Are you witnessing anticipatory obedience?

Searching for clarity as Wisconsin confronts a new round of fascist power grabs.

As the second Trump Administration’s power grabs filter down to state and local governments, will Wisconsin’s leaders push back, or will they simply roll over?

That’s a question we need your help to answer. It’s also one that looms large over Madison. 

Federal funding makes up about 25 percent of UW-Madison’s annual revenue. Federal grants support countless programs in state, local, and tribal governments around the country, social programs at private non-profits, arts programming, and so forth. Trump’s dictatorial freeze on federal grants, and his barrage of executive orders, jeopardized this funding and sought to weaponize it to advance the administration’s fascist priorities. As the Wisconsin State Journal reported on Tuesday, this could impact City of Madison programs that use federal grant funding, like the roll out of Bus Rapid Transit. 

Although a federal judge halted Trump’s plan at the last minute on Tuesday, the order was only a temporary one. Trump rescinded the budget freeze on Wednesday, but it’s possible a more targeted version of the freeze will soon reappear and start to impact lives and livelihoods in our community on an immediate, day-to-day level.

And at this point we have very little sense of whether Gov. Tony Evers’ administration, leadership at the UW-System, or local governments around Wisconsin have a gameplan for dealing with all this. We don’t understand how they’re making decisions about new federal policies, how they’ll respond, whether they’ll comply cautiously, or give the administration even more than it’s demanding. 

We hear a lot these days about anticipatory obedience—the phenomenon of people and institutions falling into line with authoritarian regimes before the coercion begins in earnest. Will that happen here? Or will state and local leaders hold the line and try to retain what power they can to shield everyday Wisconsinites from the crackdown? Who will make these decisions, and will they be made carefully and transparently, or in a blur of panic? Do they have any proactive strategies, or will they always be reactive, on the back foot?

Here’s one example that’s already raising these questions. 

Isthmus reported on January 23 that several State of Wisconsin websites briefly went offline last week. The Wisconsin Emergency Management, the Wisconsin National Guard, and the Wisconsin Department of Military Affairs websites each left up placeholder pages that cited and linked to Trump’s executive order aimed at destroying federal diversity and environmental justice programs. Evers’ administration didn’t offer any reasoning for why pulling down the websites was necessary to comply with the order.

The effect of this was to turn a few government websites most people never check or think about into signals that Wisconsin’s state government will flinch, fast, to ensure compliance with fascist policies from the federal government. That the state will comply even when it isn’t explicitly required to. 

Wisconsin Public Radio reported in a January 24 follow-up story that, according to a Military Affairs spokesperson, “[the] agency wanted to ensure its online content complied with Trump’s new anti-DEI directive affecting the federal government. Wisconsin’s Department of Military Affairs includes a mix of federal and state employees, and it oversees the state’s Emergency Management office.” 

This still doesn’t tell us a whole lot. These are hardly the only agencies where state and federal spheres overlap. The executive order doesn’t appear to command federal agencies to scrub DEI references from its pre-existing communications per se, and of course it says nothing about state government agencies. National guard units essentially toggle between state and federal control, so perhaps the overlap there is unique. 

But! Both state and federal law provide for “interchanges” of employees between different levels of government, so any state agency could at least in theory have federal employees working for it. If the crossover with federal employees is reason enough for a few specific agencies to be chickenshit, why not (oh god don’t give them ideas!) be chickenshit across the board. This is on top of the myriad state-level programs or jobs that are funded with federal dollars, our public universities’ heavy reliance on federal research grants, and so on—all of which will give the Trump administration plenty of creative ways to spread the damage.

Some kind of actual, specific explanation would be nice, or really anything more proactive than just letting people see the sites and go “huh what?” It’s not even clear whether or not anything actually came down from the sites—which is a problem in itself. If the removed content was significant enough to pull down, isn’t it significant enough to be transparent about? Why did the state have to jump so fast?

One way or another, we need to understand how these decisions are playing out. If you’re witnessing struggles over compliance at your job or as a citizen, we’d love to hear from you. You can reach us at editor@tonemadison.com, or you can reach me on Signal at 608-571-2537. Before you share anything sensitive or potentially put yourself at risk, read this guide to sharing tips from the Freedom of the Press Foundation.