The Madison “uniparty” is not oppressing you, because it’s not real

Within the first two weeks of 2026, The Cap Times published three columns about an alleged “uniparty” that supposedly crushes dissent in Madison’s civic life. Publisher Paul Fanlund kicked things off, former Mayor Paul Soglin chimed in to claim that “dissent is not tolerated,” and guest columnist Ray Mendez followed up with his own take.

It’s beyond me why Fanlund and Soglin would fixate on this when a fascist federal regime is actually trying to crush dissent by sending throngs of ICE agents to terrorize and murder people in communities across the United States, including just over the state line in the Twin Cities. The feds are also attacking and deporting journalists specifically, which would be a good thing for a newspaper publisher to write column after column about. When and if Madison gets the full Trump treatment, our local intramural bickering will feel very quaint indeed. The panic about the “censorious left” was always horseshit, and these times really demonstrate how comically disproportionate it is.

I’ll try (and fail) to refrain here from analyzing the by now all-too-familiar antics of The (increasingly reactionary) Pauls. You might say their recent work constitutes a “unicolumn” about how you probably think they are just old and racist for merely questioning the almighty Satya Rhodes-Conway and her merciless cabal of mayoral sycophants, or whatever. Honestly, if you hear me working on yet another piece about all this at any point in the future, please distract me with a shiny object.

What I want to focus on is the fact that an outright lie forms the narrative foundation of these pieces.

Fanlund claims that in Madison politics, “nearly all power [is] held by elected officials on the far left,” that these elected officials constitute a “controlling uniparty,” that this bloc responds to its critics primarily through ridicule and shunning, and that “moderate” voices are drowned out. None of these things are true. They are demonstrably false.

It doesn’t help that in the United States, most journalists and politicians tend to use the terms “liberal,” “left,” “Democrat,” and “progressive” as porous blobs drifting randomly across a wide part of the political spectrum with few agreed-upon break points. A lot of Americans, Democrats among them, refuse to talk like grown-ups about actual far-left alignments—socialism, communism, anarchism—instead relegating those to a “here be monsters” area of their political map.

In Madison we are primed to think of ourselves as a political outlier, which muddles the conversation further. Yes, we are a heavily Democratic-voting area. Let’s remind ourselves, though, that the Democratic voter base encompasses a whole mess of people who don’t really belong in a party together, from center-right-ish moderates to socialists. It’s a sausage at war with its own casing. “Pretty liberal” for a fascist country only means so much. There are more than enough Republican voters in Madison and Dane County to matter in our chronically close statewide elections. In the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump got 25,982 votes in City of Madison voting wards alone. That’s about 15% of the overall vote in these wards. County-wide, Trump got 85,454 votes, or about 23%. The percentages aren’t impressive, but keep in mind that Trump won Wisconsin by 29,397 votes.

We have reached a point where we are not mutually intelligible and need to clarify our terms. Not a problem that Fanlund or Soglin created, to be fair. But even if we grant a little grace for imprecise language, you still have to go way out on a limb to claim that Madison is dominated by the far left.

If we’re calling something “far left” or “hard left,” we can at least identify some basic platforms advocated for at the extremes of left-wing politics: the elimination of capitalism, and a fundamental transformation of power structures and social orders. Most people who call themselves liberals don’t want these things. They seek to put guardrails on capitalism through stronger regulations, a stronger safety net, and a more robust public sector. They also seek to make existing power structures and social orders more inclusive while keeping those structures intact. This is why people on the far left emphatically do not consider themselves liberals.

I agree that political debate in Madison is not what it should be. There are too many public policy discussions that I’d love to see go deeper, too many local officials running uncontested for reelection, too many ideas that deserve more serious consideration, too many people who (as I know I’ve complained before) want a public profile but are too thin-skinned to take criticism. Years of austerity and state-level preemption have cowed local policymakers into taking a narrow view of what’s possible. We have a stagnant consensus-by-committee that no one is particularly thrilled with. The causes of this state of affairs are many and messy. A tyrannical “far left” is not one of them.

If you look at the policies the Madison Common Council and Dane County Board of Supervisors have been adopting in this era of The Pauls’ torment, you simply do not see things that aim to fundamentally upend capitalism and existing power structures. You do not see rigid ideological conformity, either. In the past few years, Alders and Supervisors had significant disagreements with each other over all manner of issues: the censure of former District 18 Alder Charles Myadze, parking enforcement, budgeting for the Madison Public Market, how to help homeless people, funding for the Madison Police Department, funding for the Dane County Sheriff’s Office, police-accountability funding, appointments for important County positions, funding for the Dane County Jail (in fact, this debate went on too long for Fanlund’s taste). They do in fact make compromises and changes to their policy proposals in response to pushback.

Take the main focus of Fanlund’s criticisms: The push for increased housing density and a slightly less car-centric transportation landscape. Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway and the Common Council have largely tackled Madison’s housing crisis through policies that assume market actors will play the lead role. The zoning changes they’ve enacted cleared the way for private developers and property owners to build denser multi-unit housing. The City is not seizing large tracts of private land or expropriating vacant apartments. Elected officials and City staff have, in fact, made adjustments and considered amendments to these policies, often in response to pushback from businesses and homeowners. These are moderate and incremental policies.

