"Remember, this (formation of a new party) happened once before in the history of Wisconsin -- in the time of slavery. The two major parties were the Democrats and the Whigs. And then a bunch of people in 1854 went into a little schoolhouse (in Ripon) as Democrats and Whigs and some even called themselves Free Soilers and they came out of that schoolhouse calling themselves Republicans. Both Democrats and Whigs were pro-slavery and there was a growing abolitionist movement that felt it wasn't given representation in either major party and so they established a new identity. Eventually the system compressed back into two parties to where a generation later, Bob La Follette thought the Republican Party had become corrupt. They were being legally bribed and he established a new identity and really transformed both parties. Today we have a moment that cries out to us to do the same thing.
"Our challenge as citizens is not to look for saviors. Our job as citizens is to create the conditions that leave mainstream politicians like Harry Reid and John Boehner no choice but to behave more like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Our job as citizens is to bring Bernie and Warren (now on the fringes of their parties) squarely into the mainstream. That happened in the late 1890s and Bob La Follette was central to that. He was a great progressive leader, but he never became president. Teddy Roosevelt became president as a Republican; Woodrow Wilson became president as a Democrat. They both ended up embracing the progressive agenda because they realized that they had no choice. And that's what has to be replicated today.
"Today we're at what I call the third stage of ownership that has been designed by the ruling class. At the founding of our nation, ownership was crass and brutal -- it was literally slavery. It took decades of struggle and civil war to bring an end to that first stage of ownership. The ruling class then designed a second stage of ownership: Jim Crow. It was a whole fabric made of laws designed to keep people separate and the ruling class in power. And it too took decades of struggle to bring an end to the second stage of ownership. There are still remnants of the second stage. I point to voter ID and voter suppression as example of a second stage tool being used today to prevent people from exercising their rights. For the most part, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act -- all the great civil rights legislation--for the most part demolished the second stage of ownership.
"I don't think that it was a coincidence that at the end of the Civil Rights Movement, the last piece of civil rights legislation was the adoption of Title IX in 1973 that in 1976 the Supreme Court ruled in Buckley v. Valeo that money is speech. And to me that marked the construction of the third stage of ownership and the third stage has been designed to keep a few in control and the rest of us under their thumbs. Slowly but surely that's what's been created and eventually extended by Citizens United and by McCutcheon v. Federal Elections Commission. We need to become intimately familiar with the design of this stage because it's our job as citizens to demolish it.
"This is an ongoing battle, but one that can be won. Citizens can emerge victorious. Democracy is a living thing; it constantly has to be tended and fed or it will die. History teaches us we can win greater democracy if we're smarter about it and understand the mechanisms of control and fight like crazy and put our hearts and souls into it, we can prevail. The third stage of ownership will eventually find its way into the trash bin of history. It's a matter of how quickly we can mobilize to bring that day to pass."
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