I have lived east of Philadelphia since 1980, so I have a pretty good idea about how Easterners think of Iowa (if they think of it at all): flat farm country. That’s about half right. Yes, Iowa is farm country, though increasingly less so with the scourge of factory farms and the demographic flight to metropolitan areas. Flat? I invite you to ride RAGBRAI, the Des Moines Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Across Iowa, from the Missouri river to the Mississippi and then characterize the topography. The word flat would not figure into your description.
With some of the richest soil in the world, Iowa’s farms are still central to the economy, although more and more of that precious loam is being Hoovered up by subdivisions, especially west and northwest of Des Moines. Here, the new middle-class standard appears to be a three-car garage, along with the obligatory basketball hoop in the driveway. You have to search for the entrance somewhere behind the garage doors. Front doors are for rotating seasonal displays only, not ingress or egress. The scarecrows of Halloween last fall gave way to Thanksgiving pumpkins, then Frosty the Snowman, hearts for Valentine’s Day and then, recently, shamrocks for St. Patrick’s Day.
Having spent my high school years in Des Moines, and with family still there, I consider Iowa my second home. The urban sprawl is regrettable, but I love Iowa’s undulating hills (I’ve ridden RAGBRAI twice), and I admire its statewide newspaper, the Des Moines Register, though it’s not the powerhouse it once was (thanks, Gannett!). Downtown Des Moines is in the midst of a spectacular renaissance, and the state’s spectrum of craft beers (most of them available at the Iowa Taproom) may rank second only to Vermont.
So when a family health crisis arose several weeks ago, I didn’t consider it too much of a hardship to book a flight and take a turn at my mother’s bedside. In addition to spending time at the hospital, I was also trying to make sense of Iowa’s recent political transformation from Purple to Red.
Iowa has a long tradition of progressivism, beginning with Josiah Bushnell Grinnell, the abolitionist minister kicked out of his Washington, D.C., congregation for preaching against slavery. It was to Grinnell that Horace Greeley, editor of the New-York Tribune, issued his famous dictum, “Go West, young man, go West!” Grinnell obeyed, settling in Iowa, winning a seat in Congress and founding the college that now bears his name.
That tradition of prairie populism continued with distinguished and colorful characters like Henry A. Wallace, vice president, secretary of agriculture and third-party candidate for president in 1948, and Harold E. Hughes, a former truck driver and reformed alcoholic, who served as governor and U.S. senator. Tom Harkin’s election first to Congress, then to the Senate in 1984, continued that tradition.
When Harkin retired in 2014, however, Democrats lost the seat to Joni Ernst, the Republican nominee whose qualification for office, judging from her own campaign commercials, was her ability to castrate hogs. Ernst’s election marked the first time in decades that Iowa’s congressional delegation was unbalanced; Iowa’s other senator, Chuck Grassley, who will be remembered for blocking Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court, is also a conservative Republican.
Iowa Democrats propelled Barack Obama toward the Democratic nomination in 2008, and Iowans twice awarded him their state’s six electoral votes. In 2016, however, Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by nearly 10 percent of the popular vote, and Republicans captured both houses of the Legislature. With the complicity of the Republican governor already in office (Terry Branstad is about to ship off to China as Trump’s ambassador; the lieutenant governor is also Republican), Team Red has wasted no time enacting the Koch Brothers’ agenda. The first move was the imposition of limits on collective bargaining, and next up, according to the Register, are bills “to limit workers’ compensation benefits, dramatically expand access to guns, defund Planned Parenthood, outlaw local civil rights protections and limit the right of terminally ill Iowans to sue for asbestos exposure.”
On March 9, Republicans in the Iowa House passed a bill mandating that voters present an identification card, a measure generally understood to reduce turnout among minorities and the elderly. (Iowa, in fact, was one of the few places in the nation with a documented case of voter fraud. A Des Moines woman, a registered Republican, confessed to voting twice for Donald Trump last fall.)
The standard narrative of Trump’s electoral success — exploiting the rage of unemployed and disgruntled white voters — doesn’t entirely work in Iowa. After the ruinous Bush-Cheney recession followed by eight years of Obama economic policies, the unemployment rate in Iowa is down to 3.3 percent, one of the lowest in the nation. But, as I heard loud and clear on talk radio, the rage persists.
My visit to Iowa coincided with Steve King’s latest xenophobic outburst. King represents northwest Iowa in Congress and is Texan Louie Gohmert’s principal competition for outrageous utterances coming out of the mouths of members of Congress. Over the years, King has produced such gems as migrants having “calves the size of cantaloupes,” from ferrying marijuana over the border, and suggesting an electrified border fence to deter immigrants, like cattle. Last July, King declared that white Christians had contributed more to Western civilization than any other “subgroup.”
Just recently, King declared his support for Geert Wilders, the hard-right Dutch politician who characterizes Muslims as “scum” and wants to close the borders. “Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny,” King enthused. “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”
David Duke, the former Imperial Wizard for the Ku Klux Klan, applauded King’s remarks, but they also provoked a flurry of condemnation, including from a few Republicans. (Rekha Basu, one of the Register’s columnists, speculated that with all the demagoguery oozing out of the White House these days, King suddenly felt redundant and had to reassert his nativist credentials.) Somehow, I just knew that King would be Jan Michaelson’s guest on WHO radio. Sure enough. Michaelson, Iowa’s version of Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, teased the King segment by declaiming, “They’re trying to run him out!” And: “The level of hatred that is being leveled at him is almost unprecedented.”
WHO is a clear-channel station, one of the pre-eminent voices of the Midwest. For years, the programming consisted of farm reports and a trading post, the radio predecessor to eBay. Morning drive-time is still chatty and largely vacuous, a serving of white toast with jelly, but that gives way at 9 to Michaelson’s red-meat conservativism.
I’ve been a guest on Michaelson’s program several times in years past. He’s always been conservative, but there’s now an edge and a relentless combativeness that I don’t remember from previous encounters. That pugilism was on full display during his conversation with King.
No one on WHO challenged King’s premise that “our civilization” stood in need of restoration, and plenty of callers chimed in with their own xenophobic comments. “They should speak English and assimilate themselves to our culture,” one said. “We should be educating our own kids,” Michaelson declared, not “those who wash up on our shores.”
King himself was unapologetic. “If we care about our stock,” he said, we must keep immigrants out. He warned darkly about “elements in America that want to destroy Western civilization.”
With rhetoric like this saturating the airwaves — an afternoon drive-time host worried that the starvation death of an Iowa home-schooled teenager would reflect badly on home schooling — Purple to Red was starting to make sense to me.
Despite Iowa’s noble and storied history of progressivism, Iowa voters got the president they wanted last November. And so we all sail together on Trumpian seas, Plato’s proverbial Ship of Fools, with “a captain who is taller and stronger than any of the crew, but he is a little deaf and has a similar infirmity in sight, and his knowledge of navigation is not much better.”
Iowa’s beleaguered lakes and rivers are in the midst of a cleanup, but Trump’s proposed budget would likely put an end to that. Programs that assist poor Iowans with heating bills, rehabilitate struggling neighborhoods and provide loans to rural towns to improve drinking water would all be cut. Trump’s promised repeal of Obamacare, according to an Urban Institute study, would deprive 240,000 Iowans of health coverage.
The people of Iowa might want to consider keeping those front-door shamrocks up a wee bit longer this year.
Randall Balmer is chair of the Religion Department and director of the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College