A former Democrat(ic) mayor is studying to be a conservative. His words. Like he’s studying to take religious orders. He’s that serious.
Dave Cieslewicz! More recently of the WI Bicycle Federation, now a public scribbler. Two terms as mayor of Madison WI, sanctuary city of Woke, “No Kings” progressivism. We take notice of this Saul to Damascus conversion because we suspect that scores more would leave the hive if not for peer pressure equivalent to that which imploded that submersible descending to the sunken Titanic.
I realize that I’m in political no man’s land, no matter what I choose to call myself. I enthusiastically reject what Donald Trump represents. But I’m also repulsed by a liberalism that rejects Enlightenment values to pursue a rigid identity politics in which everyone is either a helpless victim or an undeserving winner based solely on their race or gender.
Identity politics is now so engrained in the Democratic Party that I don’t see how it can reform itself. — “A Conservative by September?“
It’s not just outright Marxists like Francesca Hong, Comrade John Nichols, A.O.C., and Zohran Mamdani. It’s Tim Walz installing tampon dispensers in the boys’ room. Open borders czar Kamala Harris, the nation’s most notorious DEI hire, promising taxpayer-paid sex change operations for prison inmates. Hellz bellz, it’s the Democrat(ic) sheriff of Dane County calling his inmates “residents.” The public school system dumbing down academics in a failed attempt to make the race numbers work. The cop-bashing city police monitor exonerating her board chairman for resisting arrest while black and entitled.
Not a single Wisconsin Democrat has spoken out against any of that — much less Dane County’s progressive UniParty. Some of them, like the minister’s son in Texas and the lobster man in Maine, camouflage their progressivism in Carhartt and Dickies.
Which way out?
Moderate Democrat diaspora
We know there are more former Democrats like Dave Cieslewicz out there, maybe of a certain age. They didn’t leave the party, it left them about the time the University of Wisconsin-Madison erased the good name of Fredric March and removed a 42-ton glacial boulder after a small gaggle of wannabe victims played the race card. To this day, not a single Democrat(ic) office holder has objected to those travesties. Meat & potato Democrats like Patrick Lucey, Tim Cullen, and Joe Andrea are long gone. Craig Gilbert in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports:
The candidates fighting for the Democratic nomination in 2026 will face a different electorate than they did in the 2018 primary won by Tony Evers … the party’s voters are a much more liberal group today. … The share of Democrats in Wisconsin who call themselves moderates or conservatives has dropped from 42% in the late 2010s to 31% today, according to extensive polling by the Marquette Law School.
The share of Democrats who call themselves liberal has risen from 55% to 68%. Within that large liberal group, the share who call themselves “very liberal” has risen from 17% to 27%.
Personal responsibility?
Mayor Dave writes that he got turned on to conservatism by reading Sam Tanenhaus’ biography of the charismatic William F. Buckley Jr. (It’s a great read!)
What attracts me most about traditional conservatism is that it sees people as individuals who are primarily responsible for their own lot in life. — Dave Cieslewicz
That insight is profoundly at odds with the current Democrat(ic) platform that regards Americans as either oppressors or their ballooning list of victims — black and brown people for starters, women (all too stupid to get voter I.D.), “workers,” university grievance studies majors. Marxist class warfare, updated. Unfortunately, the aspirational Republican party that once proclaimed “Tear Down That Wall!” too often today says things like “Quiet, Piggy.”
So the former mayor says his options are “thinking of myself as a moderate, non-partisan Democrat or as a traditionally conservative (and classically liberal) independent.”
Blaska’s Bottom Line: Republicans won’t get his dues, but it’s a start.
People are individuals who are primarily responsible for their own lot in life?! In Madison this is tantamount to someone standing before the Inquisition and denying the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. And speaking of trinities, progressives have their very own–not the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (too patriarchal) but Race, Class and Gender. And woe befall any heretic who denies that tenet of the faith.
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