Stuck in austerity hell with Paul Soglin

In my infinite scrolling on Instagram recently, I came across a reel in which a comedian (didn’t get his name, but I’m sure more than one person has said this) said something along the lines of, “being a conservative must be nice, because you don’t have to learn anything new.”

By that metric, we can safely say that former Madison Mayor Paul Soglin is officially a conservative. To this day he staunchly touts his liberal bona fides from his ascent into politics and early political life in the 1960s and ‘70s. But during his most recent stint as mayor, he began dipping his toes in the conservative waters. In 2015, Soglin removed the public art installation “Philosopher’s Grove” at the foot of State Street, which had been a popular hangout for Madison’s homeless population. That same year, he put forward a proposal to remove homeless people from public spaces, which Isthmus called “draconian” and published a caricature of Soglin as Dr. Evil. In a 2018 debate with now-Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway, Soglin downplayed Madison’s gross inequities, saying at one point that “this is not a racist city.” Evidence shows that not only do Madison’s racial disparities exist, they became worse during Soglin’s time as mayor. 

After losing to Rhodes-Conway in 2019, Soglin has taken to backseat mayor-ing, blaming Rhodes-Conway for just about any problem Madison faces, including the snow-packed roads last January. In an early 2023 Facebook post, he said Freedom Inc. “bullied” him and the Common Council into not implementing a body-camera program for the Madison Police Department during his final stint in office. (The Common Council and Rhodes-Conway did go on to approve a body-camera pilot program for MPD in 2023, but thanks to the recently enacted Act 253, it's a waste of money anyway.)

A recurring refrain is his opposition to housing density, zoning changes, and bus rapid transit. He argued against a rule change that would allow allow more unrelated people to live together in rental housing by saying that “A low income family of five with one adult working and the other tending to the three kids will be able to afford a monthly rent of $1200”—and we can stop right there because it proves how divorced Soglin’s perspective is from reality. A large apartment in Madison going for a mere $1,200 in rent? Single-income family of five? In Madison? I am once again begging politicos to spend five minutes looking at apartment listings.

Increasing density and multi-modal transit options makes communities healthier, safer, wealthier, more equitable, and critically, reduces carbon emissions—goals Soglin purports to share, unless they mean apartment buildings and buses in his neighborhood. 

On October 15, Soglin finally dove right on into those conservative waters when he held a friggin press conference urging Madison voters to reject the City's $22 million funding referendum on November 5. He argued that the City is spending too much money. But the City's current budget crisis has more to do with the state under-funding the City. Shared revenue from the state has plateaued over the past decade and the legislature has blocked off most other revenue sources for cities. Last year, when other cities received a boost to their shared revenue, Madison received a pittance. 

Adding insult to injury, the day before Soglin’s press conference, the State of Wisconsin reported it is projected to have a $4.6 billion surplus at the end of 2024. The legislature could snap its fingers, close the budget gap and then some, and it wouldn’t even affect the digit after the decimal point. And it should, in part because the State owes the City $13 million for services to state facilities, but also because that is our money. Unlike most areas of this state, Madison is attracting new residents who earn money and spend money, and the resulting sales and income tax revenue ends up in state coffers. That is our money. Saying we should cut costs while the state is sitting on our money is like telling low-income workers to stop eating avocado toast while wages have not kept up with productivity since 1979—the rich are eating avocado toast, buying yachts, multiple homes, and websites, and flying into space with our goddamn money. 

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Soglin’s other argument is that the Republican-controlled legislature stiffed the city because Madison didn’t lobby the legislature hard enough. As Sam Munger, the mayor’s chief of staff and former policy advisor to Gov. Tony Evers, told Isthmus after Soglin's October press conference, the idea that current Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway could have secured more state funding by playing nice with Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester)  is a “laugh line.” The City's current budget shortfall wasn’t an accident; it was by design. And Robin Vos was one of the main architects.

For decades, Wisconsin has had a system in which most revenue goes straight into the state's coffers, and then the state “shares” that revenue with municipalities. It makes a kind of sense—most tax money flows in, and the state makes a budget determining how much goes to state expenditures and how much can be sent out to the municipalities. The problem is the Tea Party brought in a wave of elected representatives who want government to fail, no matter who it harms.

Our City is debating deep cuts in city services or increased property taxes while the legislature is sitting on a big pile of our money. The legislature's Republican majority won’t even release the $15 million Evers allocated to shore up healthcare centers in the Chippewa Valley after two hospitals and 19 clinics closed without warning—money that is crucial for continued access to basic healthcare in many of their own districts. There’s a growing list of things Wisconsin Democrats have tried to pass for years that would have a direct positive benefit on people’s quality of life—expanding BadgerCare, removing lead pipes, funding childcare—that Vos and his ilk refuse to even consider. You really think paying some lawyers and lobbyists to schmooze these guys will make a difference? Of course not. Republicans know where their bread is buttered and they’re hoarding that cash so they can deliver tax cuts to their rich friends, who will then give generous donations to their campaigns. Time and again when asked what to do with this pile of money, their answer is always “tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts.” They like to pretend the tax cuts are for the middle class, but that’s never the case, unless you’re deluded enough to think $250k is middle class. 

