Our national polarization is a bad thing. But our local political monoculture is not so great either.
A case in point is the Madison school board. Three of the seven board seats are up for election in April and two of those seats will have no incumbent. Yet, only four candidates filed papers to run for the three seats. In a city as politically active as ours, how can that be?
My theory is that while we’re plenty politically active, we are not at all politically diverse.
Madison has long had a well-earned reputation as a liberal town, but we were once a place where conservatives or moderates at least had a seat at the table. When I entered local politics around 1990, the Dane County Board I joined was almost evenly split between liberals and conservatives with the balance held by a handful of moderates. The Dane County Executive was Jonathan Barry, a Democrat turned Republican. Dane County even had a moderate Republican congressman in Scott Klug. And the school board held at least one rather rabid conservative in Nancy Mistele.
And when I became mayor in 2003 I served with a city council that held several moderates including Warren Onken, Cindy Thomas, Judy Compton, Zach Brandon and Linda Bellman. In fact, in later elections, Jed Sanborn, a true libertarian, joined them.
Today, Congressman Mark Pocan is a leader of the progressive caucus in the House. Of the 37 county board supervisors only a handful identify as conservative. The council has maybe one or two alders who might be as moderate as any of the alders I mentioned above. And nobody on this school board comes close to Mistele’s outspoken conservatism, which I fully admit to strongly opposing at the time.
This is not a good thing, people. It’s certainly not my desire to turn the county conservative, but I do think we need a greater breadth of views in our political mainstream. A loyal opposition keeps the majority honest and it forces them to justify and hone their policies. Once in a while they might even discover that the minority has a point.
The school board is an especially big problem, in my view. The board’s focus for many years now has been on social justice issues. That’s fine, except for the perception (if not the fact) that they have focused on those issues at the expense of school safety, good order, and the interests of average students and those who wish to excel. Instead, the board buys into an ideological framework in which all student misbehavior or poor academic performance must be the result of institutional failings. It is not permissible to so much as suggest that some of the fault might lie with the student or the student’s family.
I was hoping — in fact I was urging — that candidates would run this spring who had a different point of view. I was looking for candidates who would prioritize safety and orderly classrooms as the precursor for learning. I was hoping for candidates who would acknowledge that kids and families are complicated, and that falling behind in academic performance cannot be explained entirely by demographic factors. I wasn’t interested in candidates who denied racism, but I was hoping we’d get candidates who didn’t think that it explained 100 percent of every problem.
But that’s not what we got. Board President Ali Muldrow will run unopposed while Nichelle Nichols will walk into the seat being vacated by Ananda Mirilli without opposition. Mirilli has endorsed her. Nichols told Madison365, “Certainly my voice will be my own voice. It will be different than Ananda's, but I feel like we’re both people who care very deeply about schools being more equitable for learning and address some of the real issues that so many of our young people need. That part feels great that she’s supporting me running.” Nichols works for the National Equity Project, which is described as an organization that supports equitable learning practices and outcomes.
It’s not that the approach largely shared by Mirilli and Nichols is a bad thing, but it doesn’t appear that Nichols will provide any new diversity of philosophy on the board. My argument is that it would have been good for Nichols — and for the community — for Nichols to have had to run against someone who had a different point of view.
The only contested race will be between Laura Simkin and Shepherd Janeway.
Janeway is a transgender activist who, apparently, will make that her priority. That’s not bad either, but there’s certainly no lack of that perspective already on the board and, I would argue, that those are not the most important issues facing the district right now. Simkin works for an organization that provides city accreditation for in-home learning. It’s not clear from press reports what her priorities might be, but she did not emphasize a concern about school violence and disorder in her initial comments.
Look, my purpose here is not to criticize anyone who has stepped up to run for local office. School board positions are poorly compensated public service jobs where good deeds go unnoticed while board members expose themselves to harsh criticism when anything goes wrong. I have respect for anybody who puts their name on the line. I’m certainly not saying that those who are running shouldn’t be running; I am saying that I wish they were in hotly contested races with more candidates who took different positions on the issues and on overall philosophy. I wish there had been primaries for all three seats. Instead there will be no primary at all.
The trend toward a homogenous political culture is the reflection of what’s been happening nationally. We’ve segregated ourselves into deep blue urban echo chambers and sprawling red rural echo chambers. It’s not just liberal places where different views are unwelcome. It’s hard to imagine it today, but northeast Wisconsin’s state Senate district (the home of ultra-conservative Congressman Tom Tiffany) was once held down by moderate-liberal Democrat Jim Holperin. And liberal Democrat, and now federal judge, Lynn Adelman once could win a Waukesha Senate district.
Back here in Dane County what passes for debate these days is tightly constrained between left and far left perspectives. I think that Madison would be a better, stronger place if we had a healthy debate about priorities and approaches to problems, most definitely including perspectives that are moderate or (gasp!) even conservative.
Dave Cieslewicz is a writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. He also blogs at Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos.
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