Finger-pointing is oversimplification; not leadership

I cried Friday---hard, and for a long time---about the uphill battle one faces in the world of overabundant misinformation to advocate for a rational middle seeking not to exploit, but to emphasize the best in every person, and in every group---even the flawed. I'm also overstressed because I am over midway through law school, and suddenly confronted the idea that perhaps those institutions I'd sought to join by starting this journey were less worthy of my respect. Sadly, as a hopeful future state employee, it was my would-be boss who told me just how little I should value these institutions, filled as they are with greedy benefiteers.

What bothers me about Scott Walker’s governing style is not that, as a WI voter last November, I didn’t expect the policies he’d promote; though I did underestimate him, thinking people were confusing him as a slightly thinner haired Marco Rubio. What does not sit well with me is the commitment to high-stakes finger pointing. First, the trial lawyers were the bad guys—driving business away with their frivolous lawsuits. Next, President Obama is a trying to bankrupt our state, purposely, because his administration allocated $810M for high-speed rail between Milwaukee and Madison. Then it was time for union workers—for all teachers, notably, as this rhetoric seems to go—to “pay their fair share,” which meant not just actually paying, but releasing their ability to collectively bargain. A move that makes adopting Daubert with teeth in WI small potatoes. (Thanks for your services and legal scholarship, and all, Professor Blinka, but your reasonableness test alone is bankrupting us!)

In Wisconsin under Walker's leadership, at once, there is a call for understanding of the serious plight we are in--but an absence of calls to come together. There can be no unity where there are no calls for shared sacrifice--but you get the sense that unity matters little. Instead, we get the rhetoric of class warfare: vilification of one group at another’s expense. Making the group who is unaffected feel as if the problems will go away but for these who are fighting their image as the sole problem. I say this as someone unincluded in all groups vilified thus far, with the exception of those supporters of the President who would like to modernize rail nationwide. But that’s less personal than what I’ve been seeing in this battle-the-teacher week. Debate today devolves quickly; talk turns coarse and it takes a huge leader to soften proposals publicly and make the machine work in a way that doesn’t let the commentariat lose it on one another. The problem, though, if you glance at the summary of this year's budget bill, is the purposefulness of the finger pointing. What irks me is the explicitness of the blame in a world too complicated to point a finger unless you're pointing at the collective whole.

Vilifying any group is not leadership—that is abdication. How can a solution be palatable when people feel under attack? How can you rationally think about policy when you have to defend your own character? (See, e.g., the television commercials---funded by who?!!---calling for support of the budget proposal because unions must pay their fair share; even if this was so, the tone of these ads---right after we're through watching ads from the political season!---is all "us versus them" all the time.) 

Does democracy mean helping only those (like the police and firefighters unions exempt from the budgetary collective bargaining assault) who got you a job? Is this about turning your people against one another to make a splash large enough for your own political gain, Governor? 

Scott Walker and tea party leaders like him arose in a vacuum where the GOP had been because of that party’s complete abandonment of fiscal responsibility for at least a decade. But, more, the tea party leaders rose to power because the President sought shared sacrifice from so many whose sense of entitlement counsels them to think they’ve already given too much. One who is not inoculated by right-wing media may opine their sense of entitlement is taught to them by Fox News, whose headline online yesterday drummed up the sense that the protestors were skipping work over any other overarching narrative. Fueling the anger at the worker... to the worker? But you are us! We are you!

We are all in this fiscal situation together. The problems we face deal more with retiring baby boomers--I am convinced of this. I start this blog even at the expense of simply talking with myself, inspired by the sense that few seek ignorance purposefully; that few believe their neighbors, but not they, contribute to problems facing our nation; that we can speak respectfully to groups of people while asking them for sacrifice, thereby showing our own supporters how to conduct themselves; and, perhaps most importantly, that problems don't have two solutions and two black-or-white positions to take. 

Let's work together in the gray areas our politicians seem unable to articulate because of the constantly running political season. People themselves must set the stage for that kind of rising of the rational middle. Resist the politics of exploitation.