Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is “more Nixonian than Nixon” according to former Nixon aide John Dean. Walker, now viewed as a serious contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, reinforces Dean’s description with a political strategy that updates Nixon’s infamous “Southern strategy” of 1968 aimed at capitalizing on whites’ racial resentments. But when I first met Walker back in 1996, I would have described him as the nicest conservative I had encountered in public life. I was then lobbying for a progressive coalition building support in the Wisconsin State Legislature for a campaign reform that would set up rapid disclosure of campaign contributions. Then-state Rep. Scott Walker proved to be an unexpected and enthusiastic sponsor.
Back in the 1990’s, the black-haired, boyish-looking Walker was clearly one of the most conservative of Republican legislators.But he was unfailingly respectful and friendly to me as we held news conferences together and strategized over coffee on how to win passage of the disclosure bill. His friendliness and aw-shucks manner seemed to be grounded in his background as a small-town preacher’s son and Eagle Scout.
But once elected as governor, Walker has emerged as one of America’s most dangerous political figures, committed to serving corporate contributors like the Koch borthers by rolling back decades of reforms that have produced labor rights, a high-quality public-education system, and strong environmental protections. Meanwhile, major corporations are benefitting from $2.3 billion in tax cuts by 2020 enacted by Walker.
With supreme deviousness, Walker often unleashes these regressive moves without warning, as with his 2011 attack on public-worker unions and his sudden reversal of his position on the “right-to-work” affecting private-sector workers.
In fact, Nixon — the force behind “Watergate’s” sleazy, secretive fund-raising from the super-rich and political dirty tricks— has perhaps met his match in Scott Walker. In his latest budget proposal, Walker literally tried to delete “the search for truth” from the University of Wisconsin’s mission statement — and then lied about it when confronted on his surreptitious switch.
Walker, like Nixon, has endless ambition and no reservations about imposing policies which harm his constituents while delighting a vast network of corporate donors. Similarly, Walker has the same penchant for breaking campaign promises and launching sneak policy attacks on working people and racial minorities.
Walker signing of the “right-to-work” law March 9 contradicted reassuring statements made during his latest gubernatorial campaign just a few months back and over the past several years.
With Wisconsin wages already 15% below the national private-sector average (while the top 1% hauls in a record 18.2 % of all Wisconsin income ), the very last thing needed by Wisconsin workers was legislation aimed at lowering their bargaining power. “Right to work” laws ban unions from collecting fees from all the workers they are legally required to rep resent. (Union membership cannot be required, so “compulsory unionism is a bogus claim concocted by Walker and his allies) This prohibition divides workers, depletes union treasuries, and hampers their ability to survive.
The result is a union membership share of just 5.7% of workers in “right-to-work” states compared with 15.8% in states where unions are allowed to assess all who benefit from their services and representation, according to a Congressional Research Service study. For working families, this means higher earnings outside “right-to-work” states, with estimates of the advantage ranging from 3% to as high as $7,226 per year for workers, according to the CRS report in 2012. Walker’s new assault on private-sector workers parallels his sudden blitzkrieg attack on public employees’ union rights in 2011.
Shortly after public employees staged a massive rebellion in 2011, Walker and Wisconsin Republican legislators responded with a new law limiting voting rights that would have an especially harsh impact on racial minorities and other Democratic-leaning constituencies lacking photo IDs. Frances Fox Piven, co-author of Keeping Down the Black Vote, told me at the time, “We saw labor protests of unprecedented size and intensity over limiting their voice as workers. And then [protesters] were greeted with a law to limit their power electorally, too.”
But Walker has not only embraced significant elements of Southern-style economic policies which have suppressed unions, kept wages low and held back educational attainment and public health while adding largesse to big corporations.
Significantly for the entire nation, Walker’s political approach has also increasingly come to resemble Nixon’s “Southern strategy” with its focus on pumping up whites’ fear of a growing Latino and black population and middle-class economic insecurities as they lose status and income. This strategy is largely an extension of the way that Walker has operated as state legislator (1993-2002), Milwaukee county executive (2002-2010), and governor since 2011.
Walker oversaw just 111,295 of the 250,000 jobs that were his central promise of the 2010 campaign. To shift responsibility away from his policies, Walker has sought to direct public resentment over sliding real wages and precarious financial conditions to the economic system’s biggest victims: the long-term unemployed. “My belief is we shouldn’t be paying for them to sit on the couch, watching TV or playing Xbox,” Walker stated last fall. “We need to get them the skills to get back in the game and get back to work.”
Again deflecting attention away from his failure to produce the promised 250,000 jobs, Walker pronounced, Wisconsin “doesn’t have a jobs problem, we have a worker problem.” The clear implication was that workers were too lazy or too unskilled to fill available jobs, a conclusion refuted by a study of Wisconsin workers and job opportunities. In the context of a Republican Party forever lurching further rightward, Walker has felt increasingly safe in playing “dog-whistle” politics, manipulating of whites’ racial resentments. One central element is intransigent opposition to almost all government programs because they supposedly confiscate hard-earned dollars of taxpayers—whose whiteness is hinted at — while serving only to perpetuate “dependence.”
As Walker described the Obama Administration, “I see a president who seems to feels success should be measured by how many people are dependent on the government,” Walker said. Under Obama, government assistance has become less of a safety net and more of “a hammock,” he said.
Examining Walker’s overall record and his presidential pre-primary strategy, one cannot help but notice the unmistakable resemblance to the political lessons outlined by the late GOP strategist Lee Atwater. Atwater was a practitioner of the ruthless politics in which he took great pride until he was on his deathbed. During his career, Atwater advised his Republican candidates to avoid direct racial appeals and instead rely on coded or what was later called “dog-whistle” appeals to whites.
In a remarkably frank interview (you can see the video at <http://bit.ly/1tBtZQ3>), Atwater once described the evolution of conservative politics and the “Southern strategy”: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘n****r, n****r, n****r.’ By 1968 you can’t say n****r—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites… ’We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘n****r, n****r.’”
Scott Walker is speaking in what Atwater would have called “more abstract” terms than the overt racism that prevailed in the South until the late 1960s. But his appeal is merely a slightly more refined version of the coded but divisive language that Richard Nixon used to propel himself to victory in 1968.
As he did when I first met him, Walker maintains a smiling, congenial style toward everyone. But behind this mask, Walker has shown a willingness to trample the voting rights of people of color, grind down worker rights through sudden sneak attacks, form alliances with white supremacists both crude and sophisticated, and utilize anti-urban statements and policies to build a base hostile to people of color. By harnessing a white base, inflamed by Walker’s race-coded “Southern Strategy” themes, with a vast list of big donors, Walker hopes to win the White House and impose his vision of a revived robber-baron capitalism on the nation.
Roger Bybee is a Milwaukee-based writer and University of Illinois visiting professor in Labor Education. Email winterbybee@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2015
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