“This is the Plan”

Ben Wikler’s brilliant roadmap offers hope

By Bruce Watson

The best-seller splash of Ben Wikler’s This is the Plan is one part of a plan. Guesting with Jon Stewart, speaking all over the country, Wikler is spreading surprising news — the Democrats have a future. And Wikler’s “plan,” as the book’s subtitle reads, promises to “end America’s meltdown and save democracy.”

This highly readable book, part political prescription and part personal memoir, lands just in time to energize Americans who have been clinging to hope since 2024. And Ben Wikler is the perfect pol to offer a roadmap for political action.

First, he’s just plain funny.

“I do invite you to curl up in the customary 2020s fetal position under your blanket. But not with your phone, which is terrifying you with its incessant notifications, making you feel alone and powerless as the sky falls. Instead, bring this book.”

Next, as he details in numerous battlefield accounts, Wikler is one of us, a veteran grassroots organizer. Until last year, he was also chair of the Wisconsin Democratic party that took back the Badger State from a GOP onslaught that made Wisconsin “a democracy desert.”

Blow by blow, county by county, Wikler details the relentless GOP gerrymandering, court packing, and other sly tricks that, despite winning far less than half the votes, gave Wisconsin Republicans a tri-fecta. What the state’s Dems did to restore democracy, Wikler says, we can do nationwide. So what is “the plan?”

“The task is simple but daunting. To build a year-round permanent campaign that fights for better leadership at every level of government and advocates for that government to do what’s right. I’ll show what you personally can do to fuel that fight.”

Yes, Connector reader, the plan depends on you. You are Wikler’s ideal audience because you already know that your “superpower” (voting) goes beyond the ballot box to include persuasion, organizing, and fighting like hell. Wikler tells you where to put your admirable energy, aside from the next “No Kings Day.”

Saying nothing about public protest, Wikler dives straight into the trenches. Chapters explain how organizing locally will spread a democratic base to thwart a Trump takeover. He writes of flipping seats to recapture state legislatures, and explains why reaching disaffected voters — and non-voters — is more important than screaming the president’s name again and again.

A section on canvassing offers tips to engage, rather than argue. Wikler knows that jeremiads about democracy fall on deaf ears among voters worried about prices and paychecks. “If you care about democracy,” he advises, “talk about roads.”

All politics is local, Wikler acknowledges, but he does not stop with elections. Even after ballots are counted, local organizers should be planning their next campaigns, building relationships, fostering a deep community of democracy.

“Build a team, work on races at every level, and don’t stop just because an election is over,” he writes. “Politics isn’t a spectator sport. It’s like pickleball: a life sport. A blast. More fun in groups.”

Beyond the mid-terms, even beyond Trump, Wikler offers a legislative agenda for future Democratic majorities. Abolish the Senate filibuster. Reform the U.S. Supreme Court. “Pass decisive democracy and anti-corruption reforms from a national ban on partisan gerrymandering to voting rights protections, DC statehood, and safeguards for union organizing.”

If the plan goes according to Wikler, “by 2032, we’ll have the first small-d democratic elections in American history. A new dawn for American democracy rather than authoritarian breakthrough and doom.”

We desperately need this pep talk, this roadmap, but is it all we need? I kept thinking of the warning issued by Judge Learned Hand during World War II: “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.”

Wikler, the consummate and dedicated organizer, believes what’s wrong with American politics can be cured by. . . more politics. I agree our politics can be amped up, but long-term change requires more than votes. America did not re-elect a self-avowed dictator because Dems were out-organized. Kamala Harris had far more people on the ground, far more organizing, even more money than Trump — and she still lost. This suggests that there is more to winning than just getting out the vote. Hearts and minds need to be changed, and not just by the grassroots.

Wikler talks a great game and everyone should listen. We need to “organize, advocate, donate, and communicate.” But when two-fifths of Americans still think Trump is the answer, politics alone will not right the ship of state. Liberty has not so much died in MAGA hearts as it has been perverted — putting party over country, tribalism over pluralism, turning “a nation of laws” into a nation of men wielding unchecked power. And even at its lowest, Trump’s approval rating says that 80+ million Americans are “just fine with that.”

Which is why, beyond politics, a bigger “plan” must not only be political but social and educational, with a heavy emphasis on critical thinking, media literacy, civics classes, and social media reform. So organize, yes, but democracy does not live solely at the polls nor in the streets. Wikler’s political plan, well thought-out and engagingly explained, will save democracy from Trump’s (insert latest outrage here.) But it is only one path to “ending America’s meltdown.” The fault, as Shakespeare said, “lies not in our stars but in ourselves.”