- Welcome everyone, to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab .
I'm Tom Zinnen, I work here at the UW-Madison
Biotechnology Center.
I also work for UW Cooperative Extension.
And on behalf of those folks and our other
co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television,
the Wisconsin Alumni Association,
and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again
for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab .
We do this every Wednesday night,
50 times a year.
Tonight it's my pleasure to introduce to you
Kathy Cramer.
She's a professor in the Department of
Political Science.
She was born in Grafton, Wisconsin, and went
to high school there.
She came to UW-Madison and got her
undergraduate degree in Journalism and
in Political Science.
Then she went to the University of Michigan
and got her PhD there in Political Science,
and then moved directly from there to here
to be on the faculty.
She is also the Director of the Morgridge
Center for Public Service, which is located
in the Red Gym, and the impacts of which
are felt all over Wisconsin, and all around the world,
and probably also in the hearts of the students
that get to do that.
Tonight she gets to talk to us about the topic
of her book, and the topic of her talk tonight
is the Politics of Resentment, Rural Consciousness
in Wisconsin, and the Rise of Scott Walker.
Please join me in welcoming Kathy Cramer
to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab .
(audience clapping)
- Thank you, Tom.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Thank you.
Hi, everyone.
Thank you very much.
It really is a pleasure to join you all this evening.
Tom, thank you for inviting me to do this,
it's really an honor.
I'm going to start off with a puzzle,
or what I hope you all agree with me is a puzzle.
On the one hand, we have a variety of types
of documentation of the fact of rising
income inequality.
These graphs were not designed by me, they're
from a variety of different scholars from across the
country, basically documenting the same thing,
and that is that income inequality in the United
States has risen pretty drastically since the 1970s,
and it's increased because the income earnings
among the people in the top echelon of income
earners has gone up pretty dramatically,
while the income earnings of the rest of us
have pretty much stayed the same.
So income inequality is a fact, or is as close
to a fact as social science gets.
We have this.
And we also have, at the same time,
something else, which is evidence that our
governments are not necessarily responding
to the wishes of many of us.
So I'm going to show you a graph here that was
created by my friend Larry Bartels, who is
a Political Science Professor at Vanderbilt University.
And this is done from a study of
senators' behavior, looking at the correspondence
between the way senators in the late 80s
and early 90s voted, and the wishes of
their constituents.
What this graph is showing you is that if
you carve up the constituents into three chunks,
low-income, middle-income, and high-income,
the senators voted in the closest correspondence
with people who were wealthiest at the time,
and really, there wasn't much correspondence
between the way senators voted and the
lowest-income earners.
You might say to yourself, well this is probably
driven by the behavior of politicians
from one particular party.
And that's not the case.
This next graph shows you that with respect
to both Democrats and Republicans, the
correspondence between the way national-level
legislators, senators at the time, vote and the
wishes of their constituents have the strongest
correspondence among people who are wealthiest,
the wealthiest constituents.
Some correspondence among those in the middle
income tier and really not any correspondence
at all with people in the lowest third
of income earners.
This kind of relationship has been documented
over time by other scholars, so this relationship
continues, and by that I mean, if our national
level legislators seem to be responding to anyone
in the population, they're responding to the
wealthiest amongst us.
This is also taking place at the state level, as
other scholars have documented in recent years.
So the puzzle for me is this: income inequality
is increasing, and has been since the 1970s, we
know it, we hear about it.
At the same time, our politicians don't really
seem to be responding to many of us,
and yet, there's very little call in the population
for redistribution, any kind of redistribution.
We keep voting in politicians who don't seem to
be responding to many of us.
So the puzzle for me is why?
Why is this happening?
Well, sometimes a question gets asked a little
bit differently, and in a less charitable fashion,
and that is, it gets asked as, "How can
people be so stupid?" Right?
So that's what I'm here to talk with you all
about tonight, not why are people stupid,
but what is going on in voters' minds when
they think about politics?
So typically, when we talk about the question of
how can people be so stupid, or why is it that
people are voting against their interests,
I worry about that question, because to me,
if carried to extremes, what it's saying is
most people are incapable of participating in democracy.
And I certainly hope that's not the case.
But this isn't about my hopes, this is about
what I've learned over the past eight or
nine years.
So, typically, in the study of public opinion,
we ask the question of what's wrong with people. Right?
Again, how can people be so ignorant, how can
they be making the wrong choices?
And tonight I want you to try to think about this
differently with me, and think about it not with
respect to what are people getting wrong,
but instead, how are people understanding
their world?
How are they getting it?
How are they interpreting politics, and therefore,
why are they making the choices that they are?