To support his narrative of “far left” dominance, Fanlund relies heavily on a May 2025 Cap Times piece by Marc Eisen. (Full disclosure: Eisen has written for Tone Madison and, well, he wouldn’t like me talking like this, but he’s actually a really nice guy.) Funny thing about that: the phrase “far left” does not appear once in Eisen’s piece. Eisen does use “left” as a loose catch-all. The phrase “hard left” shows up once in a quote from realtor and business-lobby veteran Jim Imhoff. “We don’t have the hard left anymore,” Imhoff says in the piece, with evident approval, to illustrate compromises between local electeds and the business lobby. That’s an illustration of moderates… being listened to and getting at least some of what they want. So… is there even an agreed-upon narrative here?

Look, everyone will at some point find themselves in the minority on one issue or another. We all at some point in our lives will end up in settings where our own ideas and values are unpopular or just not dominant. Everyone, and especially everyone who participates in political life, will at some point feel unfairly maligned or misunderstood, will feel thwarted by deeply flawed government processes. Most of us will experience what it’s like to end up on the losing side of a policy decision, feeling bruised and maybe a little defensive. And charitably, we probably all think “the debate” writ large is flawed when our own ideas and preferred outcomes don’t prevail.

What you won’t find in any of The Cap Times‘ three January “uniparty” pieces is one single specific and verifiable example cited of a specific person doing a specific thing at a specific time that constitutes censorious behavior or shuts down debate or forces opposing voices out of public life. Soglin and Fanlund do provide specific examples of the policies and political maneuverings they oppose. They do not, however, provide solid specifics about the central problem they are diagnosing—as Soglin puts it, “group think, the uniparty, and crushing dissent.” The lack of detail is especially striking coming from Soglin, who, to his credit, clearly loves to get granular about the ins and outs of running a city. The best we get are generalities and vibes, and Soglin summing up a few broader commonalities he sees among his critics in this debate. Soglin gripes that “independent alders” don’t get committee assignments, but still provides no specific examples. More to the point, he doesn’t explain how a committee snub would prevent an Alder from speaking out on public policy debates or influencing legislation or, you know, casting their votes on proposals that committees eventually send up to the full Common Council. Because it doesn’t.

A specific anecdote, a direct quote, a link, anything. Who, specifically, by name, did these things that censor debate and quash dissent? What did they do? When? In the combined 2,608 words of these three pieces, you will not find one single solid answer.

Soglin notes that Fanlund’s latest column received “a sharp rebuke from our city’s netheads on the left.” Not once in his column does Soglin ever cite a specific person among these “netheads,” or anything they said, or why he thinks they got it wrong. This lack of specificity about the opposing argument is a constant in these diatribes. Soglin and Fanlund rely heavily on generalities about their critics.

That especially stands out in Soglin’s recent Cap Times pieces, because he clearly loves to get granular about the ins and outs of running a city—budgeting, lobbying, logistics, you name it.

The thing that Fanlund and Soglin overlook is that there is a substantive debate happening, should they choose to engage with it as opposed to complaining about a lack of debate. Whenever The Cap Times publishes one of these repetitive screeds, it also ends up publishing numerous responses in the forms of letters to the editor and guest columns. Some of them agree with The Pauls, some disagree, some even come directly from the policymakers The Pauls are criticizing. By and large these responses actually engage with the text of what The Pauls are saying—a courtesy The Pauls rarely return in their Cap Times pieces. Fanlund rarely links back, cites, or engages with thoughtful opposing arguments published in his own outlet. Instead, time and again The Pauls greet their critics’ responses with a mix of “here we go again” eye-rolling and fixate on how mean people are to them.

This latest round of pieces fits the pattern. Fanlund complains that Soglin is “reflexively and personally attacked whenever he calls for more transparency and spending accountability in local government.” Soglin in turn complains that age is “the most frequent criticism” leveled at Fanlund, which I’m not sure is even true. Mendez writes that after Fanlund’s latest column, “Madison responded the way monocultures do when gently critiqued: clutch the pearls, ignore the substance and debate how harmful the critique itself was.”

Publishing these statements requires The Cap Times to be just plain dishonest about the debate playing out within its own opinion section. Let’s look at the letters to the editor The Cap Times published about Fanlund’s January 5 column, as Soglin and Mendez prepared to weigh in with their characterizations of the response. Two letter writers who disagreed with Fanlund turn the charges of name-calling and disrespectful rhetoric back on him. Another starts out by thanking Fanlund for his piece despite disagreeing with him, then goes on to briefly address his arguments about taxes, housing, and transportation. Another offers some historical perspective on growth and housing development. Yet another ponders how to balance housing density with green space. There’s even a letter agreeing with Fanlund, which, despite Fanlund’s constant whining, is not unheard of and does not get one hauled away in a black helicopter. Even the tougher responses don’t engage in name-calling or mock Fanlund for his age. I’m sure The Cap Times also receives its share of replies that do engage in personal attacks and so forth, but filters them out for the sake of focusing on substance and giving readers at least some idea of what the broader debate looks like. Is it too much to ask that Fanlund do the same?

The Pauls have lapsed into a now firmly ingrained habit of the right and “far center“: casting vigorous disagreement as a mere symptom of intolerance, claiming that a censorious left has smothered debate and free speech, detecting illiberal high-handedness whenever their opponents speak or govern with any degree of confidence. Not coincidentally, complaints like these have grown louder as the United States’ political life has become more accepting and inclusive over the past 60 or so years.

The truth is that no one has done more to position The Pauls as aggrieved, defensive Boomers than Soglin and Fanlund themselves. They can’t seem to stop making it all about that. They attract ridicule because their arguments rely so heavily on hyperbole and an overwrought sense of victimhood. And in blaming an imagined far-left uniparty, they’ve crossed over into a realm of pure fiction.