Photo credit: Robert Geiger / Flickr CC
Having for years promoted the important contributions of Milwaukee socialists to American democracy, I’d like to thank the red-baiting Republicans who immediately began denouncing Democrats for choosing to hold their 2020 presidential nominating convention in Milwaukee, a city nationally recognized for its good government under nearly four decades of socialist mayors.
Instead of celebrating the economic benefits to the state, city and hundreds of businesses from the rare choice of the industrial Midwest for a high-profile national political convention, Mark Jefferson, executive director of the Wisconsin Republican Party, began vilifying as un-American nearly 4,000 Democratic delegates from throughout the country who will be flooding into the city next year accompanied by the national media.
“No city in America has stronger ties to socialism than Milwaukee,” Jefferson groused. “And with the rise of Bernie Sanders and the embrace of socialism by its newest leaders, the American left has come full circle. It’s only fitting the Democrats would come to Milwaukee.”
McCarthy Lives On
Jefferson was echoing the inflammatory Republican hate campaign against Democrats as subversive socialists that Donald Trump has been test marketing as the centerpiece of his reelection drive. Trump is channeling the dishonest attacks of Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy (1908-’57) who smeared supporters of progressive political ideas in the ’50s as communist sympathizers. During the shameful McCarthy Era, thousands of government employees, academics, entertainers and other professionals were fired or blacklisted from employment.
It makes no sense for Trump to call Democrats a red menace when he’s the one palling around with Russian president Vladimir Putin and professing his love for murderous dictators, but Republicans don’t care that Trump hardly ever says anything truthful.
Good Government in Old Milwaukee
That’s why a Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Milwaukee is an excellent reminder to the country that American socialists were the original good-government reformers. Emil Seidel, Milwaukee’s first socialist mayor in 1910, cleaned up the corrupt swamp of Mayor David Rose, who openly supported houses of prostitution a block from City Hall and 24-hour gambling houses. Seidel introduced budgeting and city planning, and honest professionals replaced the government grifters who faced 276 indictments during Rose’s administration.
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For four of the next five decades through 1960, socialist Milwaukee mayors introduced socialist ideas that became basic city services everywhere: public schools, parks, libraries, health departments, low-cost housing, roads, public transportation, street lighting, water systems and sewer systems. The last one was the environmental protection and public health achievement of its day, cleaning up the open sewer that was the Milwaukee River that carried reeking human waste through the city right into Lake Michigan, which provided Milwaukee with its drinking water. More revolutionary political groups belittled Milwaukee’s socialists as “sewer socialists.”
The local party embraced the sewer socialist label as the ultimate goal of American socialism: necessary public benefits provided by sharing the cost. The New York Times hailed Milwaukee’s financial management during the Great Depression, when socialist Mayor Daniel Hoan ended 1931 with $4 million in the bank after spending hundreds of thousands for unemployment relief. In 1936, conservative Time magazine put Hoan on the cover, declaring Milwaukee “perhaps the best-governed city in the U.S.”
You can see the principles of American socialism behind every important Democratic social program since the 1930s, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Socialism isn’t a threat to democracy; it’s responsible for what most Americans consider democracy’s most important programs.
Winning Back Wisconsin
Some Americans may respond negatively to the demonized term “socialism,” but they nevertheless fought like hell in elections last November to stop Trump’s Republicans from destroying the ACA’s subsidies and healthcare protections for pre-existing conditions.
That’s the other reason Milwaukee’s a terrific choice for the DNC. Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania are three of the most important states in next year’s election. All three had long histories of voting Democratic in presidential elections before shocking even themselves by voting for Trump in 2016. Last year, all three states said they were sorry by electing anti-Trump Democrats in a clean sweep of the midterm governor and U.S. Senate races.
That led another Republican to spin the most bizarre explanation for Milwaukee winning the DNC: Because Wisconsin’s former Republican governor, Scott Walker, was so terrific at his job! That nonsensical claim came from Christian Schneider, a former rightwing columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel who regularly wrote similarly nonsensical columns that gushed over Walker.
Under Walker, Schneider wrote in a guest column in the Washington Post, “the state has become so attractive, it will be a national showcase for the same party that opposed Walker at every turn.” Schneider doesn’t explain how nefarious Democrats convinced Wisconsin voters to throw out such a breathtakingly spectacular governor in November 2018, however.
But Democrats will build on their midterm success across the industrial Midwest by bringing the excitement of their party’s national convention to Milwaukee. They’re on track to flip Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania back to the Democrats next year, making Trump the next to go as he’s carried out of the White House, raving incoherently.
