures to roll back the bargaining rights of public employee unions:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/business/04labor.html
Hint: ALEC is way below the fold!

A Cautionary Note

What you’ll quickly learn even from reading these few documents is that ALEC is an organization that has been doing very important political work in the United States for the past forty years with remarkably little public or journalistic scrutiny. I’m posting this long note in the conviction that it’s time to start paying more attention. History is being made here, and future historians need people today to assemble the documents they’ll eventually need to write this story. Much more important, citizens today may wish to access these same documents to be well informed about important political decisions being made in our own time during the frequent meetings that ALEC organizes between Republican legislators and representatives of many of the wealthiest corporations in the United States.

I want to add a word of caution here at the end. In posting this study guide, I do not want to suggest that I think it is illegitimate in a democracy for citizens who share political convictions to gather for the purpose of sharing ideas or creating strategies to pursue their shared goals. The right to assemble, form alliances, share resources, and pursue common ends is crucial to any vision of democracy I know. (That’s one reason I’m appalled at Governor Walker’s ALEC-supported efforts to shut down public employee unions in Wisconsin, even though I have never belonged to one of those unions, probably never will, and have sometimes been quite critical of their tactics and strategies.)  I’m not suggesting that ALEC, its members, or its allies are illegitimate, corrupt, or illegal. If money were changing hands to buy votes, that would be a different thing, but I don’t believe that’s mainly what’s going on here. Americans who belong to ALEC do so because they genuinely believe in the causes it promotes, not because they’re buying or selling votes.

This is yet another example, in other words, of the impressive and highly skillful ways that conservatives have built very carefully thought-out institutions to advocate for their interests over the past half century. Although there may be analogous structures at the other end of the political spectrum, they’re frequently not nearly so well coordinated or so disciplined in the ways they pursue their goals. (The nearest analog to ALEC that I’m aware of on the left is the Progressive States Network, whose website can be perused at
http://www.progressivestates.org/
but PSN was only founded in 2005, does not mainly focus on writing model legislation, and is not as well organized or as disciplined as ALEC.) To be fair, conservatives would probably argue that the liberal networks they oppose were so well woven into the fabric of government agencies, labor unions, universities, churches, and non-profit organizations that these liberal networks organize themselves and operate quite differently than conservative networks do–and conservatives would be able to able to muster valid evidence to support such an argument, however we might finally evaluate the persuasiveness of that evidence.

Again, I want anyone reading this post to understand that I am emphatically not questioning the legitimacy of advocacy networks in a democracy. To the contrary: I believe they are essential to democracy. My concern is rather to promote open public discussion and the genuine clash of opinions among different parts of the political spectrum, which I believe is best served by full and open disclosure of the interests of those who advocate particular policies.

I believe this is especially important when policies are presented as having a genuine public interest even though their deeper purpose may be to promote selfish or partisan gains.

Reasserting Wisconsin’s Core Values: Decency, Fairness, Generosity, Compromise

ALEC’s efforts to disenfranchise voters likely to vote Democratic, for instance, and its efforts to destroy public-sector unions because they also tend to favor Democrats, strike me as objectionable and anti-democratic (as opposed to anti-Democratic) on their face. As a pragmatic centrist in my own politics, I very strongly favor seeking the public good from both sides of the partisan aisle, and it’s not at all clear to me that recent legislation in Wisconsin or elsewhere can be defended as doing this. Shining a bright light on ALEC’s activities (and on other groups as well, across the political spectrum) thus seems to me a valuable thing to do whether or not one favors its political goals.

This is especially true when politicians at the state and local level promote legislation drafted at the national level that may not actually best serve the interests of their home districts and states. ALEC strategists may think they’re serving the national conservative cause by promoting legislation like the bills recently passed in Wisconsin–but I see my state being ripped apart by the resulting controversies, and it’s hard to believe that Wisconsin is better off as a result. This is not the way citizens or politicians have historically behaved toward each other in this state, and I for one am not happy with the changes in our political culture that seem to be unfolding right now. I’m hoping that many of my fellow Wisconsinites, whether they lean left or right, agree with me that it’s time to take a long hard look at what has been happening and try to find our bearings again.

I have always cherished Wisconsin for its neighborliness, and this is not the way neighbors treat each other.

One conclusion seems clear: what we’ve witnessed in Wisconsin during the opening months of 2011 did not originate in this state, even though we’ve been at the center of the political storm in terms of how it’s being implemented. This is a well-planned and well-coordinated national campaign, and it would be helpful to know a lot more about it.

Let’s get to work, fellow citizens.

William Cronon

P.S.: Note to historians and journalists: we really need a good biography of Paul Weyrich.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

William Cronon (born September 11, 1954) is the Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, he obtained a D.Phil from Jesus College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. (1976–1978).[1] Cronon holds a B.A. (1976) from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and an M.A. (1979), M.Phil. (1980), and Ph.D. (1990) from Yale.

An Introductory Bibliography on the Recent History of American Conservatism

David Farber, The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism: A Brief History, 2010.

George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, 1976(one of the earliest academic studies of the movement, and still important to read).

Lee Edwards, The Conservative Revolution, 2002 (written from a conservative perspective by a longstanding fellow of the Heritage Foundation).

Bruce Frohnen, et al, American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, 2006 (a comprehensive and indispensable reference work).

Jerry Z. Muller, Conservatism, 1997 (extensive anthology of classic texts of the movement).

There are many other important studies, but these are reasonable starting points.

Posted in Wisconsin Political Controversies | Tags: ALEC, conservatism, conservatives, David Koch, disenfranchisement, Koch brothers, labor unions, liberals, MacIver Institute, Paul Weyrich, progressives, Republican, Scott Walker, SPN, state budget crisis, student voters, Wisconsin, WPRI

65 Responses to “Who’s Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin and Elsewhere? (Hint: It Didn’t Start Here)”

• Sharyn:
  March 21, 2011 at 2:20 pm
  What Andrew said. I have and will continue passing a link throughout my reach. Much appreciated Bill(?)!
  Reply
• Thomas R. Kueny:
  March 19, 2011 at 10:42 pm
  Congratulation on this in-depth investigation. Who knows, with this kind of research, we may find out who was really behind the 9/11 collapse of the three NY skyscrapers. It was not the airplanes.
  Reply
• Joseph Vaughn:
  March 19, 2011 at 1:37 am
  Bill, I think you are very un-educated. I feel you have no idea what you are talking about. You have taken everything out of context and what you have said in your piece is being read for diciplinary actions. Feel free to change the lies you have put in here, but you will still be going to court for all the lies. Till court day. I bid you adue
  Reply
• 
   