A little bit of background about me.
Tom Zinnen, when he introduced me, said that
I was from Grafton, which is about here, although
my brother came and listened to a talk I gave,
I think just last week, and he said, "Oh, you know,
"you've got that wrong, you're actually pointing
to not our hometown, but a different town."
Roughly, this is where I'm from.
(audience laughing)
And I tell you that because I'm a very proud
member of the faculty here, and as Tom explained,
I was very fortunate to be able to join the faculty
here as soon as I finished my PhD.
It was my dream job.
It was the reason I went to graduate school.
And while I was sprinting for tenure,
I dreamed in my mind that if I
were fortunate enough to earn tenure here,
my next project would be something about
going around the state of Wisconsin, listening
to people talk, understanding how they're
understanding their state and the politics
within it, and at the same time, giving myself
an opportunity to find all the great places for pie
around the state.
(audience laughing)
Well, so what I did, to be honest, is I
have always been interested in the way people
interpret politics, and I have found that the best
way to study that, for me, is to listen to people
talk to one another, not necessarily to listen to
me or respond to my questions, but listen to the
way they talk to one another in the settings
they normally spend time in, with the people
they normally spend time in.
So what I did was I decided to design a study
that allowed me to study that among people
living in Wisconsin, and at the same time, use
the conversations I was observing as a way
to set questions for the Badger Poll, which is
a state-wide public opinion poll that our Survey
Center here at UW-Madison used to do.
And I thought, just my own sensibility about
public opinion is if we're truly going to gauge
the way people in the state think about politics,
we should ask questions about things that people
care about, not necessarily that I care about,
or that people in Madison or in North Hall,
where the Political Science Department is,
care about.
And so this is what I did, and I should also add,
with the blessing and the support of UW-Madison,
when I applied for a Wisconsin Idea Ira and Ineva
Reilly Baldwin grant to enable me to travel around
the state, the University said, "Absolutely, great idea.
"But while you're out there, would you please
also ask about us?"
Ask about the UW-Madison, what do people think
about the UW-Madison?
So what I did was to carve up the state into
eight different regions, depending on political
leanings, population density, type of industry,
different demographics, also type of agriculture.
And in each of those regions, I sampled
several places,
typically a large place and a small place.
And then I sampled for some additional places
to get a wide range of places.
I wasn't aiming for perfect representation of the
whole state of Wisconsin.
What I was aiming for was a wide variation in
places, particularly with respect to
socioeconomic status.
At the time I started this study, way back in 2007,
I was very interested in the way social class
mattered for the way people thought about politics.
So I wanted some low-income
communities, some higher income communities,
communities that varied by the type of local
industry, and even level of education.
So this is a picture of the 27 communities that
I eventually visited.
And what I did was to, back in 2007, I sampled
these places and then I called up the county
Extension Office, and I said, "Where in, for example,
"such and such Wisconsin, do people get together
on a regular basis that I might get access to?"
And following here in the next few minutes are
some of the pictures of the places I visited.
You will see pictures of gas stations, for example.
I spent a long time in gas stations, because in
many small towns in Wisconsin, the gas station
is the place where people go to get the news,
typically in the morning.
So I ended up going to a lot of diners,
a lot of gas stations, some churches, a few types of
other establishments, where everybody in
the community knew there was a group of
regulars who got together on a regular basis,
usually daily, to talk about whatever,
whatever was of concern to them.
For example, I would be told about a gas station.
So back in May or the summer of 2007, I would
walk in and I would say, "Hi, I'm Kathy,
"from the University of Wisconsin- Madison.
Do you mind if I join you this morning?"
And they would laugh, you're all being very polite,
yes, they would laugh a little and say, "Sure, lady."
And then, I would give them a business card so
they knew my name and had a way to contact me
if they wanted to.
I also passed out a token of my appreciation
which was typically a football schedule, or a pen,
or a pad of Post-it Notes, and I learned very
quickly, as you will see, that I had to say, "No,
your taxpayer dollars did not go to pay for these."
(audience laughing)
"They were donated by the alumni association."
And then I would ask if it was alright if I turned
on my recorder, I had a digital recorder that I
used to record all the conversations, and then I
would say, "Tell me, what are the big concerns
in this community?"
And then, the conversation would start.
I had a few other questions each time I visited
these groups that I would ask, but I tried,
as much as possible, to let the conversation
flow naturally.
There were 27 communities I visited.
39 groups overall across those communities.
I visited most of them between two and three
times, some groups as many as five or six times.
I was doing this study between May of 2007 and
November 2012.
