Was in Wisconsin again - Great convo w/old-time labor activist.

I was up in Wisconsin again a few weekends ago in order to help out a Democratic party friend there who was running for a local position, in the get-out-the-vote effort a weekend before the election.

I ran into a ton of people, and it was basically like a reunion from the 2012 Obama campaign.

After a full day of getting-out-the-vote by going door-to-door, I ended up going out for a beer with a younger (white) guy from the town who had run a local Obama office and has done a ton of organizing stuff, and we ended up at this bar run by 3 very liberal women and he ran into a ton of people he knew, including a very (old) (white) (straggly ponytailed) guy with a (Southern) accent who came to the bar to watch an NCAA game since his grandkids had commandeered the TV at home.

Turns out that he had grown up in a mining family in West Virginia and had always gravitated to the communist/socialist left of the unions, though he went to charismatic churches all the years growing up.

"At heart I identify with the prophetic tradition, you would call it," he said.

He also said he would love to poke fun at the up-tight commie union people back in the day.

"Religion is the opiate for a lot of the people," he would say to them, "But your opiate is ideological purity.  You're exactly like Jesus, no more than 12 allowed, get any bigger than that and then there's a new church just like the Pentecostals."