  • n2eil:
    March 19, 2011 at 10:05 am
    “Adue”? That’s hot, Joseph.
    Reply
  • chris:
    March 19, 2011 at 3:31 pm
    Joeseph,
    Get out of the basement, pull up your Depends, take your medication, and lay down with a nice cool cloth on your feverish forehead.
    Reply
  • nita:
    March 20, 2011 at 8:10 pm
    Joseph:
    If you consider that Prof. Cronon is un-educated, I think you should present your educated points to conclude something (with intelligence instead of emotion). Please, inform us with the TRUTH, don’t just threat Prof. Cronon. Don’t be so angry, rather show your “education”.
    At this point if I have to choose between the information in Prof. Cronon blog and your reply, you don’t have much …. you don’t sound educated at all.
    Reply
  • bad boy:
    March 20, 2011 at 10:55 pm
    “diciplinary”?
    I have the good fortune of having been in enough trouble, early in my life, to know how to spell “discipline”
    you really should get out more, Joseph
    Reply
  • samuelt2:
    March 20, 2011 at 11:44 pm
    Joseph,
    Do you “feel” that Cronon does not have degrees from Oxford and Yale? That he did not receive a Rhodes scholarship and a MacArthur Genius Grant? What about him strikes you as “uneducated”? That he happens to disagree with you? You have just single-handedly demonstrated the problem with our social and political discourse (with typos!): not only do facts not matter, opinions are not even opinions (they are facts!). Grow up, along with the rest of your ilk, and learn that ad hominem attacks without substance only make you look like a baby and an ignoramus. Your family deserves more from you.
    Reply
  • Diana in Indiana:
    March 21, 2011 at 12:20 pm
    You are hilarious !
    Reply
• gerald hoffman:
  March 18, 2011 at 3:06 pm
  You have my deepest appreciation for your effort to shine light on ALEC. Your work helps to make sense of the apparent narrow corporate interest at the heart of much recent Republican sponsored legislation. As usual, the very old answer to many political question is still “follow the money”.
  Reply
• Hector Solon from DailyKos:
  March 18, 2011 at 10:58 am
  Prof Cronon:
  THANK YOU for this excellent write-up on the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and all the LINKS that you have provided. This is a very important story that has really started to bubble up.
  Our team on the DailyKos put together as much information on ALEC and did a hasty investigation of ALEC in the State of Michigan and our legislation. We first noticed it from a WI TV news story on Koch. Many of the links and references that you have provided were included but we also see a few that we missed. Thanks, we will add those.
  LINK:
  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/03/08/953811/-Gov-Rick-Snyder-Sellout-Prefabricated-Corporate-Michigan-%28Government%29-Courtesy-of-KochALEC-Excl
  Now that many are becoming aware of ALEC and the nature of it’s fundamental threat to the democratic process in multiple States across the country. The question is: WHAT’S NEXT?
  Some folks have been gathering their resources to investigate ALEC activity and the presence of ALEC influence in their State or in their area. Environmental groups, which have been on the trail of ALEC before, namely the NRDC back in 2002-2003, are gearing back up on the ALEC story and the relationships between both specific politicians and legislation.
  We have talked to quite a few larger national organizations in labor and elsewhere (also Rachel Maddow’s team before her mention of ALEC – glad to see we are not the only ones making the pitch to her team (see below)), and despite the fact that ALEC language and content is very pervasive in legislation and bills now flying around in many States, perhaps a more efficient approach is in order.
  In a conversation with a Professor at the University of Michigan last night, we came upon the idea of using “anit-plagiarism” software used in the academic world to check student papers for similar content and apply it to ALEC.
  THE IDEA IS THAT by loading passed legislation and ALEC models (hard to come by we know that), a database of ALEC content could be established in which to compare new bills active across the country for that “ALEC Content” returning back a “score” or percent of similar content. This would point teams quickly on where to look, and concentrate resources, like the NPR team did in GA on the ALEC-CCA corrections privatization story. Also, by doing this we can show using technology where all the trails lead and add relationship mapping features (like Muckety) to paint a picture to all Americans about how far this ALEC influence goes.
  The ALEC story of teams of corporate lawyers and lobbyists “co-authoring’ legislation with State Legislators outside a State for import back into to their home States is one anyone can understand, as unbelievable as it might sound at first. We might call it “Law Laundering”.
  Just a couple thoughts.
  Thanks again for tracking this, it’s a big deal.
  Reply
• Celeste Koeberl:
  March 18, 2011 at 10:31 am
  “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”
  Reply
• Michael Feldt:
  March 18, 2011 at 8:44 am
  
  • Amy Leverson:
    March 19, 2011 at 5:11 pm
    Michael,
    Thank you for suggesting the facebook addition , which was added. When I found this last night, after getting sick to my stomach (almost) while reading the ALEC page, I immediately started sharing it with as many organized sites and friend as I could. We all knew the language and the actions were all too much alike. Then after sharing on facebook, I started downloading as many files as I could –sending them to a friend who was also doing this and I was doing print sceens to send her to print. I think with the exposure they are going to get now with FB they will take that page underground like much of it is already. I was convinced last night that it would be gone by now, but it exists. I now think it will take until the end of the week before it is private only.. I don’t know if you looked at the pictures of some of their events taken by professional photographer, so they can order their likeness, in the background the topic was THE NEW MAJORITY. I felt as if I was a fly on the wall at a KKK meeting or something..very disturbing to me. Basically they would be circumventing any open meetings laws as under investigation in WI, at the very least, since the laws are scripted in secrecy.. Sad day for democracy.. Especially the Disorder to the court brochure…. RECALLS thanks again for helping this great prof get his word out by your suggestion.
    Reply
• Rachel in Austin:
  March 17, 2011 at 8:13 pm
  Professor Cronon
  Thank you for this sane and skilled analysis. It is sorely needed
  To some of the dissenting voices on this thread:
  Respectfully,
  Rachel in Austin
  Reply
• Lightfoot Letters:
  March 17, 2011 at 4:32 pm
  “After watching the sudden and impressively well-organized wave of legislation being introduced into state legislatures that all seem to be pursuing parallel goals only tangentially related to current fiscal challenges–ending collective bargaining rights for public employees, requiring photo IDs at the ballot box, rolling back environmental protections, privileging property rights over civil rights, and so on–I’ve found myself wondering where all of this legislation is coming from. ” – William Cronon.
  This is not sudden, unless 70 years is sudden, not well organized, not just Republicans, related directly to public employees making 30 to 50% more in wages, benefits and retirement than the private sector that pays the bills, collective bargaining is not a right it is a privilege created or removed by statute…IDs at the ballot box has been required as long as I can remember untill the last couple of years.. AB 32 The final Global Warming Solution in Calif. is based on bogus science by researchers with bogus degrees..
  And without property rights, there can be no civil rights, because they are the same thing.
  I never read any further. When the premise is without weight or validity the purpose is without cause.
  dubiousraves:
  March 17, 2011 at 10:54 pm
  Lightfoot, you have drunk the kool aid. Every single one of your statements is completely wrong. Are you getting your info from Limbaugh and Beck?
  Reply
• Cohete:
  March 18, 2011 at 11:10 am
  Lightfoot, you are sadly mistaken and are obviously getting your facts from conservative pundits – most likely you are a viewer of Fox News and don’t bother to verify what they say. Most public employees in fact make LESS than their equivalents in private industry (compare degree levels and opportunities for those at thta education level). THe exception being some of the least skilled positions, such as garbage collection.
  Your argument about global warming is also severely misinformed. My guess is that you have no college degree, or if so, have not bothered to pursue any higher education after graduating years ago. Maybe you also believe in creationism?
  Let me set you straight. There is no disagreement in the climate scientist community. Global warming is taking place, and probably at even a faster rate than previously published. The dissention comes from groups hired by entities with oil and gas interests. Obviously they do not want us to decrease our consumption of their products. Within the scientific community, there is near 100% agreement. Can you show me some scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals that disagree with that? No, I didn’t think so. You might want to educate yourself on these and other topics from a source other than Fox.
  Sincerely,
  Cohete
  Reply
• chris:
  March 19, 2011 at 3:28 pm
  Lightfoot,
  Excellent. Especially the part about not reading further. Good heavens we wouldn’t want you confused by facts, now would we?
  Reply

Frida Paloot:
March 17, 2011 at 9:18 am
http://maciverinstitute.com/files/Senate/Fitzgerald-Scott-2010Amendment.pdf
Briandnapa:
March 20, 2011 at 9:35 am
Excellent Frida!! One by one, follow the money and shine a bright light on it! Thanks much.
Reply