I thought that I was wrapping up my study in late
2010, but at that time, as you recall, Wisconsin
politics got very interesting, so I stayed in the
field a few more years.
Here's what I learned.
You know I'm from Grafton.
I explained myself as a small-town Wisconsinite
for many, many years.
But I quickly learned that Grafton,
population of about 7,000 when I was growing up,
is not small-town Wisconsin.
I learned, once I got outside of the Madison and
Milwaukee metro areas, that there is sort of a
mental map of the state that is more prominent
when you move outside of those metro areas,
of Madison and Milwaukee, and then the
rest of the state.
Sometimes you hear the term "outstate Wisconsin," right?
Here's the map of Wisconsin again.
Just a reminder that, you know, that our main
metro areas are here, Madison, and Milwaukee,
but there's a lot of geography left in the rest of the state.
And so, many people would explain to
me as they're talking about local events, or state
policy, federal policy, even, that they would carve
up the state into these two main regions:
Madison and Milwaukee, sometimes the m&m's ,
and then, the rest of us.
I also heard that Madison, to many people,
represents both the University and the
State Legislature.
It's sort of a center of power, and for many folks,
the decision making is all sort of a part of one
mix, which is a little bit surprising if you live in
Madison, particularly in these times, where we
don't often think of the University and the
Legislature operating in sync.
(audience laughing)
There's another part to this geography,
and that is this basic story line that I heard in
many different parts of the state, again,
primarily in so-called outstate Wisconsin,
outside of the main metro areas,
that Madison and Milwaukee suck in all the taxpayer dollars.
So, Madison sucks in all the taxpayer dollars,
spends them on itself or on Milwaukee,
and people in outstate Wisconsin
never see what they pay in return.
So, it's a story partly about the resources, but it's
also partly a story about power, about who has
power in the state.
And I heard many times that there's this perception
that Madison makes all the decisions, and
communicates them to the rest of us,
but we don't have a say.
Nobody's listening to what we think.
There's not a reverse listening mechanism built in.
The decisions are communicated
outward and there isn't listening going
on in return.
So it's partly about the resources, partly about
the power, but also, partly about respect.
So many times I heard people say, "You know,
"the thing is, those people in the cities,
"they just don't get us.
"They don't understand how we live,
and they don't understand our values."
Let me give you some examples of this,
what it sounded like in their own words.
Mind you, these are recorded verbatim.
The names I'll refer to I've made up to protect
the identity of folks.
But I think I can explain it to you, I can give you
a kind of a general conception of what this
sounded like, but I think it's most meaningful
when you hear it in their own words.
So in this conversation, I'm talking with a group
of retired and working women in the northwest
corner of the state, and they meet once a week
for breakfast in the back of a local restaurant,
and I've been asking them about University of
Wisconsin Madison.
And Teresa, who's a former teacher, is explaining
to me, well, her own sentiments about how people
downstate in Madison and Milwaukee treat
young people from her neck of the woods,
if you will.
Teresa says, "As a former educator, I resented
"highly comments such as there is no education
north of Highway 8." [which is a highway
that runs east west across the top tier of the state.]
They say things like, "These kids aren't--
"We send them such absolutely excellent and
"well-prepared students, that they have the attitude
"that we are the hick area of the state.
It was painful."
And I asked her.
I said, "So where did you get that from, from recruiters?
And she said, "No, professors."
And I said, "Really? When they would visit?"
And she said, "Well, yeah, or publish newspaper
articles, or you know."
And that was a little distressful, because I think
northern Wisconsin feels a little far away from
Madison anyway, and we keep waving our hands
and saying, "Yoo-hoo,
"there's another half of a state up here!
Up north is not Wausau!"
Here's another example from a town not far
from there, but farther south.
This is a group of people who meet once a week
in the basement of a church, because this church
is the main, is really the only meeting space
in this community.
There's no gas station, it's a very tiny town,
and so the people who meet there, some of
them are part of the congregation, but some
of the people are local business owners
from nearby communities.
There's some farmers,
there's some retirees, there's some stay-at-home moms.
It's a mix of people.
And again, we're asking about University of
Wisconsin-Madison.
And I'm asking them, I've asked them,
"What do you think the university does well?"
And they have lots to say.
And then I get around to talking with them about
what do you think the University of Wisconsin-
Madison does not do well
when you think about it?
And Martha says, "Well, represents our area.
"I mean, we're strange to Madison.
"They want us to do everything for Madison's
"laws and the way they do things, but we
"totally live differently than the city people live.
"So they need to think more rural, instead of all
this city area."
And Donna says, "We can't afford to educate our children
"like they can in the cities.
