It’s been 90 years, but socialism is back in the Wisconsin Legislature.
After being sworn in Tuesday, two new members of the Assembly made their first order of business to revive a socialist caucus that has been dormant since the 1930s.
As self-identified Democratic Socialists, a movement that has been regaining popularity in the US with the help of young Democrats, Representatives Ryan Clancy and Darrin Madison plan to hold their own meetings to advance their political goals while also meeting with the Assembly Democrats.
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Yet in the Republican-controlled Legislature, the socialist caucus is a minority within a minority. The Democrats or the new caucus are highly unlikely to get their way on most issues.
Clancy, a Milwaukee county supervisor, was still optimistic about bringing to the Assembly ideas that he has successfully pushed locally, such as guaranteed advice for tenants facing eviction.
“The things that we can do are things that are common sense and have not been seen as bipartisan fights,” he said.
But Republicans, unsurprisingly, don’t see it that way.
“Socialism has failed everywhere in the world where it’s been tried,” said Republican Majority Leader Rep. Tyler August. “It’s not what makes our country great.”
Clancy and Madison hail from districts of Milwaukee, a city with a storied past as home to one of the most prominent socialist movements in the nation’s history.
In 1910, during the height of socialism in the United States, Milwaukee sent the first socialist to Congress and was the first major American city to elect a socialist mayor. Two years later, Democrats and Republicans joined forces behind a single candidate to oust Mayor Emil Seidel, who was running for vice president on a socialist ticket.
“Cities from Reading, Pennsylvania, to cities on the West Coast had prominent socialist politicians, but even in that landscape, Milwaukee stood out,” said Philip Rocco, a professor of political science at Marquette University in Milwaukee.
Socialist politicians sat in the Wisconsin Legislature as early as 1878, according to the Office of Legislative Reference, but most socialist state legislators held office between 1917 and 1935, when the first socialist caucus appeared.
Two Milwaukee-area socialists have reinstated a long-dormant caucus in the Badger State legislature.
(AP Photo/Morry Gash, File)
Even after socialism fell under the same McCarthy-era stigma as communism during the 1950s, its visibility persisted in Milwaukee. Mayor Daniel Hoan, the city’s second Socialist mayor, served for 24 years after taking office in 1916. The city’s third and last Socialist mayor, Frank Zeidler, left office in 1960 after serving three terms which coincided with the notorious tenure of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. anti-communist campaign.
The unique and pragmatic approach to socialism that made Milwaukee’s socialist mayors so popular with voters also led to friction with the Socialist Party of America, which had more ideological and revolutionary goals, Rocco said. The Milwaukee Socialists earned the nickname “Sewer Socialists” for their hands-on approach to public health improvement and infrastructure projects.
It’s a story that Madison and Clancy have embraced, identifying as gutter socialists in their campaigns and promoting support for the Milwaukee chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.
“We want to continue this legacy and redefine what it means to be a socialist in the state of Wisconsin,” Madison said.
That means, in Clancy’s words, focusing on “unsexy” politics like early-20th-century socialist lawmakers did. High on the fledgling caucus’ list of priorities are addressing issues in juvenile prisons and the prison system, improving access to child care and pushing for public services to be public resources.
August said most of those issues would be “off-the-cuff” issues for Assembly Republicans, but his group was open to working with lawmakers from the left.
Branding themselves socialists hasn’t always been easy, Madison and Clancy said, especially on the campaign trail where socialism has become a dirty word. Even in the Democratic stronghold of Milwaukee, where Clancy ran unopposed and Madison’s only challenger was in a partisan primary, the socialist label was often a hard sell to voters.
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“There were people who were very close to me and cared about me who knew that wearing this tag would put a target on my back,” Madison said. “They strongly encouraged me, ‘Don’t do it. Be a socialist internally, but don’t throw it out into the world.'”
The victories for Madison and Clancy reflect a national resurgence in the popularity of democratic socialism over the past decade, with longtime stalwarts of the movement like Senator Bernie Sanders joining US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a younger generation drawn to socialist ideals under Trump-era immigration and economic policies.
But Rocco said Milwaukee is once again exceptionally fertile ground for ideology.
“This was where this form of municipal socialism proved to be not just a possible model of government, but a model of government that earned the city the nickname of one of the best-run cities in the United States,” he said. .
Leaders of the Milwaukee chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America report that their membership has grown steadily since the chapter was recast in 2016. And for an ideology that hasn’t been represented by a single legislator at the state level for some 30 years. , the opportunity to propose legislation, even if quickly rejected by Republicans, is great.
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“Just the fact that we can introduce legislation now and come up with ideas can get the conversation going,” said Alex Brower, co-chair of the group. “Those things can be really significant.”
