When I was an Editorial Board member at The Badger Herald in spring 2009, I wrote several columns harshly critical of the Madison left. When I served for a truncated stint as Editorial Page Editor from July to October 2009, this did not abate. Kyle Szarzynski, campus activist and current candidate for District 8 alder, went so far as to call me an “anti-leftist leftist” on his relatively high-traffic blog.
I still consider that to be the most fair-minded and objective portrait of my previous political incarnation. Perhaps my most-quoted observation was that “I would love to be part of a thriving, coherent, intellectually responsible Madison left. I just wish one existed” (“Polls, not parades, place for progress” Jan. 27, 2009). And if the recent mounting protests outside the Wisconsin Capitol have taught me anything, it is that I was despicably, unforgivably wrong in that statement. The Madison left is alive and well. It is thriving, coherent and intellectually responsible. It deserved much more respect than I could muster at the time.
And two of its finest representatives – Sam Stevenson and Kyle Szarzynski – are running for aldermanic seats in the elections on April 5, 2011. Stevenson, running for District 2, and Szarzynski, running for District 8, both bring the kind of credentials that Madison voters will be impressed with: strong records of engagement on worker, immigrant, student, minority, homeless and LGBT rights.
I know Ald. Bridget Maniaci from my Herald experience, and District 8 candidate Scott Resnick and I go back many years. I have no qualms about their personal characters or dedication to the city of Madison. I am merely suggesting that if ever two aldermanic races dovetailed perfectly with the activist zeitgeist emerging in Madison, Wisconsin – something straight out of the 1970s if ever I saw it – here they are. Take them or leave them.
After graduating from UW-Madison last spring, I left for Duke University to pursue my PhD in political science. What have seven months away from Madison taught me? As Joni Mitchell put it, “…don’t it always seem to go / that you don’t know what you got ’till it’s gone.”
Instead of being at ground zero for the most effective and strategic protests for workers’ rights in Wisconsin in decades, I have been forced to follow coverage of the proceedings via Facebook, the national press and (only a very few) talking heads. If I feel like I have missed an important cross-section of protest history, it’s because I have. When they go to the polls on April 5, residents of District 2 and District 8 should ask themselves one fundamental series of questions: for which aldermanic candidates do the dreams and aspirations of the least affluent and most oppressed among us course through their blood? Which aldermanic candidates spent the most time protesting for collective bargaining rights and workers’ rights over the past several weeks? And, inversely, for whom are the positions of alderman or alderwoman merely stepping stones to a professional political career? Here I must disagree with the ostentatious dinner guest in Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Remains of the Day.”
Now is not a time for professionals. It is a time for activists.
Eric R. Schmidt
Graduate Student, Duke University
UW-Madison, Class of 2010