"Simple as that.
We don't have the advantages."
And Ethel says, "All the things they do
"based on Madison and Milwaukee, never us."
And Martha says, "Yeah, we don't have the
"advantages that they give their local people
"there, I think, a lot of times, and it's probably
"because they don't understand how rural
"people live, and what we deal with,
and our problems."
This general perspective I'm describing
I call "rural consciousness," a social science-y term
which explains something that's actually
not all that complicated.
Basically, what it is this identity as a rural
person, combined with this perception that I'm
not getting my fair share.
People and people in communities like mine are
getting the short end of the stick, right?,
which is what I mean by distributive injustice.
Again, there's several parts to it.
It's this perception of where the power is,
who has the power in the state.
It's also this perception of where the resources go,
how they're allocated, and where they're
drawn in from, and also this notion of respect,
that rural areas are ignored and disrespected.
What I want to explain to you is how this colors
attitudes toward UW-Madison, and then I'm
going to come back around to this question
of income inequality, and how this perspective
has been a very fertile ground for arguments
for smaller government,
or small government candidates.
So first, with respect to UW-Madison, as I
mentioned briefly a few moments ago, even in
groups that were critical of the University, there's
a lot of love towards this institution.
I mean you can, I can, honestly, walk into just
about any establishment around the state and
encounter someone wearing Badger gear, right?
When I ask people what does the UW-Madison
do well, people did not, were not at a lack of
things to say.
Oftentimes they would say Badger sports, the marching band.
They would eventually get around
to research, especially research that was
prominent in the news at the time,
so for example, stem cell research.
Many people had great stories about their
experience at UW Hospital,
very heartwarming stories about it.
And yet, perhaps it's because
people feel as though this institution is theirs,
there's also a great sense of distance from it.
So in these perceptions that I was explaining
to you about how people feel distant from
the power centers of the state, or feel as though
the resources are allocated in Madison and
Milwaukee and not their communities, the same
kind of sentiment was used to talk about people's
association with UW-Madison.
There was this sense that it's too expensive
to send a child here, it's hard to get in.
There's a sense that the faculty here
are lazy, liberal, and elitist,
meaning we don't teach our own classes, right?
There's TAs who are teaching the classes instead of us.
This perception that you have your summers off.
And there's also perception that people who
are on the faculty, or even not on the faculty
but working here at UW-Madison, earn income
that is far, far more than you can find in a typical
job in many of the small communities
around the state.
So in the same way that people talked about
life in general in the state, perceptions of
UW-Madison were woven in there.
I want to say, and I'm not just saying this,
partly because UW-Extension is sort of in the
room and responsible for this wonderful
program, but when people did talk about their
fondness toward UW-Madison in particular,
people would also bring up Extension with me,
and talk very warmly about Extension
in their community.
So, this is somewhat separate from UW-Madison,
but in people's mind, UW-Madison was partly
about Cooperative Extension.
Here's, now, how this perspective is also
related to support for small government.
I'm going to give you three storylines of
how this works, so that's what I mean
by the narrative.
I realize this is kind of social science-y approach.
Stick with me, you'll see what I mean.
Okay, so one is that when I was engaged in
conversations with people about specific policy
areas, the conversation often had this storyline
of, "You know, Kathy, we're not opposed to
"spending on government programs in general,
"but the thing is that if we pay higher taxes,
that money's never going to come back to us."
I heard this most commonly with respect to
education in outstate Wisconsin.
So people would say things to me like we really
value education in our community, we're proud
of the great schools we have here, but you know,
they're asking us to pay more for education.
It's just not something we can support because
that money's going to go to Milwaukee,
or it's going to go to Madison,
and we're not going to see that money come back
and benefit our own schools.
That's one way it sounded.
Here's another narrative.
That even though there's a substantial
portion of the workforce in any community
in the state that's employed by a government,
roughly 10 percent of any municipality in the state,
folks there, roughly 10 percent of folks there are
employed by local, county, state, or federal
government, there's a perception that even if those
folks have lived in that community a long, long
time, decades, they're not really from there.
They're not driven by decisions that are made
in this place, they're driven by decisions that are
made downstate, in Madison.
DNR, for example.
How many of you have heard people critical
of DNR?
I know I'm not the only one.
Public school teachers, as well, right?
There's a sense that whatever is driving those
folks, those government employees, those
decisions are made by urban people based
on urban values.
They're not us.
They're not one of us.
So, with respect to Act 10, you can see how this
worked, that people would be talking about things like:
public employees aren't people like us,
they're driven by decisions that are made in
places that aren't respectful of people like us.