Dean:
March 17, 2011 at 3:39 am
Bucky Too’s resonse deserves reading and some thought too, because it reflects the political mindset of our powerful “me-too” generation. Bucky has gathered his hoard, and now in retirement he opposed enough to sharing it through taxes, especially for public unions, and moved out of the state for his own “fiscal well being”.
Even if public union members in Wisconsin are paid well, in itself a hotly debated issue, is that wrong? Wouldn’t it be better to recognize that public unions now are the strongest organized representative of the working class, and in that role, best define the ideal which all workers’ pay and benefit scales should strive to achieve? If we are to “support Core Values: Decency, Fairness, Generosity, Compromise” for all, and to struggle towards that goal in a democratic way, isn’t it important to oppose this dangerous trend towards separation of the haves from the have-nots, to resist the anti-humanitarian aspects of the radical conservative movement and to be critical of Bucky Too’s” me-too” point of view? Why? Because as individuals we don’t live in a vacuum, we are part of a society whose well being eventually determines the long-term well being of the individual. Things like health, education, individual and national security, a decent standard of living, and a safety net for the less fortunate should be the goal for every citizen, and not just those on the right side of the income bell curve. To make this possible for the 308,745,538. individuals living in the United States. it takes the determined effort of a government which represents everyone, not just the corporations and the well to do. We have to get over the idea that implementation of our national goals like forming a more perfect union, insuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare and securing the blessings of liberty, has to come cheap.
bucky Too:
March 17, 2011 at 7:13 am
Dean, your assumption is wrong.
Wisconsin seniors’ incomes did not rise last year, or for the last few for that matter. Yet, Senior homeowners in Dane County must pay rising taxes and they are increasing at a much faster rate than inflation. You can Google Madison School District’s spending plans in Dec of 2010…along with those of Middleton…and they were projected to be larger than 9%. Also this link, a few weeks before the current protests:
http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/111633569.html State Agencies Request 6.2% Increase in Spending
=============
Your concerns for fairness, decency, etc………ignores basic math. Tax increases on seniors on fixed incomes are the antithesis of fairness, justice, etc. The common assumption that unions represent the working class is in error. Many ‘workers’ are not represented by unions and do not benefit when pubic employees wage increases cause government spending to increase. Most people that I know do not wish public worker compensation to be driven down to the minimum wage. On the contrary, when have unions been as concerned about those on fixed incomes?
Diana:
March 17, 2011 at 12:53 pm
“seniors on fixed incomes” That phrase is so old and tired. Everybody is on a fixed income
bluwater:
March 17, 2011 at 2:08 pm
The idea that “everyone” is on a fixed income is ludicrous. An elderly senior citizen living off of a pension, or even more likely, social security is on a fixed income. A twenty/thirty/forty/fifty/even sixty something that can go out and find extra (gasp) employment (e.g., delivering pizza) to supplement their income is not on a fixed income. The probability that an elderly senior citizen can go and find a job is lower but still possible. Don’t confuse fixed income with lazy. If you know who got voted off the island, or who made it on American Idol, you aren’t trying hard enough to raise your income and are playing poor me too much. The best place to go when you need money is to work, not to the government.

Melanie:
March 17, 2011 at 12:45 am
Always practical, I’m left now with the conclusion that ALEC may have no political ideology as we might classically think of it. ALEC uses a veneer of issue concern to better deliver the 3 prize benefits to its business members: Power, Access, Money. It seems they carefully evaluated the field of opportunity in political parties to see which ‘side’ might deliver the goods the best, and chose Republican. Perhaps at the time Republicans were more susceptible, or malleable, or greedy. Who knows? But many Republicans I know who are moderates have been appalled that the party is being used to deliver power, access, and money to someone–under the guise of moving important legislation. The party has ceased to speak, or even be much concerned about speaking, for centrist Republicans.
As a communication specialist, I’ve been struck by the use of classic propaganda techniques in conservative talk shows, email chains, commercials and slogans in the last 2 years. Call it ‘strategic persuasion,’ ‘coordinated manipulation,’ or what have you, but it appears to be a purposeful and carefully deployed campaign. I stand amazed every month when my journals are published without anyone taking up the study of this new communication campaign. Here I can only recommend and quote the classic article “The Theory of Political Propaganda” by Harold Lasswell (1927, Am Pol Sci Rev v21 no3):
Lasswell wrote: “Every cultural group has its vested values. These may include the ownership of property or the possession of claims to ceremonial deference. An object toward which it is hoped to arouse hostility must be presented as a menace to as many of these values as possible. There are always ambitious hopes of increasing values, and the object must be made to appear as the stumbling block to their realization. There are patterns of right and wrong, and the object must be made to flout the good. There are standards of propriety, and the object must appear ridiculous and gauche. If the plan is to draw out positive attitudes toward an object, it must be presented, not as a menace and an obstruction, nor as despicable or absurd, but as a protector of our values, a champion of our dreams, and a model of virtue and propriety.”
Of course the antidote for ALEC strategic communication, as Bill notes, is sunshine, time, and opportunity for conservatives to seriously question why they are being used as fuel in their own destruction.
bucky Too:
March 17, 2011 at 1:00 am
“veneer of issue concern ” Ya don’t have a clue.
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IronicMoniker:
March 20, 2011 at 3:41 am
I appreciate this response, as I too have developed a concern about the nature of political media in the last few years. I’ve actually gone back to college at this point and I’ve decided my field of study is going to be media, specifically for this reason. I’m not opposed to opinion journalism per se, but the journalism part actually does have to be included. The kind of nonsensical, sensation based, purposely misleading programming, advertising and language being used is something I’m coming to regard as a genuine threat to the democratic system. I don’t particularly care for this kind of propaganda coming from either side of the political spectrum, but the naked cravenness of the more extreme conservative groups, programming and otherwise is at a level I honestly didn’t think most Americans would put up with.
I’m really glad to know there are other people out there studying this. Maybe if we can leave behind an orderly, well documented and researched record, future generations won’t fall prey to it so easily.
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bucky Too:
March 17, 2011 at 12:19 am
Several problems with your best guesses and general line of inquiry. First, even if ALEC has conservative goals, the question really is: Why do so many people agree with the conservative agenda of Walker, Kasich, the Tea Party, etc.?
Second, your suggestions remind me how the FBI and many right wing pundits of the late Sixties looked under every rock for links to Soviet influence that was behind the Anti-War Movement, SDS, Mother Jones, Revolutionary League, Radical America, and even the first History Students Association in your own department. As an insider on the Madison campus during the years of protest, I clearly understood how misguided such inquires were. At the time. we often laughed about how clueless conservatives were.
Outsiders could not, and would not, believe that most students acted out of genuine beliefs and perceptions, totally divorced from the propaganda of the Communist Party of the USA. the old left – Paul Baran, Sweezy, Gus Hall, et.al. Sure, CPUSA, Young Socialist Alliance, and Progressive Labor may have had tables of literature in the Memorial Union during lunch most days, but these were not what motivated or influenced the mass of students who participated in left-wing demonstrations, though all these organizations certainly would have wished their influence was critical. Right-wing journalists and TV pundits at the time tried to establish the relationship between such groups and protests, just as you are looking for some force/organization behind the growth in conservative populism and related legislative initiatives.
Just as conservatives of the Sixties could NOT understand the authentic and organic growth of student protest movements….most on the left today really have NO understanding about _why_ so many people are attracted to the Tea Party or the conservative movement. Hatred of all things conservative is a sufficient substitute. Fine. But that really is an impediment to understanding. Just as EP Thompson’s view of the “Making” of the working class was original, I suggest you consider, in a similar manner, that the making of the modern conservative movement arises from an authentic and genuine ‘progressive’ vision that is the antithesis of the Left. Don’t believe me. Just consider it.
Long before Obamacare and the rise of the Tea Party, I left Wisconsin. As a retiree, I understood that property and income taxes in Wisconsin not only were too high, but there was no end sight to their ever-increasing toll on my budget. I didn’t need ALEC to tell me to leave the state for my own fiscal well-being. The cost of Wisconsin’s love affair with public unions is high, especially to non-union workers, homeowners, and retirees. The property tax on a 250K Dane County home is between 5-7K per year with no end in sight. In other states, a similar homeowner would be taxed only 1500. Property taxes in Madison cost 450% more than where I live now. Just to pay for ‘unionization’ and Wisconsin-style progressive property taxes, I would have to invest about 183,000 more at 3% just to pay the difference in tax bills. Like many retirees, I do not have an extra 183,000.
My point is simple. Like Dylan’s Ballad of a Thin Man, you just don’t understand. That you don’t understand….troubles me not.
Just giving you a heads up chance to reflect as you chase more intellectual windmills.
The clip below explains, simply, why John Q Public finds the entire debate about teacher unionism a non-sequitur. I know you’ll likely disagree, but it goes a long way in explaining why the ‘progressive’ visions fail to carry the day with non-union citizens.
http://www.battlefield315.com/2011/02/teachers-unions-explained.html
Regards,
bucky Too
carolina:
March 18, 2011 at 9:55 am
We can easily believe that people hold these beliefs., buckytoo. What we keep pointing out is that they keeping voting for the very people who talk a good line while they are putting policies in place that will make their lives and living situations worse. Don’t like big deficits? Stop voting for Republicans. Just because someone claims to be a ‘”fiscal conservative” doesn’t mean he won’t break the bank–literally.
Talk is cheap.
bucky Too:
March 18, 2011 at 12:27 pm
carolina…
You’ve used too many relative pronouns. Unclear to whom you are referring.
Obama’s deficits dwarf any other by multiples…..and they were sustained by a Democratic Congress.
Republican transgressions are not models, but they pale by comparison.
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• Jon:
  March 18, 2011 at 7:13 pm
  Our current deficits have little to do with Obama and a lot to do with tax cuts, demographic shifts, and a poorly-regulated banking system. In terms of blame, I would start with George W. Bush, then continue on blaming past presidents back through Reagan, at least.

