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Last month I attended the American Legislative Exchange Council’s States and Nation Policy Summit. ALEC, and this conference, is a source of deeply conservative policy which is copied and pasted to become bills in statehouses across the country. They spawn legislation to attack immigrants, tenants, the environment, public school students, reproductive rights, Palestinians, progressive taxation, DEI and much, much more.
I was, to the best of my knowledge, the only Democrat registered, and almost certainly the only socialist. I was there because I wanted to learn about what they have in store, so that we can be prepared to defeat it. Up until they had security remove me from the last session—a potentially serious violation of their non-partisan 501(c)3 status—the conference provided a great deal of insight.
First, the bad news: this year, with Trump’s second term imminent, they are emboldened and giddy, chomping at the bit to spread their brand of hate through what they consider an electoral mandate. Whipped into a frenzy by speakers like Newt Gingrich and Vivek Ramaswamy, they’re going to be hitting state legislatures with a deluge of harmful legislation. Our Democratic and socialist caucuses are going to be very busy, both pushing back on it and making a case for a state and community which are not based in this fear and scorn, but on uplifting and strengthening our communities and drawing our neighbors closer.
What they said behind closed doors was worse than I expected. In one task force, Republicans united around a massive tax credit only for families who do not have children enrolled in public schools. But they quickly turned on one legislator who suggested that the model legislation be amended to be a refundable tax credit that might also help poor or working-class parents who don’t have $10,000 tax liabilities at the end of the year. The amendment was soundly defeated, with one opponent characterizing it as a “wealth redistribution program.” ALEC Republicans were just trying to attack public schools, after all, not inadvertently help the poor. The unamended model legislation passed with unanimous votes from both the private and public sectors.
In a workshop, a state legislator who introduced himself by saying that his “pronouns are Kansas Super Majority” suggested that Republicans could defeat DEI initiatives if everyone would simply “identify as a one-legged Asian lady with a kickstand.” His comment was met with laughter and applause. In another task force, Republicans debated whether or not to support a bottle deposit program which would have consumers pay a deposit for bottles and cans that would hand millions of uncollected deposits not to the state, but to a non-profit run entirely by the manufacturers themselves, who would be able to use those dollars for transportation, advertising and other costs related to recycling. The framing, that recycling was a “national security issue” needed to combat “Communist China” which we import some aluminum from, was apparently not enough to convince many opponents, who argued that recycling was inherently “woke.”
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Sadly, I was escorted out by security before the vote was taken on this measure, so I’m not sure if the anti-woke folks or the McCarthy camp won. If any of my Republican colleagues could tell me the final score, I’d be grateful. But the good news is this: they’re underestimating us. They think that “the left” is simply “woke banks” who want to hire Black executives, or fiddling around the edges of the current, failed system. They think that the left is simply an obstacle to their agenda. We need to prove them wrong. We need to both stand up for the folks they will target and to stop running right to appease ALEC conservatives who use the veneer of economics to mask their hatred for our most vulnerable friends and neighbors. We must push for a better world for all of us which makes their vision obsolete.
Over the coming months, I’ll be using the insight that I received at the summit through conversations, presentations and meetings to help us all fight what is coming. I’ll be working with grassroots organizations across the state to let them know what ALEC’s plans are to harm them and to help develop strategies to push back. I am confident that we can out-organize them, as we did many times in Wisconsin’s last session. We can win. But we need your help. Find the organizations in your community which are going to be on the front lines over the next two and four years. Amplify their messages within your networks. Donate. Show up. The stakes are too high not to.
Ryan Clancy represents District 19 in the Wisconsin State Assembly.