If you look outside at our community, which so
clearly is dying, in some respects, whether it's
the change in farming, or the change in the
businesses on main street, whatever government
is doing, it is not working for places like this.
So why would we ever want more of it?
Right?
And following from this was sentiments about
how it's time that public employees pay
their share, right?
Why is it that I, as an outstate Wisconsinite, am
working so hard to make ends meet, and I can't
afford healthcare, but you're asking me to pay
higher taxes so that I can pay for healthcare
for public employees?
Doesn't make sense to me.
That leads me to the third narrative of how this worked.
Underlying that attitude about
who's working hard in the population
are these notions of deservingness.
So there's this sense that,
you know, I'm working really hard, as a person
in outstate Wisconsin, and oftentimes I'd be
hearing this from people who were doing
physical labor during the day, sometimes loggers,
sometimes people working in agriculture.
And the attitude was that, you know,
as a person who uses my body all day, I'm
working really hard, but you, Kathy, like first
of all, you're driving around the state in your
Volkswagen Jetta, having coffee with us,
like how's that hard work, right?
And also, sometimes, this is the best
shorthand that I came across for this attitude,
was people would say when do you
take a shower?
And I'd say well, before I go to work,
and they'd say exactly.
I take a shower when I come home.
And that was an illustration to me of their conception of
people who are deserving
are people who are working hard,
and people who are working hard
aren't people who are sitting behind a desk thinking,
and talking all day.
So, part of this notion of deservingness, and
hard work, we have to acknowledge that for a
long time, there's been a racial component to this,
and notions about who works hard in the
population have been used, at times, to bolster
this stereotype of people of color as being lazy,
lazier than white folks in the population.
And so as I'm telling you about this us versus
them perspective, urban versus rural,
I suppose some of you are thinking isn't
this about race?
Isn't this about people in outstate Wisconsin
saying, you know, I don't like those people
in the city, meaning people who are
racial minorities.
That is undoubtedly in the mix here, but it's
so much more complicated than that.
And so as you hear what I'm saying, I encourage
you to think about how this isn't, this isn't just
about race, and also it is about race, and that's
partly why our racial tension and our racial
injustice is so difficult and so complex,
because there are many parts to it.
Even when we don't talk about race,
we're talking about who's deserving,
we're talking about who has power,
and it's all built on a long legacy in which
we have often criticized expanding government
by pointing to who is not deserving,
and certain components of the population.
So I want to come back to the question
I started off with, a while ago,
and that is that how are people in outstate
Wisconsin, or small-town Wisconsin,
rural Wisconsin, understanding redistribution
and the appropriate role of government?
And my short answer for this is,
through resentment.
In many of these conversations, what I was
hearing was resentment, kind of this slow
burning feeling about I'm not getting
what I deserve.
I'm not getting my fair share, and somebody
else is, and they don't deserve it.
And a resentfulness toward that.
And again, it's complicated because it's both
resentment towards cities and city people,
but it's also resentment toward public
employees, it's resentment toward people
of color, and it's all in this context,
where we see it day after day, my goodness,
especially in the presidential campaign,
this attitude of they don't deserve what
they're getting, and I'm not getting what
I should be.
You may be asking: Okay, but how much of
this is based in fact?
Is it the case that small-town Wisconsinites aren't
getting their fair share?
So I want to show you some facts for a moment.
This is a bar chart, it's just showing you where
state and federal expenditures went in 2010,
based on the type of county in Wisconsin.
There's 72 counties in Wisconsin, and rural
counties here are counties where the population's
less than 10,000 folks.
Micropolitan is between 10,000 and 50,000 folks,
and metropolitan counties are those
50,000 and over.
Just from this basic bar chart, you can look
at this and say yeah, most of the money
goes to metropolitan counties.
But, of course, because that's where all
the people are, right?
So let's carve it up a little bit differently.
Let's look per capita.
And what I'm going to show you here, is that with
respect to state aid and federal aid, there isn't
a very strong relationship, if there is one at all,
between how rural a county is and how much
state or federal dollars it's getting.
What this chart is showing you
is each of the dots is one of the 72 counties.
And so, it's as you go to
the right across the graph, those counties are
more rural, and then the Y axis is the number of,
the amount of money per capita, thousands
of dollars per capita spent in state aid.
Again, this is 2010 dollars, not much of a
relationship, depending on...
So per capita, it's not necessarily the case that
rural folks are getting less state aid.
Same basic thing with respect to federal aid.
Then you might say: okay, well is it the case that
more tax money is being sucked unfairly
from rural counties?
