Former chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, Ben Wikler, talks with NPR’s Sacha Pfeiffer about his new book “This is the Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy.”
Transcript
SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
As the second Trump administration rolls on and Democrats struggle to try to revive their party, one political hand has some advice based on his years of working at the state level.
BEN WIKLER: What we’ve learned in Wisconsin is that if you build a movement of thousands – and nationally millions – of people who work on a year-round basis in their own communities, organizing, talking to people and contesting every level of power, that you can unrig a system from the inside. The key is to not think it’s about one candidate or one person. It’s about the whole system that needs to change.
PFEIFFER: Ben Wikler was chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin from July 2019 to July 2025. He has now written a book called “This Is The Plan: How To End America’s Meltdown And Save Democracy.” Ben Wikler, thank you for coming on the program.
WIKLER: It’s great to be with you, Sacha.
PFEIFFER: So if the ultimate goal is to unrig this system, as you say, the first step, at least in your view, would be to put Democrats back in power. And you seem to believe that Democrats would do a better job. But you know that many Americans want to blow up the whole system and start over. They want younger candidates. They want third parties. Maybe they want European-style coalition governments. They feel incredibly disappointed and disenchanted. So what does your book offer people like that?
WIKLER: Total agreement (laughter). I think that the most important thing to remember here is this shouldn’t be about one party or the other. Right now, as it happens, one of the major political parties has wrapped itself completely around someone who wants to be a dictator, and that’s the Republican Party with Donald Trump. On the Democratic side, it is a big-tent coalition with lots of internal disagreement. And in fact, if there is a Democratic trifecta in Washington, D.C., it will certainly include independents in the U.S. Senate as it – the Democratic Caucus currently does. There are states like Alaska that have multiparty coalitions – independents, Democrats and some Republicans caucusing together.
I think that the future probably does involve people wearing different political jerseys who agree on some fundamental things – the fundamental idea that it should be the people who decide who the government works for rather than a handful of far-right billionaires, which seems to be how the country operates right now. The level of public discontent across the country is so enormous. And to me, the question is not whether people will get involved enough to fight and win some critical elections in 2026. It’s whether they will keep rolling up their sleeves, stay involved, work on school board races and city council races and mayor’s races, think about the big picture and how these things interconnect and then work to ensure that their elected officials take action, when they have the chance to do it, to essentially bring down the partisan temperature, bring down the level of kind of procedural arms race in this country for the long term.
PFEIFFER: I wonder, though, if that fundamental discontent that I think as you called it is actually a barrier to what you want to accomplish because what Wisconsin did was in 2020. Now, six years later, although it’s only six years, there’s been a massive amount of change to our society, our political system, and a level of public voter disgust that I wonder if that would no longer make the Wisconsin model replicable at the national level.
WIKLER: So the real discontent is not just about politics. It’s about the sense that the whole country doesn’t work for regular people. It’s the sense that the cost of healthcare is out of control. It’s impossible to find a house that you can afford if you’re trying to start a family. Things that just about everybody needs are not getting taken care of, even though people have, you know, gotten involved in politics, or people who have been disgusted with politics feel like they can just see the evidence in front of their eyes that this system doesn’t work for them.
But the other thing that’s true and that we’ve seen evidence for at the state and local level over and over again is that people rolling up their sleeves and getting involved can move the needle. It is the work of years. This is no quick fix. This is no silver bullet. But it is possible to build a better democracy than we’ve ever had by using the tools of democracy now. The message here is not vote harder. It is to vote in every election from the smallest to the biggest and get other people to take action with you.
PFEIFFER: That sounds very hopeful and optimistic and something I think most of us would hope for. But is it naive? Given the state of politics today, the manipulation of the political system in all sorts of ways by both parties, is that a naive view?
WIKLER: If you go back a little over a century, you go back to the Gilded Age and, like our current era, it was an era of enormous technological change, of massive fortunes that rose up, of oligarchs who were buying and selling politicians, rigging things in their direction – the country was much more rigged then than it is now, politically speaking – and movements rose up, including the progressive movement in my home state of Wisconsin, the capital-P Progressive movement. You had “Fighting Bob” La Follette, who came into office and was able to regulate the railroads, was able to break the trusts, was able to put in worker safety regulations.
The first successful progressive income tax in the country came in Wisconsin. And we were able to shift how American politics worked, including letting people directly elect their U.S. senators. And then, you know, the suffrage movement. Women had the right to vote. The Civil Rights Movement. We’ve had moments when the system was clearly, plainly rigged against huge numbers of regular folks, and people overcame those odds and were able to shift power.
PFEIFFER: A lot of the things you’re concerned about and a lot of the solutions you’re suggesting have been talked about for years, and yet still we have the outcome that we have. Why would it be different this time around?
WIKLER: As dark as things can feel now, as broken as things can feel now, we can also reflect that it’s still the case right now insurance companies cannot deny coverage to someone because they have a preexisting condition. In living memory, we’ve changed a brutal and fundamental fact about how American healthcare works because of a movement of people that led to just enough votes to pass the Affordable Care Act through Congress. At this moment, people can marry the person that they love, regardless of their sex or gender. That was something that – not just a U.S. Supreme Court decision…
PFEIFFER: But even that appears to be in the cross hairs of some people who don’t like the idea of gay marriage. So is that…
WIKLER: That’s certainly true, but a bill was passed through the United States Senate with 60-plus votes and through the House – my own senator, Tammy Baldwin, led the way on that – and signed into law by the president. There are absolutely not enough votes to repeal that law. There have been positive changes, and the question for everyone who thinks that, as a country, we can become a place that helps everyone to thrive and then guarantees everyone’s freedom – the question is, are we ready to do the work to ensure that we elect people at all levels of government who share those values and then ensure that when people are elected, they actually deliver and make the difference that we need?
PFEIFFER: If you’re not able to achieve one of your goals of getting Democrats back in power at the national level, is there a Republican in office or a Republican equivalent of a person like you who’s working to get Republicans in office that you think has a similar goal to your own, that you would feel confident knowing that person is trying to achieve what you’re also trying to achieve, to get us back to a more middle – a middle healthier state?
WIKLER: There are tons of Republicans that I’ve met in my state that are, you know, working across the country. Some of them are being pushed out of primaries by Donald Trump. Some of them are trying to keep their head down until they think the political danger has passed. Until then, I don’t think there’s going to be a renaissance in the Republican Party. My hope is that in 2050, we look back at this time as a moment when the system was bent almost to the breaking point, but a moment where people rallied and said that we want this country to actually work for everyone. No matter, you know, the color of their skin or where they live or who they love, this can be a country where everyone has a voice. And we can argue about what to do, but we shouldn’t argue about whether we have the right to argue and hold power and contest for different kinds of policies.
And my goal with “This Is The Plan” is to help equip people to be part of accelerating that change so that this painful moment in American history becomes a cautionary tale and a memory rather than an ominous foreshadowing of something even worse.
PFEIFFER: Ben Wikler is a former chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. He’s also the author of “This Is The Plan: How To End America’s Meltdown And Save Democracy.” Ben Wikler, thank you.
WIKLER: Thank you so much, Sacha.
(SOUNDBITE OF SEPALOT’S “LOVE OCEAN”)
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