There are plenty of conservatives in the City of Whitewater, a small rural town, that’s home to a medium-sized campus within the city limits, and is principally located in conservative Walworth County.
In many ways, this rural town should be mostly conservative, mostly Republican, campus notwithstanding. After all, Walworth County is hardly a liberal place.
And yet, and yet, anyone visiting from Waukesha, Ozaukee, or Washington counties would see quickly that Whitewater is neither as conservative nor as Republican as those places. If anything, it’s a cultural adjustment for conservative Republicans when they move to Whitewater (as some have mentioned to me): Whitewater seems liberal to them.
Now, I don’t think Whitewater is a liberal city, although it becoming bluer.
Still, I’d say that conservatives from GOP strongholds in Wisconsin are right to see how Whitewater’s less red, or more blue, than their own communities.
How is that?
Why wouldn’t Whitewater, during the height of GOP success statewide, be more conservative? Even as recently as ten years ago, conservatives were doing better in the city than they are now.
Here’s Whitewater’s current political climate:
The Democrats’ statewide or nationally typically carry Whitewater. National or statewide Republicans can win here, but they depend more on an occasional red wave (2010), and even then it’s not a sure thing that they’ll prevail locally.
What happened?
I’d suggest that it’s not social but economic issues that have fractured the GOP, and many so-called Republicans look like putative moderates to Tea Party Republicans and movement conservatives. (Most social issues don’t matter for local offices that have no authority over applicable policies.)
But on economic matters, Whitewater’s old-guard Republicans have flacked tax-incremental financing and Innovation Center spending – and flacked them in the most platitudinous and grandiose way – so that they look weak and unprincipled to true, small-government conservatives.
Tax Incremental Financing and the Innovation Center were not GOP ideas; the problem is that so-called conservatives in Whitewater lined up to push them, with sugary language to disguise poor economic and fiscal results.
In the eyes of a rock-ribbed conservatives in elsewhere in Wisconsin, GOP luminaries in Whitewater look slow, stodgy, bloated, and appeasing of (often sketchy) government projects.
City GOP leaders from 2000-2010, especially, squandered the local party’s reputation on acquiescence to big projects and a ‘Hey kids, let’s put on a show’ mentality.
Unfortunately, their “jobs, jobs, jobs” and “businesses, businesses, businesses” approach is empty of employment and full of white-collar welfare.
It’s true conservatives and Republicans elsewhere who are among the biggest critics of that approach.
So what does the local Republican party have now?
They have a landlords’ and realtors’ pro-business lobbying group, some signs along Main Street during election time, and lots of meetings to announce successes and triumphs where the rooms are mostly empty and without ordinary residents.
That’s something, but it’s not much for a small rural town.
The move toward a small group that seeks to influence and pressure is a common dynamic after a political party has conceded influence of the electorate. It’s the refuge of groups that are waning.
The Left in Waukesha County, and the Right in Dane County, took similar steps when they were losing electoral influence in those respective places. These steps were half-measures, but ineffectual to reverse electoral decline.
Even the Koch Brothers, who could not carry an issue in Whitewater, would at least be able to draw a crowd with their American for Prosperity team.
Whitewater’s Republicans compromised to go along, to fit in, with a trend toward big-spending on white collar welfare and chimerical accomplishments, successes, and achievements.
Those who brought conservatism to this condition in Whitewater, of all places, will not be able to repair their own damage.
A new generation will have to pick up the shards that clumsy town squires have left all across town.
I’m a libertarian, not a conservative Republican; these failures are not ones of the liberty movement.
Still, I cannot avoid seeing how a few gentlemen have harmed their professed ideology, in a city where conditions should have been fitting for ongoing success.