jeconnery:
March 16, 2011 at 10:24 pm
Professor Cronon,
Many thanks for the post — very interesting and desperately needed.
Setting politics aside for a moment, I am reminded of something I once discussed with a fellow historian:
“The study of history can lead to optimism or pessimism. It’s just a matter of how to interpret it. Either it’s depressing to see that few of our problems are new or unprecedented and that we have yet to overcome them. Or, it’s a relief to know that things have been difficult or downright scary for a long long time but we’ve managed to come this far.”
Here’s hoping we keep chugging ahead!
Yours,
-ed connery
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Dave H:
March 16, 2011 at 8:30 pm
I am coming at this from the perspective of an academic, but maybe there should be some accountability here. If I were to submit a paper that someone else contributed to, I would have to give them either partial authorship or an acknowledgement or be subject to censure. Currently, many journals in my area require that people list the contributions of each author. I really think that the people who contribute to a bill should be recognized and their affiliations included. It seems somewhat dishonest for someone to submit legislation as their own if it is the work of others. I am perfectly willing to admit that the expertise of business is critical for many types of legislation, but I also think it is in the interest of the state to know where the legislation is coming from.
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Dan Nowak:
March 16, 2011 at 6:44 pm
Thanks for the link to ALEC. A HuuffPO link to them was lost. They are attacking the middle class.
Hector Solon from DailyKos:
March 18, 2011 at 11:13 am
UPDATE the Huffington Post Article Back up: “ALEC: The Behind the Scenes Player in the States’ Fight Against the Middle Class by Miles Mogulescu Posted: March 7, 2011.
LINK:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/miles-mogulescu/alec-states-unions_b_832428.html%3Cbr%20/%3E
Very good piece, a MUST READ for ALEC investigations and advanced readers.
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Ben Manski:
March 16, 2011 at 6:27 pm
I appreciate your work in compiling these analyses. Yet I think we should be cautious in laying the blame entirely on outside think tanks and lobbyists. The reality is that, without an infrastructure based in Wisconsin, organized through Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, and funded by the Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee, there would be no Scott Walker and no Walker agenda. If we are to be successful in overcoming the corporatization of Wisconsin, we have to bring accountability to the narrow corporate interests at work here, in Wisconsin, day in and day out, as well as the national level actors.
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Rosemary Feurer:
March 16, 2011 at 5:50 pm
I have tried to ask numerous reporters to investigate this, to no avail. They are just not that interested in the story. I have sent them some of these links, and given them the background. There are numerous other histories that could be included, including Kim Phillips-Fein’s book, which takes a “follow the money” approach to this issue but incorrectly assumes that this was just a reaction to the New Deal rather than part of longer and more complex thread in American history. There is also a long history of the relationship to public and private corporate policing that is also relevant here, and books such as Robert Smith’s From Blackjacks to Briefcases would also fill in some gaps.
Still, the problem is not really just right-wingers, but the fact that liberals have never fully committed to labor union organization in this country. Your posts reveals the problem in a nutshell. Labor’s problems originate because liberals have had such weak commitment to workers rights. The Wisconsin idea was that elites should control policy, and was distrustful of workers’ control.
But to say that these values did not originate in Wisconsin is to miss that Wisconsin itself played a vital role in the long-range history of these struggles.
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Linda:
March 16, 2011 at 1:46 pm
Rep. Suder in Wisconsin is on several ALEC committees. NPR did an interesting story on ALEC last fall which focused on, among other things, the fact that corporations which fund ALEC, also provide the funds to pay ‘scholarships’ for state reps and their families to attend the conferences. The corporations don’t have to report under any lobbying rules, and the state reps don’t have to report receiving funds from any corporations. They just report it as a gift from ALEC. This issue might be a basis for an IRS audit of ALEC’s non-profit status.
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Patrick Robbins:
March 16, 2011 at 1:42 pm
First, thank you for pointing the finger at ALEC. I wrote Rachel Maddow (of MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show”) about ALEC last week in the hopes that she and her staff, with their resources and broadcasting outlet, could study the group as comprehensively as possible, publicize their findings, and continue to follow the story where it may lead. The very next day she mentioned the group in a larger story, but she and her staff obviously had not had a chance yet to plumb its depths. After discovering your post today, I sent Rachel Maddow an e-mail suggesting she contact you.
I learned about ALEC through researching a number of Walker’s initiatives, specifically the new 2/3 supermajority requirement for taxes (Special Assembly Bill 5, which is now law). The article I initially saw about it is quoted in this post from firedoglake, but I can’t find the original article: http://news.firedoglake.com/2011/02/22/wisconsins-walker-signs-bill-requiring-23-majority-for-tax-increases/
What piqued my interest was this quote of Scott Walker’s: “I thank Senator Leah Vukmir and Representative Tyler August for their leadership on this issue.” Having heard of many of Vukmir’s ultra-ultra-conservative views, I thought I might look more at her and her website and see what else I could find about her stated (or unstated) alliances.
http://www.leahvukmir.com/site/Viewer.aspx?iid=22982&mname=Article&rpid=4876
One of the more disgusting, rather than disturbing, aspects of ALEC is that it has apparently had 501(c)(3) status for many years, despite the fact that the law regarding 501(c)(3) status makes it clear that ALEC’s activities are illegal under that status. After all, ALEC’s main purpose is to “attempt to influence legislation.” However, with the filings necessary to maintain 501(c)(3) status, it’s possible that more information could be gleaned from that paperwork. http://www.irs.gov/charities/charitable/article/0,,id=96099,00.html
Actually, some of the legislative membership can be found on ALEC’s website on these pages:
http://www.alec.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Board_of_Directors&Template=/CM/HTMLDisplay.cfm&ContentID=15492
http://www.alec.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=State_Chairmen&Template=/CM/HTMLDisplay.cfm&ContentID=15476
http://www.alec.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Former_ALEC_National_Chairmen
And some of the private sector members can be found here (note that one is Koch Enterprises). They are certainly are a who’s who:
http://www.alec.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Private_Enterprise_Board&Template=/CM/HTMLDisplay.cfm&ContentID=15553
With PhRMA (and other drug companies) on the board, I can imagine that Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, who as part of his previous life was president of Eli Lilly’s North American operations as well as Bush 43′s director of the Office of Managament and Budget, would be (or have been) intimately involved with ALEC. The history page of ALEC also reveals that Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, another Walker-like governor, was a member during the “formative years”—as was Tommy Thompson.
http://www.alec.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Board_of_Scholars&Template=/CM/HTMLDisplay.cfm&ContentID=11486
Second, you wondered about the existence of a website similar to Right Wing Watch or SourceWatch from a conservative perspective. The one that leaps to mind is Conservapedia, which also focuses on the theory and practice of various conservatisms: http://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page
Maybe I will write more later, but for now I will end by thanking you for focusing attention on ALEC. Take care.
Rosemary Feurer:
March 16, 2011 at 5:49 pm
I have tried to ask numerous reporters to investigate this, to no avail. They are just not that interested in the story. I have sent them some of these links, and given them the background. There are numerous other histories that could be included, including Kim Phillips-Fein’s book, which takes a “follow the money” approach to this issue but incorrectly assumes that this was just a reaction to the New Deal rather than part of longer and more complex thread in American history. There is also a long history of the relationship to public and private corporate policing that is also relevant here, and books such as Robert Smith’s From Blackjacks to Briefcases would also fill in some gaps.
Still, the problem is not really just right-wingers, but the fact that liberals have never fully committed to labor union organization in this country. Your posts reveals the problem in a nutshell. Labor’s problems originate because liberals have had such weak commitment to workers rights. The Wisconsin idea was that elites should control policy, and was distrustful of workers’ control.
But to say that these values did not originate in Wisconsin is to miss that Wisconsin itself played a vital role in the long-range history of these struggles.
Reply

