With Walker, the Fitzgeralds and our Koch conservative supreme court that's sometimes multiple times per week.
Consequently, after seriously answering that question many times, only to find that the person I explained my take on it really didn't give a shit about a thoughtful response it's hard to rise up and repeat it.
The historical truth is all that stuff about a Progressive WI is likely to be a view about the Wisconsin your grandfather knew.
Which is to say some time when a Democrat came to office without inheriting a budget crisis which takes us back before Ronald Reagan and the basic idea that the problem with government was it existed.
That means going back to the 1970's. And even then, that governor is the same guy whoin 2011 was campaign manager for supreme court justice David "the colleague strangler" Prosser. Which brings into question just how progressive he might have been.
Once upon a time WI had a progressive reputation. It was well deserved but it was earned in the early to mid 20th century and it faded in the last quarter of the 20th century under long term Gov Tommy Thompson who is the guy who brought WI out as a test market for ALEC white papers. Thompson's personal favorite was taxpayer subsidy by voucher for private schools.
Why don't we rise up? Well, Wisconsin dems have a peculiar although not entirely uncommon voting pattern...large parts of the WI party base tend to not to vote in anything but national elections (which, btw, is likely why our gubernatorial elections were moved so that they don't occur in step with that cycle). The reason that part of the Dem base doesn't pull its weight and turn out to vote in local and state elections is because voting has never made much of a difference to the lives of WI urban minorities. Most Americans remember our mythic Progressive history and are unaware that racial prejudice and discrimination in WI are among the strongest and worst in the nation The effect of that is very depressed voting except in general elections.
So because of our GOTV pattern we can't rise up high enough to throw the bastards out. Even when we put half a million people on the capital square But curiously enough, we do show up for national elections and we tend to go for the nominee representing blue.
So if you only know Wisconsin, aka Wississippi, because of our presidential voting history or your great grandfather's stories about labor, socialist movements, great schools and public places you probably think we are a progressive state.
We are not.
We are a red state that goes for democratic presidential candidates, and those great public places? Privatized, or soon to be.
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