Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 89. Sunrise is 5:54 and sunset is 8:06, for 14 hours, 12 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 99.3 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1945, the London Charter is signed by France, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the United States, establishing the laws and procedures for the Nuremberg trials.
There are three silly notions about Wisconsin politics deserving no better than prompt dispatch.
1. Every former Republican candidate for governor has a legitimate shot at running again for Wisconsin governor in 2026.
No, they don’t. First, one heard from journalists (who should have known better) talking about a Scott Walker comeback; it was all clickbait. See We Weren’t Teasing, Scott Walker Was Teasing! This week, it was Tommy Thompson talking about his own comeback. See Former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson considering a run in 2026 (“I’m in great physical health, my mind is sharp as hell, I’ve got things I would like to accomplish, but it’s way too early for me to make that decision”).
Oh, brother. Has anyone asked Scott McCallum about his plans? There’s a simple formula for how the WISGOP gubernatorial nominee will be decided:
(SOME MONEY) + (PLENTIFUL EXTREMISM) + (MR. TRUMP’S ENDORSEMENT) = WISGOP GUBERNATORIAL NOMINATION
That’s it. That’s all of it. Walker and Thompson lack necessary terms of the equation: not extreme enough and not likely to get Mr. Trump’s endorsement.
2. Bipartisanship is ethically permissible in this environment.
No, it’s not. Bipartisanship is not possible in a populist environment. Populism has only adherents and enemies; it does not have allies. You are assimilated or you are nothing. See That ‘Bipartisanship’ Didn’t Last Long — Because It Was Never There, The WisDems’ Bipartisan Delusion, Seeing Once Again That Wisconsin’s Not a Bipartisan Environment, ‘Bipartisanship’ in Wisconsin Is Simply the Vulnerability of the WISGOP Under Fair Maps, and After Bipartisanship.
Whenever I read someone committed to the liberal democratic order talking about bipartisanship, I think of nothing so much as a scene from Wells’s War of the Worlds where an artilleryman1 speculates about human life under Martian rule:
“Very likely these Martians will make pets of some of them; train them to do tricks — who knows? — get sentimental over the pet boy who grew up and had to be killed. And some, maybe, they will train to hunt us.”
Bipartisanship is possible only after populism’s defeat.
3. Fusion voting could bring people together.
Fusion voting “is a system that allows multiple parties to endorse the same political candidate — could help remedy the disaffection with politics that they see becoming ever more widespread….Making it possible for candidates to run on more than one party line would strengthen the power of third parties and give them “a seat at the table” as candidates and officeholders shape public policy.”
I’m not a Democrat. I’m a Never Trump2 libertarian of a particular type3. Moral and practical necessity require forming the strongest coalition possible. Multiple third parties weaken that effort.
A third way is the wrong way.
_____
- The artillery man is wrong about most things, but would have been right about this. We know he would have been right not because of a fictional account of Martians published in 1922, but because of real events among humans in the following decade. ↩︎
- Never means never. ↩︎
- Individual rights, liberty as freedom from interference, free markets in labor & capital, limited government, property rights, a spontaneous & dynamic social order, in advancement of social justice, each presumptively held and supported. ↩︎
Drone footage shows forests reduced to ash as wildfire burns through southern France: