Mikayla Hughes singing during an early voting gathering at the Midtown Center in Milwaukee. (Photo | Isiah Holmes)
“The cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy,” is a famous maxim from the early 20th century that has been variously attributed to the prominent American social worker and women’s suffrage leader Jane Addams, to the leading American philosopher and psychologist of that era, John Dewey and, most famously, to the iconic former Wisconsin Governor and U.S. Senator Robert M. “Fighting Bob” LaFollette. Regardless of who actually coined that phrase, it was utilized by all three and has proven to be predictive and prescriptive time and again over the years. Now, it may never be more applicable and essential for the survival of our 235-year-old American Experiment in representative self-government than it is today, in 2024.
This year so far in Wisconsin has been an astonishingly positive period for the advancement of democratic engagement and participation after more than a decade of continuous diminishment and destruction of what was once considered the nation’s foremost laboratory of democracy.
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