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  • The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics by Dan Kaufman
  • Joseph Slater
The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics Dan Kaufman New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2018 336 pp., $26.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper)

The Fall of Wisconsin does not focus exclusively on labor, nor is it mostly history. Nonetheless, it should be of great interest to readers of Labor. The title summarizes the book's theme: how a once-progressive state fell to the forces of conservative reaction, notably, but not exclusively, with the election of governor Scott Walker and the enactment of Wisconsin Act 10, which crippled the state's public-sector unions. The book has a unique and captivating organization. It addresses related themes—labor, politics, environmental issues, the rise of conservative organizations, and more—through both historical overviews and reports from the present, including numerous interviews of contemporary actors, including politicians and political activists, unionists, Native American leaders, and public employees.

The book does a fine job weaving together the broad and generally successful attack on the "Wisconsin idea." That idea refers, in part, to Wisconsin's pioneering role in workplace legislation as the first state to pass a workers' compensation law and a public-sector labor law. It also refers to a broader set of progressive goals, including education and conservation, and the role of expertise in pursuing those goals. Other works give more details on the specific struggle over Act 10,1 but The Fall of Wisconsin persuasively links attacks on unions to other right wing goals regarding the environment, public services, and politics generally. It describes in alarming detail the power and deep pockets of influential groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Bradley Foundation, and the National Right to Work Foundation, and it catalogs the damage to Wisconsin this movement has done: increased child poverty, nonexistent wage growth, steep cuts to education, and a decline in water quality. The book is also a fascinating record of the thoughts of many key actors "on the ground" in this story.

The strengths of broad coverage and many interviews inevitably lead to a few weaknesses. Some of the brief historical overviews may not be as precise and nuanced as historians would want. For example, Kaufman asserts it took three decades for the state to recognize collective bargaining rights for public workers, overstating the length of the battle (269). Wisconsin's history also includes Joe McCarthy and an antiunion bill passed in 1938 that was not repealed until 1959. Without refighting 2016's politics, the perspectives Kaufman presents, and arguably implicitly endorses, will ring true to some but not others. Did a significant number of voters want social democrat Bernie Sanders in the primaries but then favor a right-winger over a liberal in the general election? Maybe some were looking for a candidate to "shake things up," but one might wonder if sexism—a [End Page 140] topic the book does not broach—explained at least some decisions to rank men with very different politics above a woman. Also, Russ Feingold, a more explicit populist, received fewer votes than Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin and lost his Senate race by a larger percentage. Should Hillary have visited Wisconsin more? Perhaps, but even had she won Wisconsin (and Michigan), she still would have lost the election, because she lost Pennsylvania, which she visited repeatedly. And she always led comfortably in the polls in those states.

Most serious, and my only real criticism of the book, is the lack of discussion about race in 2016. Recent events have made it even clearer that a disturbing amount of Trump's appeal has been his pushing of white identity. My guess is that more rural and working-class (and other) whites voted for Trump because of white identity than because they thought Hillary Clinton was too "corporate." Augmenting the discussions about less affluent white folks with coverage of, say, black workers in Milwaukee could have been illuminating. As to race, Kaufman offers only a brief discussion of the 1968 Wallace campaign, which seems...

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