Recent Iowa City mayor Jim Throgmorton wrote a book about his time on the city council in Iowa City. He calls it Co-Crafting the Just City. I’ll get to why he called it that in just a bit. But for now, I’ll say it’s a rare kind of book. People don’t often write about the politics of a small U.S. city. And certainly not in the kind of detail one finds here.
As some readers know, I moved to Iowa City in 2007. And I served on the city’s Housing and Community Development Commission from 2019 to 2022 (the final year as chair). So, I know about many of the political debates Thorgmorton mentions. I followed most of them closely – some very closely.
Overall, Throgmorton does a fine job listing the basic issues at play. He does so, of course, from his own (in some ways limited) perspective. That’s to be expected. I’ll sketch out some of the book’s goals and insights into Iowa City politics.
Why Iowa City?
Throgmorton wants to use the example of Iowa City to provide insight into how small cities work. And he does a solid job recounting his own experiences for that purpose. He gets to the heart of his conflicts with the ‘old guard’ (read: pre-2016) Iowa City politicos. And he describes a new mayor’s fleeting grip on power very well. I enjoyed reading about how he navigates the transition from council critic to mayor – from (alleged) gadfly to person who has to implement his (not all that, as it turns out) new vision.
But the lessons one can apply from a place like Iowa City are limited. Look, I know we have a long history in the U.S. of taking Iowa as an exemplar of plain, down home Americana. I watched Field of Dreams, too. But Iowa City stands out as odd and eccentric in various ways.
It’s not that Throgmorton ignores this. He points to the Iowa City council-manager and ‘weak mayor’ system. He notes it’s a college town with a heavy partisan lean. And so on. But Iowa City also has an endless supply of new temp residents (i.e., 1000s of college students), a quirky and odd – but quite active and engaged – activist scene, a history of unique political formations, and a special brand of liberal bubble politics. These things shape Iowa City’s politics, economy, and social norms. They sharply limit the kinds of lessons one can draw from Iowa City and apply to other places.
Iowa City Political Coalitions
In his layout of Iowa City politics, Throgmorton sketches out four political coalitions:
1. Pro-developer insiders (‘Boomtown’ or the ‘Growth Machine’)
2. Libertarian and far-right, Trumpist elements
3. Progressive and/or leftist elements
4. His own faction (the ‘Core Four’ or the ‘Just City’)
He returns to this division a number of times, from when he first lays it out on page 3 all the way to the book’s final pages. Notably enough, he doesn’t really name his own faction until much later in the book when he writes about his 2015 campaign (pp. 115-116).
In a bit of a surprise, I think this division works better for national politics than local. Just about any city of any size will have a local growth machine, a libertarian or right-wing element, and some kind of ‘progressive’ element.
The division even works OK for Iowa City before 2016. But, by 2022, faction (2) hardly exists at all in Iowa City beyond a few isolated incidents and isolated windbags (*cough* Phil Hemingway *cough*) who troll Iowa City from the outside. It has no power in the city. And, as I’ll return to later, factions (1) and (4) have largely blurred and even merged. Finally, while Throgmorton never quite says so – no doubt Midwestern politeness at work! – I think it’s clear enough he places Mazahir Salih into faction (3). I’ll return to this kerfuffle later.
And so, I find another tension between Iowa City and the rest of the country. When the book focuses on the national, it loses Iowa City. And when it focuses on Iowa City, it loses the national. Go figure.
The Establishment and the Insurgents
Iowa City’s 2015 city council election came down to a battle between (1) and (4) – the pro-developer, runaway growth faction and the Core Four, Just City faction. The Core Four won in every race, and it named Throgmorton mayor in 2016. Did it get about the business of co-creating the just city? We’ll talk about that later.
For now, Throgmorton, in my view, both understates and overstates the significance of the 2015 election.
On the one hand, he focuses on his own attempts to become a mayor for everyone. And he often plays up Susan Mims – the final council member from the pro-developer faction – who won re-election in 2017. But all that runs into trouble. First, Mims was never really the firmest member of faction (1). She was arguably one of the more moderate council members before 2016. Second, Mims faced a weak opponent in 2017. And, finally, she even had to switch districts to fish for a candidate she could defeat in 2017.
And so, the Core Four didn’t just defeat the pro-developer faction. It annihilated it. At least in anything like its pre-2016 form. Among the four who lost in 2015, I think at least a couple of them couldn’t get elected dog catcher in this city in 2022. And all four would struggle to win.
Or Not?
