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.
Increasingly, activists in Iowa City frame our city politics as a divide between two factions. I find this framing attractive, but ultimately unconvincing.
But I’ve gotten a bit ahead of myself. First, what are these alleged factions? And what kinds of politics do they bring to the table?
Readers know I do a monthly book roundup, where I write briefly about 4 or 5 books I’ve recently read. But every now and then, I find myself wanting to say more about a particular book. Polarized by Degrees by Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins is one of those.
For one, it’s timely. Most of us know there’s something wrong with U.S. politics, even at the level of everyday discussion. Things get heated and contentious. Many Americans – particularly members of marginalized groups – feel unwelcome in their own country. And we see rising levels of hate crimes, often with politicians openly egging them on.
This situation leads some of us to look for the source of the unrest. What divides us?
According to the chattering classes, especially pundits, identity forms the dividing force. We see this from both progressive and conservative ends, with the former blaming racism and/or toxic masculinity and the latter blaming the ‘woke mind virus’ or some such. It has gotten to the point where I use the term ‘identitarianism‘ to get at the assumption shared by both progressives and right-wingers that politics and/or political explanation reduce to identity.
After the dust settled from the 2024 election, people combed through the data to see how the vote broke down by demographic groups. And, of course, they brought their identitarian assumptions to the table. They wanted to know how race and gender drove the vote. Because what else could have done it?
And so they brought out the standard playbook of questions. Did Harris lose because ‘ugh, white women again!’? Did she lose because black men ‘abandoned’ her?
In Polarized by Degrees, Grossmann and Hopkins suggest something else matters more than identity.
Here in Iowa City, the votes are in. And just as in last month’s primary, Oliver Weilein won big! He won despite strong efforts to defeat him by housing industry interests and Iowa City moderates. And, to boot, he won despite spending very little money and most Democratic officials endorsing his opponent.
Of course, our city council elections are non-partisan. That helped a great deal on the final point.
I’m very glad Oliver won. He brings a much needed perspective to the council. But I’ve already said some words about all that.
In this post, I’ll sketch out the big picture by drawing a deeper comparison from Oliver’s win to our 2015 city election.
For this post, I’m going super local. If you don’t live in Iowa City, you’ll find the local context unfamiliar. But the themes probably feel common enough for you to draw connections to your own community.
With that as a disclaimer, let’s get down to it.
County Supervisor Rod Sullivan blogged twice about our upcoming city council race. His first attempt was ill-informed. Readers who use my two part test for criticizing a candidate’s social media posts would have to conclude that it fails at least the second part.
But that’s the last time I’ll mention his first attempt. That’s not why I’m writing. I’m writing because Rod made a much more interesting and compelling second attempt to write about the race. That’s the post I’m using as a springboard here.
Like many others in Iowa City these days, Rod raised issues about what disqualifies a candidate from office. The topic has come up with regard to three candidates for office in the last year: Royceann Porter, Guillermo Morales, and Oliver Weilein.
I’ll introduce Rod’s argument, say a bit about why it’s such an appealing argument, and then I’ll lay out some of the problems in it. At the end of the day, there are huge differences between Weilein, on one hand, and Porter and Morales, on the other.
City council elections in Iowa City bring out personal attacks. Sadly, it always happens, and it usually happens to everyone on the ballot.
Notably, the attacks take different forms, depending on the ideology of the candidate. Attacks against candidates further to the left are the most common. But they’re also the most likely to come wrapped in various pieties about ‘Iowa Nice’ or ‘civility.’ They often involve tsk-tsking someone for social media posts.
That takes us to our latest installment. Both candidates in our upcoming election face criticism for their social media posts. But only one candidate faces attacks couched in the language of ‘civility.’ Attacks against the other candidate have focused on policy (though those are often overdone, and at times confirm Godwin’s Law).
So, what happened?
A variety of right-leaning Democrats – including a duo of an unpopular former mayor and a feckless state legislator, among others – launched a vicious, manipulative campaign against a left leaning city council candidate over his social media accounts. And after the candidate in question trounced their preferred candidate in a primary, some of them re-upped the attacks with all the urgency of desperate upper middle class hand-wringing.
With this incident in mind, I’d like to ask the question of when this sort of thing is OK. When can we attack a candidate for their social media posts?
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