Not really, and this is basically the same chart,
so farther to the right is a more rural county.
Again, the Y axis is thousands of dollars per capita.
And what this is showing you is that it looks like
more rural counties, people living in more rural
counties, are actually paying in less to the
collective pot, than other folks living in
metro counties.
Same with respect to federal tax money.
Well then, how about we turn on investment.
So if we look at how much people are paying in
compared to what they're getting back.
If anything, if you're a person living in a rural
county, you're actually getting a little bit more
than your so-called fair share, okay?
State dollars and federal dollars.
But I want to pause here and say these charts,
you might say, these people are just wrong.
They are just wrong.
Well, the thing is that, it's not about the facts.
It's about the perception.
And I want to show you a few more graphs
that shed a little light on where this
perception is coming from.
So here, again, are the 72 counties, and here's
median household income.
It's much lower in our rural counties, in the
state of Wisconsin.
Here's folks living below the poverty line.
Slightly more people living below the poverty
line in our rural counties.
Unemployment, same kind of story.
So when people were telling me,
"We're having a hard time making ends meet here.
"Don't you get that?
"Can't you just look outside the window
and see the rough time that our community is in?"
That's a real experience.
They're having a hard time making ends meet.
These perceptions of injustice are not necessarily
driven by looking at a graph like this.
Oftentimes, they may be driven by mass media,
seeing perceptions of people doing well in
other places, not their own.
Maybe it's driven in part by the tourism industry.
When we come in from relatively wealthier
places in the state, and spend a lot of money,
or when they're doing their own grocery
shopping and they see the pricey champagne
bottles in their liquor area, it's not for people
in their community, oftentimes, it's from the
visitors from other parts of the state, right?
So those perceptions are based
on something real.
So now I want to turn to our contemporary
politics and share with you about what I've
learned about how this matters.
These are just perceptions, right?, but they
do matter, and here's why.
Because some people are very, very good
at tapping into them.
Wisconsin, I don't need to remind you, has kind
of been ground zero for debates about the
appropriate role of government in recent years.
Scott Walker is a person who, whether consciously
or unconsciously, knew how to tap into this
rural consciousness, this thing I'm calling
rural consciousness.
I want to give you some examples of what that
sounded like as he was running for government,
governor, excuse me.
I have up here a question to myself:
What does this sound like in campaigns, when
politicians try to tap into this thing?
And for one thing, it sounds like a train.
Here's what I mean.
Back in 2010, in the gubernatorial race, you'll
recall one of the issues was this high speed train
between Madison and Milwaukee.
I didn't recognize it at the time, but looking
back over transcripts from debates and such,
it was clear that this was an issue that Scott
Walker used very well to tap into this divide,
sort of Madison and Milwaukee versus
the rest of the state.
So here's something he said during the first
debate in the primary, in the 2010
gubernatorial race.
And he, I probably don't need to remind you
who these characters are, but Jim Doyle was
not the incumbent, but the previous sitting
governor at the time, Democrat, right?
And Tom Barrett is not yet the Democratic opponent,
but eventually will be.
Tom Barrett was the Milwaukee mayor at the time.
Scott Walker was County Executive of Milwaukee
County at the time.
And Doyle had accepted $810 million from
the federal government to build this high speed
train between Madison and Milwaukee.
And here's what Walker said:
"If you look at what Jim Doyle and Tom Barrett
"have put on the table in spending $810 million
"on a high-speed train line between
"Milwaukee and Madison, with no assurance
"that it will go to Eau Claire or La Crosse,
"or anywhere else, it's just about those two areas.
"And it's about taking that money, money that
"will cost the citizens of Wisconsin up to $10 million
"per year, according to their numbers,
"I think it will actually be much more,
"that's $10 million that doesn't go to fix
"the road that goes up from West Salem through
"the cutout up to Black River Falls.
"It doesn't fix streets in La Crosse.
"That's money that's taken away from our local
"roads, and our bridges, and our other
transportation needs today."
The dividing lines are pretty clear there.
Who's the "our"?
Not the people of Madison and Milwaukee,
but the other folks, right?
Here's another way that it came across.
When Walker was talking about why he pursued
Act 10, he explained it partly in terms of public
employees in places like Madison and Milwaukee.
Here's an example.
He's explaining to the American Enterprise
Institute his actions with respect to Act 10
and why he pursued the policies with respect
to public employees in that bill,
and he said this:
He said, "We were able to rein in abuses of things
"like overtime and other excesses out there, by no longer
"having opportunities where, in our case,
"some of our state employees could literally
"call in sick on their shift, and then come back
"to work the next shift on overtime.
