Alienation, autonomy, and ideology
These are posts on elections from the blog Base and Superstructure. Topics include international elections, American elections, and local Iowa elections. There’s a particular focus on describing and explaining leftist electoral results.
In a recent issue focused on the U.S. constitution – not the best issue topic, but I digress – Jacobin published an interesting discussion between Anand Gopal and Ben Burgis on sortition.
For those not hip to fancy terms, ‘sortition’ refers to government by lot. It’s the random selection of public officials among regular citizens. It’s associated mainly with ancient Athens, notably the period around the time of the trial and execution of Socrates.
As a college student over 20 years ago, it was fashionable to identify as a person who voted ‘based on issues’ rather than based on party.
You probably know the idea. You didn’t just vote for a candidate because they ran as a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or Green. Rather, you looked carefully at their platform and voted for the person who ticked the right boxes.
Admittedly, we weren’t as clever as we thought. For leftists, the idea was to talk tough to Democrats. We said to them that we had certain issues we prioritized – health care, and so on – and we’d abandon the Democrats if they weren’t willing to fight for those issues. We announced our intention to vote for Ralph Nader – or an appropriate Nader equivalent – if Democrats failed to get with the program.
In practice, though, leftists rarely carried out the threat. Democrats repeatedly shunned universal health care. Most leftists continued voting for them anyway.
No doubt people at other points on the political map ran their own version of this. Centrists looked to candidate platforms to ward off ‘extremists.’ And right-wingers wanted to see the greatest hits of their own policy goals, lest they vote for some obscure right-wing third party. They didn’t carry out the threat, either, though they seemed to have more success at pushing their own views on party leaders.
Due to problems with a distributor, my local library took awhile to get Kamala Harris’s 107 Days. With that resolved and book finally in hand, I sat down this month to read it.
Harris wrote the book, in theory, as a journal of her brief 2024 campaign. And she captures the feeling of a whirlwind race to the presidency. But along the way, Harris also does the work of a traditional political autobiography. She just introduces herself more briefly and compactly than usual.
In a way, I found this refreshing. I read a lot of political autobiography. Much of it ends up as fluff. Harris comes off as more honest than most politicos. Yes, in part 107 Days makes her case for running again in 2028. That’s clear enough. But that case is short(er than usual) on cliches. And I think she stays upfront about her decisions and motives.
But the book irked me in many ways. What, then, is its problem?
Harris centers the book on an argument: if she had had more time to make her case, she would’ve won. But this is transparently a bad argument. To cite one obvious problem, Harris’s standing didn’t improve as the campaign wore on. If anything, her numbers regressed after a brief honeymoon phase in the first month or so.
But let’s take a closer look at 107 Days and see for ourselves.
So, we held another city council election in Iowa City. As usual, we can pull a few lessons from the results.
But first, let’s talk about the big picture. Three incumbents ran for office – Megan Alter and Bruce Teague in the At-Large race and Shawn Harmsen in District B – and they all won. Who’d they defeat? Newman Abuissa and Clara Reynen in the former race and Amy Hospodarsky in the latter.
At first glance, it feels mundane. The voters gave a new term to three popular incumbents. Big deal.
But to many Iowa Citians, the race held interest for its impact on the factions the six supposedly represent. Progressive and activist circles took this as a loss, with most backing Abuissa, Hospodarsky, and Reynen. And those who oppose them chalked it up as a win, because they backed Alter, Harmsen, and Teague. Even though more than a few of them would’ve opposed Alter, Harmsen, and Teague in the not so distant past.
As it goes.
However, I find this all very misguided. I’ll say a word about why the three challengers lost. But in the process of getting there, I’ll need to deal with all this folderol about ‘factions.’
In a recent post on local politics, I said it’s a bad idea to reduce local politics to things under the ‘abolition’ label. More generally, it’s a bad idea to reduce politics to any single issue.
People often look for shortcuts. I get that. But if you’re going to do so, find a better shortcut.
Our local DSA chapter used a long questionnaire for 2025 city council endorsements. Some of the questions are redundant, and many don’t apply to local elections. But sometimes this happens in a democratic org. Anyway, one question reads as follows: “What do you believe is the root cause of the housing crisis, and how would you seek to address it in office?”
That’s a great question, and it makes for a better single issue test. Why? For one, housing stands out as the most important issue in Iowa City politics. People who earn average incomes can’t afford a place to live. Many are getting pushed out to Coralville, North Liberty, or beyond. But also, it’s an issue on which many people hold key misconceptions. YIMBY and NIMBY politics dominate our area, even among progressives and those who believe they’re ‘leftists.’
Having read the answers given by three candidates, here’s a handy guide to interpreting responses:
Candidate cites capitalism, finance capital, financialized capitalism, private equity, and/or neoliberalism: Correct Answer
Candidate cites housing supply: YIMBY
Candidate cites housing demand among individual buyers: NIMBY
Even though the three candidates we quizzed – Newman Abuissa, Amy Hospodarsky, Clara Reynen – slot into the same alleged ‘faction’ of local politics, only one came up with the correct response.
That candidate was Clara Reynen. The other two tested out as YIMBYs.
If you’re looking for a simple test, it’s this one. And Clara Reynen passed the test.
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