The Question Before Wisconsin
Updated: Jun 19
“Memory is what the mad king and the architects of anthropomorphic rivers want you to forget. Because if you don’t remember the smell or feel of the land, then you will believe anything they tell you about it, including that it is just another body to exploit. But if you remember…” — from Ben Weaver’s Considering Leaves
Thursday, June 18th, 2026 — Milwaukee, WI
On June 27, candidates for Governor of Wisconsin will gather at North Division High School for The WEBB's Vote With Wisdom Forum. The event will focus on energy affordability, housing justice, environmental health, and democratic participation. Those subjects may appear distinct, but they all emerge from the same underlying question: who governs Wisconsin, and in whose interests?
Several weeks ago, I found myself scrambling outside half-dressed at two o’clock in the morning to prevent my and my family’s only car from being towed for failure to display current registration; itself a result of an inability to pay the $5,000 of mechanical work it would have taken for the vehicle to pass an emissions test. The experience, though obnoxious as hell, was itself utterly unremarkable: after all, over 175 million of us in the U.S. live in, or near enough to, poverty that an unexpected expense can lead to shutoffs, evictions, homelessness, chronic stress — all of which worsen and shorten our lives. What stayed with me after the incident was the contrast, a contradiction born of the global institutionalized social order we call racial capitalism.
Ordinary people — which again is the overwhelming majority of us, despite whatever myths prevail about the so-called “middle class” — encounter consequences immediately. A missed payment generates a fee. A parking violation generates a ticket. A lapse in insurance triggers penalties. The machinery of accountability functions with remarkable efficiency whenever it turns toward working class families.
Yet many of the institutions exercising the greatest influence over our collective future rarely encounter comparable scrutiny: utilities secure bloated rate increases even as households struggle with rising energy burdens; corporations receive public subsidies while local governments plead scarcity; industries obtain permits that impose environmental costs on communities already carrying disproportionate burdens; and political leaders celebrate aggregate growth while avoiding deeper questions about who benefits, who bears the costs, and who holds power.
Journalist and cultural critic, H.L. Mencken once remarked that “there is no underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” Beneath the irony lies an important observation: ordinary people may not always possess the language to describe the forces shaping their lives, but they possess an intimate familiarity with their consequences. They know when the story they are being told fails to correspond with the reality they are living. Mencken's observation feels particularly relevant today because many Wisconsin residents recognize and live within this widening gap between the language used to describe our society and the reality they encounter within it.
We hear, for example, that economic development flourishes while households struggle to absorb even modest financial shocks. We hear that democracy remains healthy while trust in public institutions continues to erode. Leaders sing to us their promises of expanding opportunity and prosperity while entire neighborhoods confront housing instability, utility shutoffs, environmental health hazards, rising crime, and declining life expectancy — all without the sustained seriousness that such conditions demand from those entrusted with public leadership!
People may disagree about the causes, but they understand when the story no longer matches the lived reality. They understand when official narratives drift too far from everyday experience, and they certainly understand when promises fail to materialize in the neighborhoods where they live, work, raise families, and struggle to make ends meet.
The resulting dissonance manifests in myriad and harmful ways: from the increasing deaths of despair and school shootings to the resurgence of openly racist, patriarchal, xenophobic Christian nationalist movements that increasingly present themselves as solutions to democratic failure while offering little more than hierarchy, exclusion, and domination in return.
The central political question of our time therefore concerns this growing gulf between what those in power tell us about ourselves and the world, and what working people experience every day and therefore know to be true about the actual conditions in the communities they create and call home.
Milwaukee offers perhaps the clearest expression of this contradiction.
Researchers at UWM have documented for years that Milwaukee ranks at or near the bottom among major American cities for Black well-being across measures of housing, health, education, income, and civic life. Such outcomes do not emerge spontaneously. They reflect decades of policy decisions, investment decisions, regulatory decisions, planning decisions, and political decisions. They reveal a governing order that distributes risk, opportunity, wealth, and vulnerability in profoundly unequal ways.
We’re tempted (and in some ways conditioned) to treat each symptom separately: housing becomes a housing issue; utility affordability becomes an energy issue; environmental degradation becomes an ecological issue; political disengagement becomes a civic issue.
We experience our lives, however, as a continuous, integrated whole. The parent deciding between groceries and a utility payment experiences all of these systems simultaneously. The renter living with mold while utility costs climb experiences all of these systems simultaneously. The resident whose neighborhood absorbs pollution while investment flows elsewhere experiences all of these systems simultaneously.
So what often appears as a collection of distinct problems, in fact, reflects a deeper crisis of democratic governance. The crisis of our democracy — alongside the interrelated crises of ecology, economy, and social reproduction — emerges from an economic system that subordinates land, labor, resources, and political institutions to the accumulation and preservation of wealth.
Any serious conversation about democracy must therefore begin with power: who holds it, how it became concentrated, and whether the people asked to live with the consequences possess any real authority over the decisions made in their name.
We ought to measure the strength of our democracy not by the frequency of elections, but by the degree to which ordinary people exercise meaningful influence over the forces shaping their lives.
The question is not merely who wins office. The question is whether people possess the organized power necessary to transform the material, social, cultural, and spiritual conditions under which they live.
At its deepest level, that transformation necessitates moving ever more spheres of life from the logic of profit and commodification toward the logic of human need, democratic stewardship, and the common good.
That is why The WEBB chose to host the Vote With Wisdom Forum on Saturday, June 27 at North Division High School.