Hector Solon from DailyKos:
March 18, 2011 at 11:15 am
Patrick – Great job. Keep digging, and get the word out.
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carolyn de la pena:
March 16, 2011 at 1:23 pm
i’ll join the others in thanking you for this. more of us need to take our skills at archival digging to the present, when issues are live, and the reporting matters
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Woody:
March 16, 2011 at 12:29 pm
One member of the Wisconsin Legislature who is actually named on the ALEC site is Rep. ROBIN VOS, who is Wisconsin Chairman of ALEC.
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Pete Morris:
March 16, 2011 at 12:23 pm
Thank you, Bill. As always, you’ve presented a thorough, thoughtful, fair-minded assessment that is both insightful and inspiring of further exploration. You’re a model for us all.
I started to write a longer comment here but decided that much of what I had to say I wanted to share with my students and friends as well. So I’ve posted my thoughts regarding the necessity of transparency in our democracy over on my own blog. For the curious, here’s the link: http://bit.ly/foknX2.
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Roberta Menger:
March 16, 2011 at 12:14 pm
Thank you Bill. I’ve been needing information like this. Many Bayfield Library patrons are searching for answers. Hopefuly there will be something posted somewhere about the negative effects of the “Repair” bill and the budget.
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Justin:
March 16, 2011 at 11:51 am
Thanks for this, Bill.
The historian Rick Perlstein’s two recent histories of the post WWII American Right, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus and Nixonland: the rise of a president and the fracturing of America, offer an epic account of the period between roughly 1952, when GOP conservatives saw their candidate, Robert Taft, outmaneuvered and supplanted by Eisenhower at the convention, and Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Great portraits of Goldwater, Reagan, Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, George Wallace, LBJ, William F. Buckley, Paul Weyrich, the John Birch Society, and the many other players in and around this contentious and wildly successful movement. They’re a riveting read as well, unfolding in places like a Shakespearean history play.
Links:
Before the Storm
Nixonland
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Barbette:
March 16, 2011 at 11:07 am
Appreciate your hard work and for sharing it with us.
Now, it is the responsibility of each and every Americans citizen to read, study and contemplate about how our government operates.
As you mentioned the genesis of ALEC is not illegal, but like an organization can be influenced by powerful individuals who may not have America’s best interest at heart.
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Dorcas:
March 16, 2011 at 11:00 am
I would add to the growing bibliography of serious scholarly study of the origins of the conservative movement: Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement From the New Deal to Reagan (Norton, 2009) and Kari Frederickson, The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932-1968 (UNC, 2001), both of which push the story back to the 1930s.
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Bob:
March 16, 2011 at 10:21 am
This NPR story should be added. Shows the corrupting influence of ALEC in an Arizona law.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130891396
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Kim:
March 16, 2011 at 9:33 am
Thank you, Bill, for this excellent overview of how the US is shifting from a democracy to a corporate oligarchy. I wonder if you and Paul Boyer (if he’s still active as a scholar in his retirement) could co-author a similar piece on how neoconservatives have used fundamentalist Christian groups to push a decidedly anti-Christian agenda.
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Larry:
March 16, 2011 at 8:41 am
Bill, excellent work here. Journalists need to read this and to begin exposing the national ALEC network and how it has influenced governors who never finished college. All of us wonder what happened to the political dialogue of old, when Republicans and Democrats discussed issues at least before the vote. Now the Republicans are all lemmings just falling in line. But where are these orders, these instructions, actually coming from. This post here should be the beginning of a longer dialogue in mainstream media. I am skeptical though. Our MSM is a profit-making entity with no teeth. Our only MSM hope is PBS’ Frontline… errr… well…. hmmm…. oh oh!
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Donna Runeric:
March 16, 2011 at 7:27 am
Quite an eye-opener. So much to know, so little time. You may be happy to know there are no job postings at Alec. I had thoughts of infiltration.
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Steve Wylder:
March 16, 2011 at 12:54 am
A biography of Paul Weyrich would be immensely helpful in understanding the post-1964 Right. Weyrich, ironically, was a strong advocate of rail passenger service and maintained a continuing dialogue with other rail advocates until his death. Walker, on the other hand, made opposition to high-speed rail a major issue in his campaign. Because the planned rail-line would have gone from Milwaukee to Madison, Walker could take advantage of anti-urban and anti-intellectual prejudices in rural Wisconsin.
I just finished rereading “Reagan’s America” by Garry Wills, which deals in part with the post-1964 conservative movement, which Wills believes is not particularly conservative. Sam Tanenhaus, in his book, “The Death of Conservatism,” believes today’s American Right has broken not just with Burke and Disraeli, but with William Buckley himself.
Thank you for this piece. While the Koch Brothers are an easy target, the careful and methodical organization of right-wingers surely bears a lot more scrutiny.
Robin:
March 16, 2011 at 10:09 am
The ‘new’ University of Madison will employ SEVEN alumni (I think it was 7) that we shouldn’t really worry about, because those alumnus ‘love the university, and love Wisconsin’ and all I could think of was this type of alumni being on the board, in addition to the 11 Gubernatorial appointees. My heart breaks for the university.
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Lisa Faiss:
March 16, 2011 at 12:41 am
Thanks Bill for such a thoughtful and educational piece.
I live in Arizona, where the SB1070 legislation was introduced and passed. This legislation was brought forth by ALEC. While the country sat and laughed at my state, little did they know that they were about to get hit by some doozies of their own. Our state is more moderate than what is generally believed (Janet Napolitano was well-respected). Jan Brewer would not have been elected unless the anti-immigration bill was put forth. There is a pent-up frustration with illegal immigration in this state that the feds are not addressing and ALEC took advantage of that atmosphere.
Our local media prior to the election questioned Brewer on the cronyism of the ALEC drafted bill when they uncovered that she had ties to the privately operated prison company that would stand to gain by detaining illegal immigrants. She refused to answer and it was too close to the elections for most people to notice.
Surprisingly, Jan Brewer is moderate compared to our neo-con state legislators. She has resisted their continuous hits on our educational funding. Proposed education cuts were so drastic (we are 49th in nation for education spending) she along with Phoenix business leaders campaigned to allow citizens to vote on a temporary sales tax. The REP state legislators tried to block it, but the governor fought for it and the voters overwhelmingly approved it (~60%).
One suggestion Bill, it might be helpful to contact the Greater Phoenix Economic Council. They commissioned a study from ASU, and worked with the AZ Board of Regents, bringing together diverse stakeholders to look at the impact of various tax policies and their effectiveness to attract new business. Into this they factored the need for good education to attract business. A PBS local Horizon episode interviews key players and highlights the findings. In short, it might be helpful to collaborate with emerging businesses that rely on a talented and educated workforce to help bring Wisconsinites back together. Horizon “Reinventing Arizona’s Economy”: http://www.gpec.org/CTC_Series.aspx.
Thanks so much. Hoping for best outcomes for the state where I was born.
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Tom Givnish:
March 16, 2011 at 12:26 am
Great job, Bill! Bits and pieces of the story have appeared in a number of venues, but this is an extremely useful, compact, and well-referenced synthesis. The tone should appeal to people on either side of the political spectrum. I only wish you’d gone a few sentences beyond your identification of recent ALEC-inspired strategy as “anti-democratic” to the real implications of such a strategy if it is successfully implemented. Perhaps a topic for the next entry in your blog? Hope so!
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Louis Warren:
March 15, 2011 at 11:46 pm
Bill:
A superb post and study guide. Thanks so much, and you are so right about the work we have to do, and the need for a bio of Paul Weyrich….
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Noel Radomski:
March 15, 2011 at 11:15 pm
I enjoyed reading Bill Cronon’s March 15th Scholar as Citizen Blog entry, “Who’s Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin and Elsewhere? (Hint: It Didn’t Start Here),” and if you agreed with his analysis then I strongly encourage you to apply his analysis to significant discussions currently underway at our alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In 2012 the UW-Madison and other land grant institutions will celebrate the sesquicentennial of the Morrill Land Grant Act, but before we plan the celebration we should heed Professor Cronon’s advice to look at ALEC’s influence not only in our state capitol, but in the esteemed halls of our campus. I respectfully encourage Professor Cronon and others to take a step back and question the role that the MacIver Institute and WPRI are playing with Governor Walker’s proposal to convert the UW-Madison from a state executive agency with the UW System to a public authority. You can start by looking at the MacIver Institute’s March 14, 2011, article “Plan Aims to Break Madison Campus from UW Board of Regents, Allow for Greater Autonomy at Wisconsin’s Flagship University,” by Christian D’Andrea. You can also read the MacIver Institute’s March 2, 2011, article “Proposed Budget Will Improve Educational Options, Raise Standards.” But don’t stop there.
You should also check out WPRI, ALEC’s other WI partner, and understand their advocacy and support of deregulating and privatizating Wisconsin’s land grant institution. You can look at the 1994 WPRI report “The University of Wisconsin System: An Agenda for the 21st Century.” You can also read the 2001 WPRI report “Chartering the University of Wisconsin-Madison.” And you can also view their 2001 article, “Why College is Too Cheap.” And a 2006 WPRI article, “The University of Wisconsin System Abandoning the Middle Class,” painted a vision to privatize the UW System.
Respectfully,
Noel Radomski
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Courtney:
March 15, 2011 at 11:11 pm
Thanks, Bill. Well done!
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Rachel:
March 15, 2011 at 10:58 pm
Bill, Thank you for your thoughtful-as-ever post. Here is a news report from NPR’s morning edition that brought ALEC to my attention. I didn’t see it in the list that you had provided. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130891396
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Linda:
March 15, 2011 at 10:45 pm
In an outburst on the assembly floor, in a video now removed from youtube, Gordon Hintz (D-assemblyman from Oshkosh) referenced a 144 page bill ( the Budget Repair Bill) which arrived from ‘out of state’ , I do not remember if he referenced an agency, but it was quite an indictment. Thank you for calling our attention to this agency. It would be interesting to hear from some of the senators on the origin of this bill!
Dawn:
March 16, 2011 at 12:15 am
Would this be the speech?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9xi3Of786M
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Anne:
March 15, 2011 at 9:48 pm
Thanks for this, Bill. This history–yikes–as disturbing as the contemporary GOP. (It’s somehow less scary to think they’ve just gone off the deep end, rather than that they have a long trajectory of concerted but stealth organizing.) No wonder they bought up all the media outlets. Let’s get to work, indeed.
Lisa McGirr’s Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, 2002) might also be relevant.
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Andrew:
March 15, 2011 at 8:38 pm
Bill, the world and Wisconsin, especially, is in your debt for this important piece. Thank You
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By Bruce E. Levine

