On Wisconsin, On Wisconsin!
That is the beginning of the University of Wisconsin fight song. It carries on with “fight on for your fame”. I lived in Wisconsin from 1961 to 1965 and pretty much spent my grade school years at the Spring Harbor Elementary School on the southern shore of Lake Mendota, which, along with Lake Monona, bound the capital city of Madison, where the central University of Wisconsin campus sits. This state took the fierce rodent, the badger, as its mascot and if there was one thing that defined the state’s fierceness (besides cheese and dairy in general), it was its belief in the liberal ideology. That ideology seems to have invaded the states of Wisconsin, Illinois and Minnesota due to the influx of Scandinavians that came to this northern land of lakes.
I have a fundamental theory about liberal ideology that I have never read about or learned about in any particular historical or sociological doctrine. It comes from my two years (1990-1991) spent living in Canada. I was the CEO of Bankers Trust Canada, based in Toronto. During my tenure, we opened offices in Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver, so I traveled across the country extensively. It was curious to me that this country that was so close to and in some ways so much like the United States, was equally so different. It was decidedly more European and almost to the point of seeming British in Toronto and French in Montreal. But it was the Western Provinces that jumped out at me the most. This country was so much more inclined to be “kinder and gentler” than the U.S., which was funny because that was the era of one of my favorite Presidents, George Herbert Walker Bush. Canada was actually borderline socialistic compared to the United States and I wasn’t sure how that was the case.
It was my travels to the Western Provinces that helped solve that mystery for me and came from my travels to places like Calgary, Winnipeg and Regina, the Provincial seats of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. By way of geography, these provinces are just north of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota and had been populated by a combination of the westward expansion of the Eastern Canadians and the influx of Scandinavians who populated the northern U.S. states as well.
The Western areas of North America were tough environments in their wilderness and frontier days, but the northernmost areas that became parts of Canada were even more severely tough by nature of the wintery cold that pervades them. Where the Americans that crossed the western frontier on horseback and in Calistoga wagons were rugged individualists, the Canadians that did likewise faced almost insurmountable difficulties and found that the only way to achieve their goals was by banding together to defeat the harsh environment. This collectivism is the roots of liberal ideology where what is good for all is best for the individual. This was the same ideology that was pervasive in the Scandinavian countries of Europe, where a similar harshness of environment existed as a constant challenge to survival.
This belief in the imperative of collectivism, which leads to a certain, almost, puritanical way of life, is what caused these people to form together as a community and to pray to their lord every day to help them as they struggled to overcome nature and the elements. These people learned to praise the lord every day they were allowed to survive and to understand that they owed their survival to both the good grace of God and the help of their neighbors. Meanwhile, down in the lower states of America, men and women struggled much more by themselves to make their westward expansion possible. There certainly was some collectivism as they formed into wagon trains and gathered to fight off native savages who were merely protecting their lands. This spirit of fierce individual achievement is what proverbial won the west. Meanwhile, in Canada, the expansion happened to a lesser extent and much more with the help of the community and the federal government.
I don’t know that I can prove any of this theory, but here we are. Canada has always appeared to be a more enlightened nation than the United States. It may have been their bond to England and membership in the Commonwealth which caused them to be this way and furthermore caused them to join the world wars in Europe more quickly than did the U.S. It took being directly attacked at Pearl Harbor for the U.S. to understand the threat of a quickly expanding fascist world threat in 1941. But the theme of differentiated belief in collectivism and individualism seems to carry through the histories of Canada and the U.S. It is not strange to me that these norther states, where these same Scandinavians inhabited, were, in many ways, the center of the liberal ideology of our nation (along with a few other similar areas like Vermont, and strangely, as opposed to the “Live Free or Die” of New Hampshire). While I have never understood why “Don’t Tread on Me” couldn’t be “Don’t Tread on Us”, it is clear that some areas of the U.S. would cleave to collectivism, while others would trend toward individualism.
Conservatives mostly feel that their good fortune is a function of their hard work and that pretty much alone. Liberals are much more inclined to believe in the role of luck and therefore the view that we should all be more grateful for what we are fortunate enough to have and the belief that “there but for the grace of God goes any of us”. I tend to think that liberals pray for thanks for their good fortune and are prepared to share that with their neighbors in need, while conservatives are those fierce individualists that believe they deserve all that they have because they have fought hard for it. It’s a shame that those two philosophies can’t be merged into one. Imagine how powerful that would be.
Yesterday, we passed through Wisconsin on our trek west. We drove through Madison so that I could take what might be one last look at the little cracker box house we lived in while my mother went to graduate school (on a fellowship, dragging three kids behind her). We are now in Minnesota, on our way into the wilds of the Black Hills of South Dakota today. I am thinking of these political heritage issues because I know that WIsconsin, which was always a very liberal state when I grew up here has turned at least a shade of purple if not somewhat red. Minnesota remains largely blue, but its hard to say how long that will last. Does liberalism gradually morph to conservatism as we age as a nation? There is part of me that suspects it might. But then I see our Scandinavian and Canadian brothers and think it doesn’t need to be so.
I am inclined to chant “On Wisconsin, on Wisconsin!” meaning that I want these lands to continue in their liberal ideological position. I want the world to value collectivism and temper their individualistic tendencies. If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere.