Our former mayors’ brain rot is on full display

There I was, rebranded and ready to turn a new page on a new newsletter, when two of Madison’s dippiest dipshits dipshat all over the internet.

Former Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz on February 28—on which organizers called for an economic blackout of major retailers that have rolled back diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives—wrote on his blog that he was going to going to buy some single-use straws from Amazon that day to own the libs.

Cieslewicz’s tagline for his blog is “a safe place for moderates in a polarized world.” But like so many reactionary centrists, he directs the majority of his ire at what he calls the “hard left.” Of course he says that DEI has gone “too far,” but does not clarify what that means. (I’m sorry, Dave, are you seriously trying to argue there aren’t enough straight cis white men in power anymore?) He even says that “to the hard-left, DEI is religion,” but not once in the post does he cite, argue with, or link to any current left-wing defenses of DEI. He mentions a former DEI proponent who is now critical of DEI programs, but doesn't actually tell us what left-wing DEI positions he disagrees with or why.

Had he bothered, he would have found that the most robust critiques of corporate DEI programs have come from the left. It is the left that has pointed out that unqualified opportunists saw DEI as a way to sell their workshops and trainings to corporations who just wanted to tick a box. It is the left that called out the false veneer DEI programs give institutions that don’t dismantle their exclusionary power structures. But there’s a difference between pointing out the ways these programs fall short and cancelling diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in response to a right-wing agenda to push women, queer people, and people of color down the ladder or out of the workforce altogether, while arguing we were never qualified in the first place. 

All that aside, Amazon is the vendor of last resort for me, because smaller businesses need my money way more than Jeff Bezos, and they do a lot more for the local economy. Bezos has more than enough resources to single-handedly rebuild the American middle class. He could pay workers what their labor is worth without making them pee in bottles or run their bodies through a proverbial meat grinder. Hell, he could do that and wouldn’t even have to delay his next trip to space. But he chooses not to, and then tries to cosplay as a working-class hero. Why would I want to give someone like that my money? Why would anyone brag about giving that person their money?

I probably would’ve ignored this, but I was already mad. Just the day before, former Madison mayor Paul “sour grapes” Soglin posted on Facebook about Madison’s “plantation politics.” Plantation politics is the term for the tactics enslavers would use to pit enslaved people forced to labor inside the home against people who were forced to labor in the field. Soglin thought this would be a great term to use to describe… Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway’s committee appointments. 

I’m not going to dig into the layers of why this is racist, patronizing, and stupid, because other people more qualified than I have done an excellent job doing exactly that. On Friday, in response to the pushback, Soglin shared a Chicago Tribune article explaining the history of the term “plantation politics” in Chicago politics and then said he is “glad to be in Harold Washington’s company”—as in Harold Washington, the first Black mayor of Chicago. 

To recap, instead of listening to people telling him that what he wrote was racist, he decided to double down, and compare himself to the first Black mayor of Chicago on the last day of Black History Month.

Soglin posted a pretty underhanded apology on Sunday. He still did not admit that his use of the term was inappropriate, but lamented that “[by] using the term I undermined my own objective and created two problems.”

“First it allowed some people to focus on me (calling me a racist, white supremist, and the equivalent of Donald trump),” Soglin wrote. “Secondly, it undermined my effort to raise the DEI issues pertaining to the city committees. The discussion is not over; but to frame the issue I will use DEI terms.”

Maybe some comments on his posts disappeared between Thursday and Sunday, but the responses I’ve seen have been dissecting Soglin’s argument to illustrate that it’s problematic, not calling Soglin racist or a white supremacist. District 17 Alder Sabrina Madison said Soglin’s behavior “mirrors what we’ve seen from Trump—gaslighting, attacking Black leadership, and using fear tactics…” which probably got under his skin. Not her fault the shoe fits.

And yes, the term “plantation politics” is problematic, but people also objected to Soglin's claim that the Black Alders who are not appointed to those specific committees are “independent in their thinking” from Rhodes-Conway, and “represent their communities.” So, what’s he saying about the Black Alders who are on those committees?

He also, unsurprisingly, did not learn anything.

Soglin clinging to his supposed liberal bona fides while being increasingly unhinged and regressive is not new. What was dismaying was the chorus of voices applauding Soglin’s initial post, even defending him against outgoing District 2 Alder Juliana Bennett, a Black woman criticising Soglin’s statement. 

Under the apology post, people commented to reassure Soglin that he’s not racist, that he should be mayor, etc. It really hit home for me (and I’m sure for others) that Madison is not nearly as progressive—especially when it comes to race—as its white residents think.

It’s all another painful reminder of the brain rot at the center of reactionary centrism. Centrists claim as a point of pride to listen to both sides but constantly berate the left—not what leftists actually do or argue, but the caricatured blue-haired-gender-studies left they love to fight in their imaginations. They claim the social cache of liberalism, the core of which is a commitment to—even love of—diversity, equity, and inclusion, but have no respect or patience for actual women, people of color, and other marginalized people who disagree with them.

In a functional society, centrism could make sense, but we are at such a level of structural violence against our communities, our way of life—hell, our survival—that centrism is just an excuse to continue on the path of least resistance. It’s easy for centrists to keep shopping at Amazon, or tell themselves that the leftists are the problem—not their outdated ideas and unwillingness to learn or take action. They’ll decry the Trump administration but they won’t lift a finger to stop it.

How would the reactionary centrists react if the Trump administration really cracked down on leftists? Would they finally grapple with their complicity and inaction in the face of this horrific project? Or would they tell themselves the leftists brought it on themselves? That the leftists took things too far? Would they maybe even enjoy the silence?