Look to the Midwest.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: EDITOR'S NOTE - Progressives in the upper Midwest - Editorial

Our cover this month is all about Midwestern values: strong unions, high wages, a clean environment, great public schools, access to health care and college, and a government that serves the public--not a tiny corporate elite that wants special tax breaks and exemptions from regulation so it doesn't have to follow the rules.

As John Nichols reports on page 16, these values are under assault by a rightwing political machine. Its mission is to take control of the traditionally progressive upper Midwest and turn it over to an increasingly rightwing Republican Party, by destroying unions, gerrymandering districts, and making it much harder for ordinary citizens to vote.

We have been living through this assault here in Wisconsin, where The Progressive is published. Now we are witnessing Governor Scott Walker's ascent as a favored Presidential candidate.

The big question for 2016, Nichols writes, is whether the far right, having launched its campaign of destruction in Wisconsin and Michigan and the rest of the industrial Midwest, will now take control of our national politics.

We progressives in the upper Midwest will have something to say about that.

In fact, we are already saying it. As Tom Harkin puts it in his interview with Jud Lounsbury on page 36, "I think that a lot of times, too many liberals, progressives, lose because they're afraid to really stand up for what they believe in. I tell you, when you dig down, people are pretty progressive."

Despite the distorting effect on our politics of big money, there are signs everywhere of ordinary citizens energetically fighting to conserve progressive values.

In Richmond, California, and in Chicago's Tenth Ward, local activists are fighting back big corporations who want to pollute their neighborhoods and buy their city governments. I spoke with some of those activists as I was writing Comment this month.

Longtime union organizer Ed Sadlowski, who spent a...