Base and Superstructure

Alienation, autonomy, and ideology

Category: Iowa (Page 1 of 13)

An artistic image of a man with his right hand raised and his left hand crossing fingers behind his back, intended to represent voter hypocrisy and Iowa City politics.

Voter Hypocrisy and Iowa City Politics

February 17, 2025 / / 0 Comments

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.

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An image that represents cyberbullying.

When is it OK to Criticize a Candidate for their Social Media Posts?

February 13, 2025 / / 0 Comments

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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An imagine of the Johnson County Iowa Board of Supervisors meeting room.

White Liberal Guilt Goes 0 for 2

November 11, 2024 / / 0 Comments

Complaining aside, there’s a lot to like about politics in Iowa City. We have little in the way of genuine right wing politics, for one. Sometimes we even hold elections where all candidates genuinely want to use government to solve problems.

That’s nice.

But on the flip side, white liberal guilt is one of our biggest vices, as one might expect in a place so dominated by highly educated, mostly white progressives. White liberal guilt causes lots of problems for us.

It forms a serious barrier to our leftist political scene, a barrier we rarely notice. Our activist scene is large enough that we fill our orgs with the ‘usual suspects,’ i.e., people already integrated into one of Iowa City’s activist subcultures. These communities are predominantly white, well educated, LGBTQ heavy, and constantly concerned about their lack of non-white members.

And while I focused in the last paragraph on activists, the same point applies to liberal and progressive politics more generally.

It’s not a problem that Iowa City progressives and leftists worry about their lack of black members. Indeed, they should worry about it. Unfortunately, the white liberal guilt they carry blocks them from addressing the issue in a satisfying way.

Here’s the quick story. In a place with a critical mass of white, well educated, wealthy progressives, those local progressives turn inward. They talk only to each other, disconnected from the realities of working-class life.

Many working in the Marxist tradition would call this an ‘ultra-left’ tendency. I prefer to call it ‘ultra-progressive,’ as most people in this camp don’t actually hold leftist views. But no matter what one calls it, it blocks real orgs from recruiting across racial lines.

And that’s bad.

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A photo of four signs for the Johnson County Iowa Democratic primary.

How Mandi Remington Won

June 5, 2024 /

I have to start by saying I’m very pleasantly surprised by the results of the county supervisor primary in Johnson County. The winners, of course, were Rod Sullivan, Lisa Green-Douglass, and Mandi Remington (in that order).

The first two names should surprise no one. They’re incumbents. Incumbents can lose in Johnson County Democratic primaries, in the sense that it’s a theoretical possibility. But it happens about as often as Iowa football scores more than 60 points in a game.

Indeed, the last couple of decades solidified what had already appeared by the 1980s: the Democratic Party runs Johnson County, in effect, as a one-party state. Democrats hold every partisan office in the county. Republicans haven’t won a partisan local election in four decades. And that’s not going to change soon. Just as Democrats stand little chance of taking power statewide, the local GOP is doomed.

This creates curious effects in local politics, where Democratic voters combine anger toward state government with complacency toward local government. They might get worked up about city politics from time to time – a city pool here or a zoning issue there – but they merrily vote for the person with the “D” next to their name in county races and call it a day.

So, that’s JC politics in a nutshell. Democrats always win. And Democratic incumbents almost always win, usually easily.

But then there’s that third name: Mandi Remington. She soundly defeated the third incumbent, Royceann Porter.

Let’s talk about why.

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Local Electoral Politics Are Messy

June 3, 2024 /

Despite the fact that it’s not a major focus of the blog, I think a lot about local electoral politics. What often stands out to me is the fact that local progressives* (see note at bottom), despite making up a rather large portion of the political establishment in Iowa City, don’t do very well in elections. And this goes both locally and statewide.

I have a stock explanation for this, and some readers are probably tired of hearing it. It’s that progressives aren’t committed to doing the kind of organizing from the ground up that’s required to build a mass movement. Instead, they preach at the choir. Or, at best, they try to recruit a couple of new members to the choir.

They also base some of their ideas on unpopular slogans. And activist movements are often a mess, but that’s less a cause than an effect of the factors listed above.

For a moment, however, let’s get past this high level criticism and into the details.

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