We have a serial abuser of civil rights as the governor of Iowa, backed by a solid flank of legislators to serve up bills she will sign into law. Naturally people are asking what the hell happened to Iowa. I moved here in the late sixties to hit the reset button on my life. It was a different place from where I came from, and it became even more different in the ensuing 50 years. In a nutshell, Iowans once had a shared reality; believing in a collective duty to nurture their community. We now live in disparate realities; unable to appreciate or even tolerate another’s world view. Once a village, we are now a war zone.
During these same years, tax and trade manipulation was toppling rural and working-class economic security nationwide. People sensed the erosion and believed Ronald Reagan who told them, “Government can’t solve problems, government is the problem”.
The waves of change, driven by greed washed up on Iowa shores just as the control rods were being pulled out of the reactor. Influential business and political leaders were leaving and dying. Voices of Republican moderation like Mary Louise Smith, Bob Ray, John Murray, Marv Pomerantz were not replaced, leaving a void to be filled by lesser angels.
With each election cycle, wedge issues were invented by “Win at any cost” politicians that harmed our collective psyche and gaslight us into believing the worst of each other.
The hunt is on to regain a shared sense of reality for us. Without explaining how we lost our grip; scholars are proposing to reverse the bitter divide and reunite America to preserve democracy.
A bitter divide is the current Iowa reality. Enactment of increasingly repressive laws, including efforts to amend the constitution, public health policies based on sentiment rather than science, and proposals to ban books and criminalize teaching about certain subjects, diverting public funds to private schools are just a few examples. The Iowa tradition of expanding rights has been reversed by a nationwide network of a far-right extremists who prey on the fears of disillusioned Americans. How did we get here?
Transformation has been long underway. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Republicans launched a successful Southern Strategy to harvest Dixiecrats and capture the Whitehouse. They took control but fumbled the ball at Watergate. Hemorrhaging voters, the post Nixon party was down but not out. A metamorphosis had already taken root.
Five years before Nixon took office Ralph Nader unleashed a consumer rebellion in his book, “Unsafe at Any Speed”. Citizens organized and lobbied Congress for consumer protection. Corporate barons panicked because the idea that industry was putting profits ahead of people was catching on. Regulation of industry for consumer protection was an abomination to them.
The US Chamber of Commerce had been sitting on a plan written by Lewis Powell to quash the threat. Powell was chief council for the tobacco industry and no stranger to opposing government oversight. He served on the board of Phillip Morris before his appointment to the Supreme Court. His reasoning in the Belotti decision laid the foundation for Citizens United decades later. Powell’s analysis of the consumer revolution and how to extinguish it was clearly spelled out in a secret memorandum he delivered to the Chamber.
Powell described the threat to big business in epic proportions. He warned that critics of unregulated corporations were dangerous. "The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism came from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians." In the memorandum, Powell advocated "constant surveillance" of textbook and television content, as well as a purge of left-wing elements. He named consumer advocate Nader as enemy number one of American business. Powell urged conservatives to “undertake a sustained media-outreach program; including funding neoliberal scholars, publishing books and papers from popular magazines to scholarly journals and influencing public opinion.”
He wrote the game plan for the modern conservative movement and spawned think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute and the American Legislative Exchange Council, (ALEC).
Transformational efforts, borrowed from the Southern Strategy, were deployed to harvest a ready-made block of evangelical voters, ripe for the picking. The GOP launched a rebranding campaign and crowned itself the protector of family values and beacon of virtue. Like Mao Zedong, they waged a cultural revolution using weapons of shame and demonization; rejecting all aspects of diversity, be it in thought, belief and even identity. The objective was not to change America, but to stop America from changing and advance the cause of free enterprise and unbridled capitalism. Greed became good. Ronald Reagan was coronated king of deregulation and declared it was morning in America.
The Republican Party seized ownership of the flag, claimed God’s endorsement, and branded itself as the American authority on morality. Political proxy wars were fought in a struggle between good and evil. Evildoers were invented for every election cycle (environmentalists, feminists, gays, unions, immigrants, public education, scientists, health providers, fraudulent voters and now transexuals) until all of Powell’s, “Perfectly respectful elements of society” were evil too. It was a winning strategy because the pyrotechnics of the cultural battles distracted voters away from financial policies that adversely impacted their lives. In the crusade for family values they voted against their own economic interests and elected politicians who would disadvantage all but the higher classes. Tax systems and public policies were manipulated to ensure an accumulation of wealth at the top and stagnation for everyone else. But why would government and big business team up to hurt the lower classes? Because we outnumber them and in democratic elections, we can out vote them.
None of this is news. What has emerged as newsworthy is the “respectable elements” of the Republican Party are now named as evildoers; like bedrock conservative, Liz Chaney. An orchestrated attack on the republic itself is underway with ALEC cranking out language for state legislatures to put their thumb on the voting scale. Redistricting, manipulating absentee voting options, closing polls early, criminalizing honest mistakes by poll workers; all this and more is underway. The Republican Party has deserted the US Constitution.
Nader demonstrated the power of consumers. The synergy of consumer activism to pull the levers of power in both parties is needed to preserve our system of government. We live in a political environment where money is speech and corporations are people. Consumers still have power to drive protections for climate, health care, working conditions, wages, and agribusiness. A consumer revolt can produce more pressure for change than entrusting the future to politicians who are interfering with our voting rights and work only to support their own re-election. We need to follow the money. Use the power of our purse to pull levers in both political parties and unite behind what Lincoln explained a reality we all want, a government of, for and by the people.
THANK YOU, JILL! Please keep this up!
Excellent narrative.