They’re also not going to give Madison the money because they’ve got us exactly where they want us. They want us to beg for the money, and in return, Republicans want to force the city to cave into their political agenda. Just as they did to Milwaukee in 2023, giving that city a larger cut of shared revenue in a deal filled with poison pills.

At his press conference, Soglin showed a chart comparing the number of hours Milwaukee and Madison spent lobbying the legislature over the past 20 years. Soglin and his allies argue that Madison's relative lack of statehouse lobbying explains why the City isn't getting its share of state funds. But—and this cannot be emphasized enough—Milwaukee got a bad deal. A really bad deal that eroded local control, restraining Milwaukee officials' ability to make shrewd decisions for the future, like expanding its streetcar service (aka The Hop) and cutting police budgets. And sure, the deal solved the city’s financial woes—until next year. Wisconsin Republicans have the state’s two biggest cities and economic engines right where they want them—lobbying, making concessions, relinquishing local control, all so we can get a tiny slice of our own goddamn money. They’re not going to give that up if you ask nicely.

Which brings me back to that little quip from the comedian. It’s sad that Soglin is using his platform to push a regressive agenda, but ultimately what he wants doesn’t matter. It’s what voters want that matters. But Soglin and his ilk—leftists turned reactionary centrists, now turning fully conservative—offer a cautionary tale. As people age, their views tend to become more conservative, in part because of the wealth and privilege they’ve gained. People like to believe that they are inherently good, so they don blinders. They refuse to see the ways in which they’ve directly contributed to and benefited from an exploitative system. In addition to material comfort, they cling to emotional comfort, and fail to grapple with uncomfortable truths, like their culpability in our current economic, environmental, and political reality.

Soglin and his cohort’s understanding of politics is also frozen in a bygone era that they have failed to reexamine. “Austerity” became a buzzword in conservative circles after the stagflation of the 1970s, which was blamed on a feedback loop of government spending and unions pushing for higher wages. But that wasn’t the problem. It was price shocks, the big one being oil, which affects the price of all goods because it raises the cost of shipping and trucking those goods all over the country, according to Mark Blyth, a professor of international economics at Brown University. When then-President Jimmy Carter said Americans needed to consume less oil he was right, for both economic and environmental reasons. Instead of listening to him, Americans voted in a two-bit actor-turned-politician who is to blame for almost everything wrong with our country. Seriously, every issue I’ve researched in the past 50 or so years of American politics has a “Then there was Reagan” section that explains how everything took a turn for the exponentially worse. (Followed by a “And then there was Scott Walker” explanation for the times things turned even worse in Wisconsin, thanks to our morbidly Reagan-obsessed former governor.)

In response to the “Reagan Revolution,” many Democrats veered to the right, either because they bought that government spending and unions were to blame for the economic slumps of the '70s (of course they didn't blame things on our decision to build an entire economy on a finite resource controlled by an international cartel… it’s gotta be the workers and welfare recipients) or because they thought it would get them votes. They also still believed in the myth of bipartisanship, but in reality that dynamic was already busted. Republicans kept pushing destructive, batshit ideas, Democrats compromised to score symbolic victories, and Republicans got to enact only slightly-less-bad versions of the policies on their wishlist. (Bill Clinton expedited this process by leading the push for regressive policies all by himself and still earning just as much scorn from Republicans. Because it was never about policy or cooperation—it’s about power.) Repeat that for 40 years. You end up with much more bad policy than good, and a regressive slide to… where we are now, actually. 

Despite the clear evidence that austerity has made the United States a worse place to live, the older generations are not allowing new information to disrupt their worldview. And that’s how we get our current discourse, where so-called liberals clutch pearls and gnash teeth at the idea of apartments and bus stops in their suburban enclaves. We just need to build more houses and add another lane to the highway like we’ve been doing for decades, but this time, by golly, it’ll work. And if we talked nicely to Robin Vos then he would see the light and we’d all be able to work this out.

It will not work. None of the ideas that have been the mainstays of political thought for 40 years have fixed our problems. In fact, they’ve only made them worse. Soglin can post on Facebook and hold press conferences, but it won’t make him right. And as I’m getting older, I’m taking note. We as people have to be willing to grow and change our ideas about the world based on new evidence. To be willing to listen with and engage with people who have very different experiences from our own. No, I’m not talking about the middle-aged white guy in a diner; I mean the actual working-class people working at the diner, who are more likely to be women and/or Black or brown. Listen to young people, who have grown up in a completely different world than the one we grew up in. We have to be skeptical yet open, analyze based on what we know, but be open to new evidence that shows we may have gotten it wrong. We have to think about power, who has it, how are they wielding it, stop pretending that every conflict is a misunderstanding, and hold powerful people accountable. That’s how we get out of this loop of perpetual debate with little to show for it; that’s how we actually move forward.