Friday, April 10, 2015

Salon.com explores Wisconsin's right turn

Definitely worth a read:
...while Wisconsin has a progressive streak of the sort that once put socialists in office, there is a history of conservatism and reactionary politics to the state that Joe McCarthy of all people called home. Wisconsin has a nativist culture, born of homogeneous white northern European immigration patterns, that is still fearful of outsiders, suspicious of change.
Second…More people live in the suburbs, or in its small, rural communities, creating a strong political base for Republicans.
Third, the economic landscape of Wisconsin has altered dramatically over the past several decades...Wisconsin has not fared as well as neighboring Minnesota, which has become a hub for bio-technology…. 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

How convenient, no one looks at the massive amount of propaganda that has been used by the state's largest media outlets to inflame racism and actually create the "white flight" that results in the demographic changes.

I understand why Salon might miss this, though that is not an excuse for their inaccurate and incomplete reporting, but I don't understand why even the alternative media in Wisconsin appears to be afraid to call out the larger media outlets in any meaningful way.

It is meaningless to just proclaim that larger populations in rural/suburban areas created a hard shift to the right.

1. Those people were encouraged to leave the cities and continue to be fed nothing but a diet of anti-urban, largely racist "news."

2. Once our urban communities become hyper-segregated, the media abandons this core of urban areas and provides nothing but negative coverage of areas of the city that have been economically abandoned by policy makers, legislatures, county government, and our Governor.

I will have to contact Salon directly about how they have given right-wing media a free-pass on this story. I don't understand why you give them a free pass too when you repeat their story.

I know from the experience of myself and others that comments are no longer allowed to be seen here if they question the roll of Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in creating the very divisive political climate this post is actually about.