"Or, bus drivers in places like Madison, that made
$150,000 or more because of overtime."
In places like Madison.
Interesting.
Okay, how about the presidential campaign?
We haven't heard a lot about rural versus urban divides.
There's been some, and I could talk more about that later,
but in general, to me, the politics
of resentment are all over the place.
Donald Trump is another person who's been
pretty adept at tapping into them.
You hear many people say, "What is going on
"with our politics these days?
How can it be that Donald Trump is so successful?"
I actually don't think it's a mystery,
given what I heard around the state.
Many times it's called anger, I think that's
part of it, but for me, resentment is this
thing that's been around for a while.
I know it's been in Madison since May of 2007,
if not well before that.
I mean in Wisconsin since May of 2007.
But it's something that when tapped into,
can be anger, and pretty intense.
A pretty intense emotion that can mobilize people.
So, I want to sum up with a few thoughts on
what the lessons are from these conversations
for politics in general, in Wisconsin and elsewhere.
And also, I hope to leave you with a joke that
will make you laugh, as well as some ideas about
how we might turn things around.
So, when people ask this question of
are people voting against their interests?
I want to point out that what I heard in these
conversations was not people being fooled by
social issues, like abortion.
Sometimes that's the conclusion that people draw,
that people are being fooled into voting,
for example, for the Republican party, by being
distracted by other issues.
People were talking about their economic interests
here, all the time.
They were talking about their concern for their
own livelihood, jobs, and such.
And so I just want to point out that it's not the case that
people are being fooled away from
economic interest.
Economic considerations still matter
very much here.
Also, I talked a bit about partisanship, but one
thing I want to point out is that I did not encounter
many strong Republicans or strong Democrats
when I was doing this research.
And I've told you mainly about what I learned
from so-called outstate Wisconsin, but I spent
time in our cities and our suburbs, too.
And in almost every group, when I got around to the
question of, you know, "Which political party
do you think best represents people like you?"
almost always people would say, "Well, neither!"
And people expressed a lot of discontent with
both political parties.
And I think it's in our interest to ask
if it's not partisanship that's driving who people
vote for, what else is going on?
And I found time and time again that this question
of who is deserving, who works hard, was much
more important for the way people were making
sense of politics, whether it was state or
national politics.
So, here's where I get to the alternatives.
And by alternatives, I want to say that I'm not
talking about what's the alternative to the
Republican party.
What I'm talking about is what's the alternative
to a politics in which people are making their
arguments on the basis of denigrating certain
social groups, certain entire groups of people,
whether they be Madisonians or Milwaukeeans,
or people of color or immigrants.
Isn't there another way that we can have a democracy?
And I believe there is.
I think one thing is that it's absolutely necessary
that we ask more of our elected officials.
We're a long way from that, I realize, but to the
extent that we can, we should insist that our
elected officials make their arguments on the
basis of something else than the backs of
other citizens.
I also think we should draw attention to
what government is doing for us.
Again, this is not an argument in favor of
the Democratic party.
This is an argument just in recognition that
democracy is partly about government,
and we would do well to understand what it
is that government does for us before we
start, I shouldn't say start, before we
dismantle it.
There are things that government does for us
that are very invisible to many people.
So, for example, and I use the term submerged
benefits of government here based on some
recent research that's been done in
political science.
Suzanne Mettler is one person in particular, at
Cornell University, who has looked at this,
that when we ask people, "Have you ever been
"the recipient of a government social program?"
very, very few people say that they have.
But when you ask people whether you've taken
the mortgage interest tax deduction,
over 90 percent of the population says, "Yes, I have."
That's a government program.
That's the kind of thing I'm talking about.
That many of us benefit from the government
far more than we recognize.
I think it's worthwhile to acknowledge it.
I also think it's worthwhile to think back to those
bar charts I was showing you about which
income tier senators seem to be responsive to
in the late 80s and early 90s, and ask who are
politicians listening to, and to demand that
they listen to all of us.
I also wonder about our rural areas.
I learned a lot about rural Wisconsin, and I
consider myself a lifelong Wisconsinite.
I was surprised by a lot of this sentiment, and
it's left me wondering are our policies meeting
the needs of our rural areas?
There's some pretty serious need in outstate
Wisconsin, as in other places, granted.
But I wonder, could something be different?
I've talked mainly about perceptions from
outstate Wisconsin.
It's absolutely the case that many folks in cities
in our state, Madison and Milwaukee, also
perceive the government's not responsive
to their needs.
I think there is some need for our legislators
to understand people form other parts of
the state, more than they do currently.