Dateline: March 16, 2011

passing a bill that — to the delight of America’s ruling class — trashed most collective bargaining rights of public employee unions. Similarly in Ohio, legislation to limit collective bargaining rights for public workers is on the verge of being signed into law by Governor Kasich, despite the fact that Public Policy Polling on March 15, 2011 reported that 54 percent of Ohio voters would repeal the law, while 31 percent would keep it.

We the People have zero impact on policy. On March 10-13, 2011, an ABC News/Washington Post poll asked, “All in all, considering the costs to the United States versus the benefits to the United States, do you think the war in Afghanistan has been worth fighting, or not?”; 64 percent said “not worth fighting” and 31 percent said “worth fighting.” A February 11, 2011, CBS poll reported Americans’ response to the question, “Do you think the U.S. is doing the right thing by fighting the war in Afghanistan now, or should the U.S. not be involved in Afghanistan now?”; only 37 percent of Americans said the U.S. “is doing the right thing” and 54 percent said we “should not be involved.” When a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll on December 17-19, 2010, posed the question, “Do you favor or oppose the U.S. war in Afghanistan?” only 35 percent of Americans favored the war while 63 percent opposed it. For several years, the majority of Americans have also opposed the Iraq war, typified by a 2010 CBS poll which reported that 6 out of 10 Americans view the Iraq war as “a mistake.”

Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll in September 2008, asked, “Do you think the government should use taxpayers’ dollars to rescue ailing private financial firms whose collapse could have adverse effects on the economy and market, or is it not the government’s responsibility to bail out private companies with taxpayers’ dollars?”; only 31 percent of Americans said we should “use taxpayers” dollars while 55 percent said it is “not government’s responsibility.” Also in September 2008, both a CBSNews/New York Times poll and a USA Today/Gallup poll showed Americans opposed the bailout. This disapproval of the bailout was before most Americans discovered that the Federal Reserve had loaned far more money to “too-big-to-fail” corporations than Americans had been originally led to believe (The Wall Street Journal reported on December 1, 2010, “The US central bank on Wednesday disclosed details of some $3.3 trillion in loans made to financial firms, companies and foreign central banks during the crisis.”)

Kaiser Health Tracking poll asked, “Do you favor or oppose having a national health plan in which all Americans would get their insurance through an expanded, universal form of Medicare-for-all?” In this Kaiser poll, 58 percent of Americans favored a Medicare-for-all universal plan, and only 38 percent opposed it — and a whopping 77 percent favored “expanding Medicare to cover people between the ages of 55 and 64 who do not have health insurance.” A February 2009 CBS News/New York Times poll reported that 59 percent of Americans say the government should provide national health insurance. And a December 2009 Reuters poll reported that, “Just under 60 percent of those surveyed said they would like a public option as part of any final healthcare reform legislation.”

Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist and author of Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite (Chelsea Green Publishing, April 2011).

 

One more instance of naked aggression, wrapped and served in thick layers of hypocrisy, the true coin of the realm.

By Stephen Lendman

On March 19, ironically on the eighth anniversary of “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” a White House Office of the Press Secretary quoted Obama saying:

In fact, it was long-planned. All military interventions require months of preparation, including target selections, strategy, enlisting political and public support, troop deployments, and post-conflict plans.

Weeks, maybe months in advance, Special Forces, CIA agents, and UK SAS operatives were in Libya, enlisting, inciting, funding, and arming so-called anti-Gaddafi opposition forces, ahead of Western aggression for imperial control. More on it below.