On the other hand, some locals argue that newer city council members – especially Laura Bergus or Bruce Teague – represent some kind of warmed over version of the pro-developer faction. But I think that’s not quite right. Bergus and Teague created their own politics, and those politics differ from the pre-2016 council. They’re not quite as conservative as some think. And, more important for this essay, the Core Four wasn’t as left leaning as some think.
Everyone who serves on the city council now – all seven, in my view – operate at some point along a spectrum from ‘Core Four’ to ‘pro-developer.’ Each accepts the social progressive ground the Core Four set out: grants for social justice and racial equity, the Affordable Housing Action Plan, guidelines on the social goals of TIF, and so on. That alone sets any of them apart from faction (1) above. But each does it in a way that’s more friendly to capital than even the original ‘Just City’ campaign.
And so, I think Co-Crafting the Just City plays up these factions in a way that doesn’t really work after 2016. It doesn’t work at all after 2019. The Core Four wasn’t all that different from the pro-developers. And where it differed, it did so as a matter of degree rather than kind. New politicians just synthesized the two factions.
The Council in the Throgmorton Era: Co-Crafting the Just City?
I’m not going to go too deep into the play by play of Iowa City politics. Noted critic (and yeller of ‘fucking coward!’) Nicholas Theisen does a good job digging into many of those details. Readers might check out his posts here, here, and here. He’s obviously very critical of both Throgmorton and the Core Four and spends a lot of time on that criticism. But he also provides a lot of key detail.
One thing worth saying is that the Core Four never got near the kind of electoral focus many on the left have pushed since 2016. In other words, they didn’t make any moves toward a deeper, social democracy. The closest they ever came to that was with their support of the Shelter House ‘Housing First’ initiative. Instead, they used incremental, technical change and public-private partnerships.
What is Local Government Like?
I greatly enjoyed Throgmorton’s big picture overview of how council service works. He describes very well the enormity of the reading load. And just how difficult it all is for a working age adult. Doing the job well requires 20+ hours per week, and the pay is insultingly low.
He describes (e.g., pp. 51-52) how the city uses formal rules and criteria to attempt to take the politics out of politics. Governing in Iowa City often seems like one long effort to pretend that politics isn’t political. Council members struggle to strike a balance between respecting the expertise of staff and moving beyond staff’s limited perspective and vision.
And while Throgmorton doesn’t put it this way himself, I’d say that Iowa City struggles with rule fetishism – with the use of rules to obscure (rather than eliminate) the underlying politics.
The question, of course, is, again: to what extent did the Core Four count as an exception to any of the problems with local politics, e.g., rule fetishism, trying to obscure the politics in politics? Not nearly as much as it would like to think.
Class Collaboration vs. Class Conflict
Throgmorton’s chapter on his day to day work as mayor provides key insight into what he means by ‘co-crafting the just city’ (esp. pp. 179-182). Here, a class collaboration approach emerges. He describes it in terms of putting people and forces together to direct an unfolding of events. In practice, this means putting together city councilors, developers, city staff, community groups, and so on, to…well…co-craft the just city!
If he misses anything, it’s that this very vision of co-crafting the just city is exactly what opened the door to continuity between the pro-developer faction and the Core Four.
This comes out, in my view, during his discussion of conflicts with Salih. Throgmorton claims the two of them share the same values. And that any conflict amounts to a matter of interpersonal issues, language, racial and gender differences, and so on.
But I think Throgmorton and Salih brought to the table different political formations grounded in different class interests. Salih built her politics on a coalition of immigrants and (mostly white, mostly wealthy and/or highly educated) progressives. Throgmorton built his – and the Core Four built theirs – on much broader class alliances explicitly involving capital. And so, they didn’t really share the same values. At least, not entirely.
A Lesson in Co-Crafting the Just City
For my part, I think it’s uniquely difficult to build a leftist coalition or formation in Iowa City. Those who have attempted it – or those who look like they attempted it – tend to end up with coalitions based on class collaboration (Core Four, Affordable Housing Coalition), some flavor of progressivism (Salih and CWJ), or coalitions of various marginalized groups where leftism forms one part of the story (Catholic Worker House, Iowa Freedom Riders).
And so, while Iowa City will never vote GOP, it’s also extremely difficult to push Iowa City to the left of, say, Warrenism.
I typically advise forming a working-class coalition across lines of race. But that’s easier said than done. Especially in a place with lots and lots of progressives who aren’t working class. It will take years of organizing. And we have to do it mostly from scratch. It will need to activate lots of non-voters and passive political spectators.
