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.
White Liberal Guilt
How does it do that, though? Let’s walk through it.
White liberal guilt ultimately centers on the guilty person, not the people they feel guilty toward. It’s about the feelings of the educated, wealthy, mostly* (see note at bottom) white people who have it. They turn on one another and accuse one another of improprieties rather than actually try to build political orgs that attract non-whites.
Guilty liberals would rather talk about their feelings than go out into the community and recruit black members. They’d rather ‘work on white communities’ than ‘build the multiracial working class.’
But by limiting their conversation to fellow activists, they turn white domination of the activist scene into a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Few non-whites want to hear a bunch of white people talk about their weird racial anxieties. They’d rather join an org that does things. And since non-white people are far more likely to live and work in working-class spaces, this means that the few non-whites that white activists encounter are often as wildly unrepresentative of the black working class as white activists are of the white working class.
A Summary of the Problem
So, let’s take stock.
Black working-class people rarely come into contact with activists. Activists, trapped in their white liberal guilt, beat themselves (and one another) up for alleged racism rather than actually going out into communities and engaging with people in a way that would allow them to put the guilt behind them and do something productive. And the few non-whites whom white activists encounter are often as disconnected – or more disconnected – from working-class communities as white activists themselves.
Yikes.
Plus, this often works out in tragic ways. My local chapter of DSA nearly tore itself apart a couple of years ago due to a severe case of white liberal guilt in action. A black lone wolf activist who’s not a DSA member behaved abusively toward several chapter members, using those members’ white liberal guilt to push them into using DSA as a vehicle for her own activist priorities. And while this activist was black, her views were also generally unpopular in local non-white, working-class political spaces.
Stuff like this happens sometimes. A healthy org would handle it by sending this person packing. It’s a no-brainer to not work with such a person. But the situation utterly paralyzed the DSA chapter. Key members simply couldn’t tell her ‘no.’ It just wasn’t in them to do it. Several members even resigned rather than face the situation in front of them.
White Liberal Guilt and Johnson County Politics
But that’s enough about the activist scene. Let’s look at how this hits local electoral politics.
In Johnson County, Iowa, liberal and progressive Democrats dominate our politics. In this way, the white liberal guilt nearly ubiquitous among activists also extends to many ordinary voters.
It comes out in strange ways.
In our recent election cycle, one incumbent county supervisor – Royceann Porter – was our county’s first black woman supervisor.
So far, so good.
Unfortunately, she also has a long history of using her office to punish her political enemies, berate her colleagues and members of the public at county meetings, and even semi-coherently shout about her personal drama during city council meetings.
That’s not so great. It’s not what one wants in an elected official.
After the primary, we had a write-in candidate – Guillermo Morales – who was fired from a high-level county job. Like Porter, he’s a person of color.
Why did they fire him?
The county supervisors collected various complaints from colleagues, subordinates, and even his bosses (i.e., the county supervisors) of bad behavior, including things like berating people and making derogatory remarks. In firing him, the supervisors ignored their own HR processes and opened themselves up to a lawsuit. But the accusations themselves appeared credible and plausible. We have a long history of these kinds of blowhards in county government.
How would progressives handle their white liberal guilt in these cases?
The Porter and Morales Campaigns
It’s easy enough to see the core problem. Progressives – beset by unproductive, directionless, navel-gazing white liberal guilt – faced two candidates. Those candidates were people of color, but they were also people who had no business serving in public office. Would they be able to set the white liberal guilt aside and vote against them?
Porter and Morales didn’t make it easy for them. Both campaigned as Democrats – Porter a moderate and Morales a progressive – and they ran campaigns based in part on using white liberal guilt to get liberals and progressives to vote for them.
Both candidates lost. But they lost for different reasons. What can I say? Local electoral politics are messy.
The argument for them, however, worked essentially the same way. Both justified their unacceptable behavior roughly like this: Sure, I might behave abusively toward people on the job (Morales) or in public meetings (Porter). But that’s my culture. White people don’t understand my culture. Instead, they misinterpret my behavior for racist reasons, i.e., they apply their own ‘white, middle class’ standards unfairly.
It ends up as a case of white liberal hypocrisy.
Liberals and progressives voted en masse against Porter, but quite a few voted for Morales. He lost because he couldn’t win the votes of Republicans and more moderate Democrats in the general election. Porter lost because she couldn’t win over liberals and progressives.
White Liberal Hypocrisy
Even though Porter and Morales used the same argument, many white liberals and progressives accepted it in the case of Morales and rejected it in the case of Porter. They rejected Porter’s version of the argument because she’s ideologically a moderate Democrat. And they accepted Morales’s version because he lines up as a progressive.
So, in reality, white liberals and progressives accepted or rejected the argument for ideological reasons, not the argument’s merits.
Hypocrisy aside, I should also note it’s a bad argument. It uses a college freshman level version of cultural relativism – presenting a cartoonish, rigid, and inaccurate understanding of cultures. And even if it were accurate in its premises, it wouldn’t lead to the conclusion to which defenders of Porter or Morales wanted it to lead.
In short, no unified culture advocates toxic behavior. None. And, even if one did, the conclusion should be that such a culture has no place in public office. But the fact remains that no culture actually proscribes the bad behavior of Porter or Morales.
In this way, the argument amounts to little more than apologism for bad behavior. My response is that it’s okay for voters to hold minimal standards of decency for public officials. And more than okay, it’s praiseworthy for the public to do so.
By rejecting Porter and Morales, the voters made the right decision.
Final Thoughts
So, there we have it. White liberal guilt went 0 for 2 in local elections in 2024. But while voters got it right this time, progressives only got it right in 1 out of 2 cases. And white liberal guilt remains a potent force in the politics of any place with such a concentration of liberal and progressive voters.
It didn’t work for Porter and Morales. But part of the issue with Morales is that he ran a ‘Hail Mary’ write-in campaign that might have been more of a vanity campaign against his firing rather than a serious effort. It might have gone differently had he appeared on a ballot.
And, let’s face it: using white liberal guilt for political advantage is too attractive to many people in a place like Iowa City. Someone is going to try this strategy again.
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