Because we, as the Wisconsin Ecojustice Base Builders (The WEBB), believe that the path forward
begins by centering those communities that have borne the greatest burdens while wielding the least power, and by rebuilding democratic institutions capable of transforming that relationship. We believe these communities possess far more wisdom, creativity, and governing ability than our current arrangements allow them to exercise. And we believe Wisconsin's future depends less on finding the right savior than on creating the conditions for that wisdom, creativity, and leadership to shape more of the systems that govern our collective lives.
The Vote With Wisdom Forum represents one contribution to that longer-term, radical democratic project. It creates a space where those seeking power must answer directly to the people who live with the consequences of its exercise. It asks voters to evaluate candidates not only on policy proposals or electoral viability, but on something much more fundamental: their capacity for critical thought, for empathy, deep listening, and their ability to compromise to move us all towards greater health and wellbeing together without violating the principles of love, truth, peace, freedom, and justice.
After all, anyone can memorize a platform or repeat talking points crafted by consultants and pollsters. The office of governor demands far more. It requires one to possess the critical faculties to analyze cruel realities and wicked problems; to wrestle honestly with competing interests; to learn from people whose experiences differ from one's own; and to exercise sound judgment under intensifying conditions of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.
Perhaps most of all, governing a state of nearly six million people requires intellectual humility (to recognize that wisdom is widely distributed), compassion (to center those who have borne the greatest burdens), moral imagination (to envision what does not yet exist), and political courage (to help bring it into being).
The deeper purpose of this forum is therefore public discernment. Wisconsin voters deserve an opportunity to determine not only what these candidates propose to do, but what kind of human beings they are.
Do they understand the interlocking crises of democracy, ecology, economy, and social reproduction that increasingly define our era? Do they recognize the structures that produce those crises? And do they truly possess the ethical intelligence, moral imagination, and political courage necessary to begin transforming those structures toward greater local democratic control, public accountability, and community stewardship of the resources and infrastructure upon which our shared life depends?
The poet Ben Weaver writes that memory is what "the mad king and the architects of anthropomorphic rivers want you to forget." His warning speaks to something deeper than nostalgia for some bygone heyday. Communities stripped of their cultural memory become easier to govern, easier to manipulate, and easier to convince that their own exploitation is inevitable.
Communities that engage in ongoing acts of remembrance, however, can compare what they are told against what they have lived. Because we all can, at some level, detect the difference between public relations and reality, between political promises and social outcomes. There exists an immeasurable distance between the sloganizing democracy of periodic elections and endless political spectacle, and the kind of dignifying democracy that emerges when people come together to determine the future of their communities for themselves, on their own terms.
The leaders of Milwaukee have waited for far too long to take these questions seriously (remember Milwaukee’s dead last ranking on the African American Index of Well-Being). On June 27, we intend to ask them of eight individuals who aspire to hold the highest elected office in the state. And we’ll pose them with eloquence, urgency, and under no illusions that any governor, however gifted, can resolve these crises alone. It requires a politically conscious and active, organized mass movement to shift the locus of power towards communities. Towards you and me. Towards We, the People.
The future of Wisconsin will not ultimately be decided by the wisdom of a single elected official, though our new governor will undoubtedly play an outsized role in whatever happens next. It will instead be determined by whether ordinary people reclaim confidence in their own inherent abilities to organize, participate, deliberate, govern, and shape the institutions that shape their lives.
The forum and the gubernatorial race, then, are best understood as moments within a much longer project of democratic renewal that The WEBB is helping weave throughout communities across Wisconsin. Long after the ballots are counted and the campaign signs disintegrate into history, the deeper spade work will continue: rebuilding civic life in the collapse of the current social order; strengthening and vigorously exercising our democratic muscles to forge a vibrant body politic worthy of its own freedom; and by expanding the ability of communities to exercise meaningful authority in perpetuity over the decisions that affect them.
The task before us obviously extends beyond any election cycle. It asks us to remember what Ben Weaver’s warning implies: that the people who remember their history, their land, their neighbors, and their collective power become far more difficult to manipulate, far more difficult to govern without consent. Democracy, at its best, is the ongoing practice of that remembering.
We here at The WEBB hope to see you and whomever constitutes your crew at North Division on Saturday, June 27, so that together we might begin remembering what so many institutions have encouraged us to forget: that our democracy is not something done for or to us, but instead something we do with, alongside, and for one another. We hope to remember how to make love, truth, peace, freedom, and justice the active principles around which we organize our communities and construct new societies rooted in dignity, reciprocity, and care for all beings, human and beyond.
In other words, and to close out: I need a governor who understands the magnitude of the moment through which we are living, with our planet on fire and under flood. I need a governor who recognizes that humanity has indeed already entered an era defined by converging crises — ecological instability, democratic erosion, deepening inequality, social fragmentation, and the resurgence of authoritarianism and fascist politics.
I need a governor who understands that these crises are not separate phenomena, but interconnected expressions of a civilization struggling to reconcile itself with the consequences of its own economic imperatives and corresponding political arrangements.
More than anything, I need a governor willing to grapple openly and honestly with the defining question of our age: how shall we learn to live together on this planet in ways that are democratic, ecological, just, and free? Not merely for those fortunate enough to inherit wealth and power, but for everyone. And not merely for the present generation, but for those yet to come.
That question is larger than any candidate, any election, any administration, or any political party. Yet every person seeking public office must decide whether they intend to confront it or evade it. On June 27th, we, the People intend to ask.
In solidarity and with gratitude,
Bryan Michael Rogers
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