Fighting Hatred and Anger With Logic and Facts
Recently voters in Madison and Milwaukee turned out in mass to elect an obscure liberal judge to Wisconsin’s Supreme Court. Governor Walker has received flack for suggesting that Republicans should respond to liberal “hatred and anger” by focusing on positive achievement. “What hatred and anger?” they ask.
What other than hatred and anger could motivate so many people to vote against their own self-interest? I wonder. True, Madison, where the chief employer is government, lives on money extracted from the rest of the state, but Madison residents must realize that a booming economy will generate more money to extract. Even students cloistered in Madison should understand that more jobs and careers generated by a dynamic, free economy are really good things. Madison professors may preach the glories of socialism where everybody in some way works for government, but they themselves would never line up to immigrate to socialist paradises like North Korea and Venezuela. Booking a cruise to Cuba, where they can view victims of socialism from the back seat of a vintage, 1952 Cadillac, like visiting royalty, is one thing. Living it, quite another.
And why, if not for hatred and anger, would the good citizens of Milwaukee, the one place in the state where violent crime is out of control thanks partly to soft on crime liberal judges, turn out in in such numbers to elect a liberal Supreme Court judge? Even downtown millennials must realize that real urban revitalization comes from dynamic small businesses and large corporations like Foxconn, not taxpayer grants squeezed out of the rest of the state. They should know what liberal Supreme Court judges can do to abort a dynamic, free market economy, the life blood of a booming city.
Of course, the relentless hatred and anger leveled at our president every day is designed to build a toxic blue wave of hatred against President Trump that will sweep Republicans from office. Hatred has the power to blind people to their own self-interest and to the tide of reforms that already have raised everybody’s boats.
While soft spoken Walker is a harder guy to hate, who can forget the blue fist? While schools in Wisconsin have never been so well funded and while principals now can actually fire bad teachers, the last Supreme Court race has shown that the ACT 10 button still has the power to reignite the old Walker derangement syndrome in otherwise normal people working in a decent profession.
If hatred is necessary to get out the vote, state Republicans, who simply kept their campaign promises to reduce taxes and regulation and energize the economy, will be gone, and all of us back in the hot seat. Can anyone so soon forget the 9% unemployment, the boarded up factories, the empty apartments? We must not let the hatred and anger orchestrated by identity politics make us forget that we are all in this game together.