False! In fact, Washington-led naked aggression was launched to replace one despot with another, perhaps assassinate Gaddafi, his sons and top officials, colonize Libya, control its oil, gas and other resources, exploit its people, private state industries under Western (mainly US) control, establish new Pentagon bases, use them for greater regional dominance, perhaps balkanize the country like Yugoslavia and Iraq, and prevent any democratic spark from emerging.

Military and government targets include:

• military air fields, tanks, artillery, other weapons, munitions, fuel depots, mobile and other targets.

About 25 US, UK, French, Canadian and Italian ships are involved, 11 from America, including three nuclear submarines. The Pentagon is providing command, control and logistics support. Air and surface-launched munitions are being used, including against Tripoli, the capital and Gaddafi stronghold.

Moreover, invasion and perhaps occupation may follow, despite official denials.

Pack Journalism Promotes War

A previous article explained how it enlists public support for imperial war, accessed through the following link:

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2011/03/pack-journalism-promotes-war-on-libya.html

Love or hate him, Gaddafi said:

Hours earlier, he pledged a ceasefire. Conflicting reports disagree if he honored it. Is he or Western intervention stoking violence? US media reports point fingers one way.

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2011/03/washingtons-un-war-resolution-on-libya.html

Launched the next day, the resources of another resource-rich Arab state will be divided among Western belligerents, to benefit Libyans, they claim.

As of Sunday morning, visible destruction also included 14 tanks, 20 armored personnel carriers, two or more trucks, rocket launchers, dozens of pick-ups, and exploding munitions. Ahead of cruise missile attacks, France initiated reconnaissance flights and aggression.

Central is the National Libyan Council (NLC), announced on February 26, established officially on March 5, led by former Libyan Justice Minister Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, a Western-allied opportunist.

In charge of military and foreign affairs, members include Omar El-Hariri, Ali al-Essawi, and Mahmoud Jebril as leader.

Not an angry Western demand was heard to stop hostilities and leave. Nor against similar Egyptian army attacks or on civilians in Tunisia, Jordan, Algeria, Oman, Iraq, and Yemen, let alone daily against Palestinians.

On March 18, in fact, dozens of Yemenese were killed, scores more wounded in Sanaa, the capital, when security forces attacked thousands, demanding President Ali Abdullah Saleh step down.

A Final Comment

Will it work? Love or hate Gaddafi, Libyans know what Iraqis, Afghans and Palestinians endure. Moreover, its society is fractious, divided by tribal loyalties, suspicious of Western intervention, and long-governed locally as well as nationally.

SENIOR CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.

Commanders brace for backlash of anti-US sentiment
that could be more damaging than after the Abu Ghraib scandal

A degenerate, hypocritical society commanded by a global plutocratic mafia with current HQ in Washington, DC., taps a vast reservoir of mostly poor, brainwashed, or deformed human beings to do its dirty work, use them as cannon fodder or foreign oppressors, and the results are as predictable as they are ugly.

Jon Boone
The Guardian,  Monday 21 March 2011

Der Spiegel to the images of US soldiers abusing prisoners in Abu Ghraib in Iraq which sparked waves of anti-US protests around the world.

They fear that the pictures could be even more damaging as they show the aftermath of the deliberate murders of Afghan civilians by a rogue US Stryker tank unit that operated in the southern province of Kandahar last year.

Five of the soldiers are on trial for pre-meditated murder, after they staged killings to make it look like they were defending themselves from Taliban attacks.

Other charges include the mutilation of corpses, the possession of images of human casualties and drug abuse.

All of the soldiers have denied the charges. They face the death penalty or life in prison if convicted.

An investigation by Der Spiegel has unearthed approximately 4,000 photos and videos taken by the men.

The US military has strived to keep the pictures out of the public domain fearing it could inflame feelings at a time when anti-Americanism in Afghanistan is already running high.

The lengthy Spiegel article that accompanies the photographs contains new details about the sadistic behaviour of the men.

In one incident in May last year, the article says, during a patrol, the team apprehended a mullah who was standing by the road and took him into a ditch where they made him kneel down.

The patrol team later claimed to their superiors that the mullah had tried to threaten them with a grenade and that they had no choice but to shoot.

In addition to the threat from the publication of the photographs, security has been heightened amid fears the Taliban may try to attack Persian new year celebrations.

Tomorrow could also attract attacks because Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, is due to make a speech declaring which areas of the country should be transferred from international to Afghan control in the coming months.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

The History Series

Chapter 2: DRAWING THE COLOR LINE

By Howard Zinn

 

[dropcap]A [/dropcap]black American writer, J. Saunders Redding, describes the arrival of a ship in North America in the year 1619:

If history can help answer these questions, then the beginnings of slavery in North America—a continent where we can trace the coming of the first whites and the first blacks—might supply at least a few clues.

Everything in the experience of the first white settlers acted as a pressure for the enslavement of blacks.

In the Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia is a document of 1619 which tells of the first twelve years of the Jamestown colony. The first settlement had a hundred persons, who had one small ladle of barley per meal. When more people arrived, there was even less food. Many of the people lived in cavelike holes dug into the ground, and in the winter of 1609-1610, they were

A petition by thirty colonists to the House of Burgesses, complaining against the twelve-year governorship of Sir Thomas Smith, said:

The Virginians needed labor, to grow corn for subsistence, to grow tobacco for export. They had just figured out how to grow tobacco, and in 1617 they sent off the first cargo to England. Finding that, like all pleasureable drugs tainted with moral disapproval, it brought a high price, the planters, despite their high religious talk, were not going to ask questions about something so profitable.

White servants had not yet been brought over in sufficient quantity. Besides, they did not come out of slavery, and did not have to do more than contract their labor for a few years to get their passage and a start in the New World. As for the free white settlers, many of them were skilled craftsmen, or even men of leisure back in England, who were so little inclined to work the land that John Smith, in those early years, had to declare a kind of martial law, organize them into work gangs, and force them into the fields for survival.

There may have been a kind of frustrated rage at their own ineptitude, at the Indian superiority at taking care of themselves, that made the Virginians especially ready to become the masters of slaves. Edmund Morgan imagines their mood as he writes in his book American Slavery, American Freedom:

Black slaves were the answer. And it was natural to consider imported blacks as slaves, even if the institution of slavery would not be regularized and legalized for several decades. Because, by 1619, a million blacks had already been brought from Africa to South America and the Caribbean, to the Portuguese and Spanish colonies, to work as slaves. Fifty years before Columbus, the Portuguese took ten African blacks to Lisbon—this was the start of a regular trade in slaves. African blacks had been stamped as slave labor for a hundred years. So it would have been strange if those twenty blacks, forcibly transported to Jamestown, and sold as objects to settlers anxious for a steadfast source of labor, were considered as anything but slaves.

Their helplessness made enslavement easier. The Indians were on their own land. The whites were in their own European culture. The blacks had been torn from their land and culture, forced into a situation where the heritage of language, dress, custom, family relations, was bit by bit obliterated except for remnants that blacks could hold on to by sheer, extraordinary persistence.

Was their culture inferior—and so subject to easy destruction? Inferior in military capability, yes —vulnerable to whites with guns and ships. But in no other way—except that cultures that are different are often taken as inferior, especially when such a judgment is practical and profitable. Even militarily, while the Westerners could secure forts on the African coast, they were unable to subdue the interior and had to come to terms with its chiefs.

One slave trader, John Newton (who later became an antislavery leader), wrote about the people of what is now Sierra Leone:

The state of slavery, among these wild barbarous people, as we esteem them, is much milder than in our colonies. For as, on the one hand, they have no land in high cultivation, like our West India plantations, and therefore no call for that excessive, unintermitted labour, which exhausts our slaves: so, on the other hand, no man is permitted to draw blood even from a slave.

