Why the Republicans will convene in a forge of American socialism

But look a little deeper into the political past and the choice of Milwaukee, a manufacturing hub on the western shore of Lake Michigan, says something more profound about the evolving contest between Democrats and Republicans. For a century Wisconsin’s dairy farmers and factory workers were at the leading edge of America’s labour movement and its progressive politics. Wisconsin created the country’s first progressive state income tax, its first unemployment-insurance scheme and its first workers’-compensation programme. Wisconsinites helped shape Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.