UWM Professor Mordecai Lee has long been the “go-to” expert for local and national media when it comes to Wisconsin politics. WTMJ’s Libby Collins asked him when politics became so divisive. Listen in the player above.
A partial transcript is provided below, courtesy of eCourt Reporters.
LIBBY COLLINS: When you were in elected office, you could agree to disagree.
MORDECAI LEE: Right.
LIBBY COLLINS: And it was civil.
MORDECAI LEE: Right.
LIBBY COLLINS: When did things begin to change?
MORDECAI LEE: I think things began to change nationally when Newt Gingrich came on the scene. He was a member of congress who knocked off the speaker of the house and really changed the tone of national politics where national politics were war to the death. And when you are in a war, there’s no compromise, because the other side is not honorable and the other side is your enemy, is the devil. To compromise with the devil is to be a sellout to whatever ideology one held. And so, that really infected politics.
And I think after Governor Scott Walker got elected and there was the fight over Act 10, that that’s sort of when Wisconsin politics became Gingrich politics, when members of the legislature hated each other, wouldn’t talk to each other, felt that compromise was a sellout. And without casting any aspersions on sort of the substance of what that issue was, I think that was the moment that sort of broke the old Wisconsin politics and created the Wisconsin politics that we now experience every day.