I think the current context of partisan
embattlement prevents a lot of that,
but we certainly need more of it.
With respect to UW-Madison, in particular,
here are three main lessons that I've taken away:
One is that sometimes on campus we say
we need to communicate better, we need to
tell people what we're doing.
I suppose that's part of the deal, but I also think
part of it is in the way we do our jobs.
Those of us on campus who do get out to other
parts of the state, I think we need to do more
about just chatting with the locals, to be honest.
Telling people what we're up to, and explaining
to them why we think our research matters
for their lives.
So in my mind, this isn't about just packaging
our messages differently.
It's about actually listening to people more,
and understanding where they come from,
and trying to figure out how our own work
could contribute to their lives.
I also think, related to this, that that listening
should not just be for show.
We shouldn't have town hall meetings to make
it look like we're concerned.
That listening should be in the service of
establishing long-term, mutually
beneficial relationships.
That's hard and expensive to do.
It takes time, which none of us have a lot of,
but I think it's very important.
And this is also not just a plug for the
Morgridge Center for Public Service, although
it is that, but I think, and I found it very refreshing
to work at the Morgridge Center for Public Service
for the past two years because it is a place where
we're constantly talking about the common good.
We're constantly talking about service to others.
And I think that is a theme that, wow, we are
so hungry for.
What about the common good? Where did that go?
Let's draw more attention to it.
Finally, I still do this, too,
but I encourage you when you leave here tonight,
the next time it comes up in conversation,
"How can people be so stupid?"
think about whether that's the right question to ask.
Is it that the ordinary American is ignorant
and not capable of participating in democracy?
Or is there something else going on
that we ought to worry about?
Finally, let me try to make you laugh,
because I know this is very depressing,
a lot of it.
What I'm going to share with you
is my very favorite conversation from these,
my five-plus years of travels around the state,
and I know some of you have heard this before,
but every time I say it, it warms my heart.
This is a group of folks who, men, retirees,
people on their way to work, who are meeting
in basically central west Wisconsin, and it
took me a while to find these guys because
they meet behind a curtain in the back of
a diner every weekday morning, starting at
about 6:30, and they play dice.
So it took me a while before someone divulged
this to me, but the first time I went, and went
through that curtain at the back of the place,
they stopped playing dice for a good 45 minutes,
and at the end of the game they said,
"Kathy, you can come back,
"but you're going to shake dice the next time you do,
you better bring your change purse."
And they said, "Do you know how to play
Ship Captain and Crew?"
And I said, "Why yes, I do."
Thankfully, as a lifelong Wisconsinite I'd played
Ship Captain and Crew many times with my family.
And Ship Captain and Crew, for those of you
who don't know, is a dice game where you get three rolls.
You have a little dice cup, five dice,
and you shake three rolls,
and you have to shake a six, a five, and a four,
in that order, and the remaining two dice
determine how high your roll is.
Well these folks would start off playing a quarter
a round, and then at 7:25 it'd be the dollar
round, so kind of high stakes toward the end
of the morning, before they all ran off
to work or wherever they were going.
On my third visit, I'm playing dice with them,
and also in town that day, there's a horse auction,
and they're asking me about the horse auction.
So Henry says to me, "Why don't you buy one
"of them horses?
I got a trailer."
And I say, "Well, I'm not sure where I would keep him."
They knew by this time that I lived right in the
middle of Madison, about a mile out from
the stadium, and I invited them to use my driveway
if they ever needed to, for a football game or such.
So I say, "I'm not sure where I would keep him."
And Henry says, "Huh?" And I say,
"Well, I don't know where I would keep him."
And Henry says, "Ah, you'd keep him in Madison,
that's where they keep all the..."
(audience laughing)
And he says, "Well, basically, all you've got to do
"is buy the front end of the horse.
They've got the back end in Madison."
(audience laughing)
So, funny, but here's the problem.
We're playing dice and I keep winning,
and winning, and winning.
And here I am, I'm three years into
my project here, and I know full-well by this time,
there's this perception, "Oh, you people in Madison,
"You parachute in, you take all our money, and leave,"
and so, I'm really uncomfortable
so I'm joking along with him and trying to
lighten the mood a little bit.
And I say, "Well, I come and I ask for your thoughts,
and I take your money."
And Richard says, "Well, I tell you what,
that's good, though, because we have so little of it."
and I say, "Well, it all goes to Madison anyway, right?"
Ha-ha-ha.
And Howard says, "We expect nothing less from Madison."
And Richard says, "Well, at least it won't
cost any postage to get it down there now."
(audience laughing)
So, thank you all very much.
Thank you.
(applause)