Jan Schakowsky, fighter.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Political Eye

Another day in the life of a conservative pundit in Washington, D.C.: Leaving the air-conditioned confines of your think tank, you push through a crowd of day laborers looking for work on the corner outside the TV studio, chat with the makeup artist who, while putting on your lipstick, mentions she can't afford health insurance and owes tens of thousands of dollars for a recent emergency surgery. Finally, you go on the air and argue that we must wean Americans from the "nanny state."

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"Only a liberal would argue that the government should pay for people's health care and retirement," one such pundit told me pointedly. Sticking to the script, she added that we must cut taxes on high earners (now at their lowest rate in eighty years) and took a jab at teachers' unions, arguing that private school vouchers should replace the public schools.

Perhaps people have grown numb to these arguments in Washington, where white privilege regularly brushes past black and brown poverty, the crumbling infrastructure is notorious, and the stark separation of our society into the haves and have-nots has been visible for some time.

But visiting D.C. from Wisconsin, I'm stunned by how Republicans can keep selling trickle-down economics and privatizing public services, even as the jobs picture darkens, the stock market does the loop-de-loop, the middle class shrinks, and the United States looks more like the Third World every day.

It's pretty clear by now where we are going.

Not that Wisconsin is blameless. In fact, the Dairy State is directly responsible for emboldening the right. Representative Paul Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, made it safe to talk about balancing the budget by cutting Social Security and Medicare while keeping taxes very, very low for the rich and corporations (the "job creators").

Add to that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's pitch to non-union, private sector workers (like that makeup artist) that if they don't have benefits, teachers and public sector workers shouldn't have them, either. Now we have a race to the bottom that won't end until the country has no safety net, no public sphere, and no more middle class--just the super-rich and the desperately poor.

In times like these, it's a relief to hear outspoken progressive Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinois, defend an alternative vision.

Schakowsky has been in Congress since 1998, where she distinguished herself for her opposition to President Bush's...