Back At It Again: Milwaukee, March 19, 2025

We’re back in Milwaukee again, this time for the Wisconsin State Supreme Court election.  Liberal judge Susan Crawford is running for a seat on the Court, and hopes to preserve the 4-3 liberal majority.  Her Republican opponent is being bankrolled by Elon Musk, who has contributed over $10 million to the race — in a campaign that could easily top $100 million, more than double the record-breaking 2023 Supreme Court Election. 

This race is meaningful.  The Court will soon hear cases relating to abortion; redistricting of Wisconsin’s federal congressional seats; and Act 10, the 2011 Wisconsin law that governs whether tens of thousands of teachers, nurses, and other state government employees can bargain collectively over their workplace conditions, salaries and benefits.  This contest may also tell us how the public feels about Trump’s campaign to dismantle the Federal government, deport millions of immigrants, and start a trade war.  And how we feel about the world’s richest man taking a chainsaw to our world.  

In the past six months I’ve visited Milwaukee four times: in July for the Republican Convention, August for the Democratic Convention (a day trip up from Chicago), October and November for the general election, and now in March and soon April for the Supreme Court election . . . I find I have great deal of affection for the town, its inhabitants, its layout and landmarks and neighborhoods, its many faces and seasons.

But everything is different now.  Back then (it seems like eons and kalpas past) there was optimism and buoyancy, we went to a Stevie Wonder concert, we walked along the river and the lake and visited the Art Bar and the Calatrava-designed Milwaukee Art Museum, we took the train up for Kamala’s one-night stand on the Tuesday night of the Democratic convention (the night of the state-by-state roll call).  We came back for the General Election and I was joined by sixteen other out-of-town volunteers and we held our retreats in the zendo here in Milwaukee, and in Oconomowoc.  We were stoked, we were so sure of ourselves, we were so young.

Back then, when we looked over the summaries of Project 2025 (none of us actually read the whole text), we were outraged — but none of us really believed it could be implemented.  For one thing, we were sure Kamala would win; for another, as a blueprint for action Project 2025 was far-fetched and ham-handed.   We’d already lived through Trump’s first term when he’d had similar plans – but was constrained by the “adults in the room,” plus bureaucratic inertia, plus public opinion, plus rank incompetence.  Well, Kamala didn’t win.  And the adults have been replaced by a ketamine-juiced Elon Musk and his crew of Doge shock troops (19-year old “Big Balls” Coristine, among others), who seem to have no impulse control at all (and Kennedy, Bondi, Rubio, Hegseth, and so on).  Bureaucratic inertia has been countered by massive indiscriminate firings.  And public opinion hasn’t turned yet, because Trump’s people are moving so damned fast and Trump voters still get all their news from Fox and we haven’t begun to feel the disastrous effects of all the slashing and burning (though the stock market is quaking).  And as to their incompetency – well it’s still there in spades, but the object now doesn’t seem to be effectiveness at all, but rather a cartoonish nihilism that makes Malcolm McDowell and his droogs look like amateurs.  The more things they blow up the better.  Project 2025 was a mild-mannered think-tank version of what we’ve actually witnessed.

It’s been called “flooding the zone,” and “denial of service,” and “shock and awe,” and “blitzkrieg.”  It’s fast, indiscriminate, scattershot, outrageous, often illegal.  It’s object is to overwhelm and paralyze, to destroy norms of behavior and tear down all the guardrails.  It’s been strikingly successful.  House and Senate Republicans have been complicit throughout, and now with the passage of the Continuing Resolution, the Democrats have rolled over.

On the one hand I’m brimming with outrage and indignation, and I pledge to put my body on the line to fight back.  At the same time I’m heartbroken that it’s come to this.  On the one hand I stride out determined to do something, anything, to suture the world back together, to save all that we hold dear — and I call upon friends and family to join us, to fight, to resist, to restore the world that is being torn down around us.  At the same time I sit on the cushion and weep, and implore the ancestors and spirits, and pray for a miracle, an epiphany, a sea change.   I find myself holding both of these, the dogged determination and the grieving.  And so it goes, working every day for the good, and opening every day to the suffering:  continuous practice.