In fact, it was because they came from a settled culture, of tribal customs and family ties, of communal life and traditional ritual, that African blacks found themselves especially helpless when removed from this. They were captured in the interior (frequently by blacks caught up in the slave trade themselves), sold on the coast, then shoved into pens with blacks of other tribes, often speaking different languages.

The conditions of capture and sale were crushing affirmations to the black African of his helplessness in the face of superior force. The marches to the coast, sometimes for 1,000 miles, with people shackled around the neck, under whip and gun, were death marches, in which two of every five blacks died. On the coast, they were kept in cages until they were picked and sold. One John Barbot, at the end of the seventeenth century, described these cages on the Gold Coast:

Under these conditions, perhaps one of every three blacks transported overseas died, but the huge profits (often double the investment on one trip) made it worthwhile for the slave trader, and so the blacks were packed into the holds like fish.

First the Dutch, then the English, dominated the slave trade. (By 1795 Liverpool had more than a hundred ships carrying slaves and accounted for half of all the European slave trade.) Some Americans in New England entered the business, and in 1637 the first American slave ship, the Desire, sailed from Marblehead. Its holds were partitioned into racks, 2 feet by 6 feet, with leg irons and bars.

By 1800, 10 to 15 million blacks had been transported as slaves to the Americas, representing perhaps one-third of those originally seized in Africa. It is roughly estimated that Africa lost 50 million human beings to death and slavery in those centuries we call the beginnings of modern Western civilization, at the hands of slave traders and plantation owners in Western Europe and America, the countries deemed the most advanced in the world.

In the year 1610, a Catholic priest in the Americas named Father Sandoval wrote back to a church functionary in Europe to ask if the capture, transport, and enslavement of African blacks was legal by church doctrine. A letter dated March 12, 1610, from Brother Luis Brandaon to Father Sandoval gives the answer:

 

 

 

 

 

Your Reverence writes me that you would like to know whether the Negroes who are sent to your parts have been legally captured. To this I reply that I think your Reverence should have no scruples on this point, because this is a matter which has been questioned by the Board of Conscience in Lisbon, and all its members are learned and conscientious men. Nor did the bishops who were in SaoThome, Cape Verde, and here in Loando—all learned and virtuous men—find fault with it. We have been here ourselves for forty years and there have been among us very learned Fathers… never did they consider the trade as illicit. Therefore we and the Fathers of Brazil buy these slaves for our service without any scruple…

With all of this—the desperation of the Jamestown settlers for labor, the impossibility of using Indians and the difficulty of using whites, the availability of blacks offered in greater and greater numbers by profit-seeking dealers in human flesh, and with such blacks possible to control because they had just gone through an ordeal which if it did not kill them must have left them in a state of psychic and physical helplessness—is it any wonder that such blacks were ripe for enslavement?

And under these conditions, even if some blacks might have been considered servants, would blacks be treated the same as white servants?

We have no way of testing the behavior of whites and blacks toward one another under favorable conditions—with no history of subordination, no money incentive for exploitation and enslavement, no desperation for survival requiring forced labor. All the conditions for black and white in seventeenth-century America were the opposite of that, all powerfully directed toward antagonism and mistreatment. Under such conditions even the slightest display of humanity between the races might be considered evidence of a basic human drive toward community.

It may be that, in the absence of any other overriding factor, darkness and blackness, associated with night and unknown, would take on those meanings. But the presence of another human being is a powerful fact, and the conditions of that presence are crucial in determining whether an initial prejudice, against a mere color, divorced from humankind, is turned into brutality and hatred.

Slavery grew as the plantation system grew. The reason is easily traceable to something other than natural racial repugnance: the number of arriving whites, whether free or indentured servants (under four to seven years contract), was not enough to meet the need of the plantations. By 1700, in Virginia, there were 6,000 slaves, one-twelfth of the population. By 1763, there were 170,000 slaves, about half the population.

Blacks were easier to enslave than whites or Indians. But they were still not easy to enslave. From the beginning, the imported black men and women resisted their enslavement. Ultimately their resistance was controlled, and slavery was established for 3 million blacks in the South. Still, under the most difficult conditions, under pain of mutilation and death, throughout their two hundred years of enslavement in North America, these Afro-Americans continued to rebel. Only occasionally was there an organized insurrection. More often they showed their refusal to submit by running away. Even more often, they engaged in sabotage, slowdowns, and subtle forms of resistance which asserted, if only to themselves and their brothers and sisters, their dignity as human beings.

When the very first black slaves were brought into Hispaniola in 1503, the Spanish governor of Hispaniola complained to the Spanish court that fugitive Negro slaves were teaching disobedience to the Indians. In the 1520s and 1530s, there were slave revolts in Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Santa Marta, and what is now Panama. Shortly after those rebellions, the Spanish established a special police for chasing fugitive slaves.

Gerald Mullin, who studied slave resistance in eighteenth-century Virginia in his work Flight and Rebellion, reports:

Slaves recently from Africa, still holding on to the heritage of their communal society, would run away in groups and try to establish villages of runaways out in the wilderness, on the frontier. Slaves born in America, on the other hand, were more likely to run off alone, and, with the skills they had learned on the plantation, try to pass as free men.

In 1710, warning the Virginia Assembly, Governor Alexander Spotswood said:

Indeed, considering the harshness of punishment for running away, that so many blacks did run away must be a sign of a powerful rebelliousness. All through the 1700s, the Virginia slave code read:

In Maryland, where slaves were about one-third of the population in 1750, slavery had been written into law since the 1660s, and statutes for controlling rebellious slaves were passed. There were cases where slave women killed their masters, sometimes by poisoning them, sometimes by burning tobacco houses and homes. Punishment ranged from whipping and branding to execution, but the trouble continued. In 1742, seven slaves were put to death for murdering their master.

Fear of slave revolt seems to have been a permanent fact of plantation life. William Byrd, a wealthy Virginia slaveowner, wrote in 1736:

It was an intricate and powerful system of control that the slaveowners developed to maintain their labor supply and their way of life, a system both subtle and crude, involving every device that social orders employ for keeping power and wealth where it is. As Kenneth Stampp puts it:

A letter to London from South Carolina in 1720 reports:

Around this time there were a number of fires in Boston and New Haven, suspected to be the work of Negro slaves. As a result, one Negro was executed in Boston, and the Boston Council ruled that any slaves who on their own gathered in groups of two or more were to be punished by whipping.

Herbert Aptheker, who did detailed research on slave resistance in North America for his book American Negro Slave Revolts, found about 250 instances where a minimum of ten slaves joined in a revolt or conspiracy.

In New York in 1741, there were ten thousand whites in the city and two thousand black slaves. It had been a hard winter and the poor—slave and free—had suffered greatly. When mysterious fires broke out, blacks and whites were accused of conspiring together. Mass hysteria developed against the accused. After a trial full of lurid accusations by informers, and forced confessions, two white men and two white women were executed, eighteen slaves were hanged, and thirteen slaves were burned alive.

Only one fear was greater than the fear of black rebellion in the new American colonies. That was the fear that discontented whites would join black slaves to overthrow the existing order. In the early years of slavery, especially, before racism as a way of thinking was firmly ingrained, while white indentured servants were often treated as badly as black slaves, there was a possibility of cooperation. As Edmund Morgan sees it:

And so, measures were taken. About the same time that slave codes, involving discipline and punishment, were passed by the Virginia Assembly,

We see now a complex web of historical threads to ensnare blacks for slavery in America: the desperation of starving settlers, the special helplessness of the displaced African, the powerful incentive of profit for slave trader and planter, the temptation of superior status for poor whites, the elaborate controls against escape and rebellion, the legal and social punishment of black and white collaboration.

Around 1700, the Virginia House of Burgesses declared:

It was a kind of class consciousness, a class fear. There were things happening in early Virginia, and in the other colonies, to warrant it.