The Cosplay Revolution At The Gates

One of the few ideas that stuck with me from grad school (other than the self-awareness that I didn't belong in grad school) was the notion of, as Eric Hoffer titled his book, The True Believer. It was an early version of what we now call horseshoe theory - the idea that as politics and political activists approach the extremes, they become more similar - both the views themselves and the personalities and rhetorical styles of the individuals. 

Horseshoe theory is how you explain the journey of Tulsi Gabbard, or the under-reported overlap between the Bernie Sanders crowd and Ron/Rand Paul supporters. This year I learned there is such a thing as the Socialist Rifle Association (complete with North Korea styled logo).

We definitely see horseshoe theory in the free speech issue. 

America's political climate has become hostile to the point of deadly in the past decade. To be honest, that has made me hesitant to write. The once universal value of free speech is under attack from both the right and the left. Online bullies dismiss calls for common courtesy and civility as "tone policing," a stance which slams the door on any rebuttals, especially when they come from an old straight white guy like me. 

So do I. But they get to speak.

Locally we've seen attempts to shut down free speech (dismissed as "hate speech") by force, with the would-be censors expecting to be treated as heroes and granted legal immunity. Support for these kind of shutdowns has even been called a "litmus test" of who's a "real progressive."

That's a complete misunderstanding of the concept of civil disobedience. We cheer when the Blues Brothers chase them off the bridge, but the Illinois Nazis were real and they got to have their march. That's the whole point of free speech - everyone gets to have it. If you disagree with someone, you don't just get to flip their table or dump marbles on the stairs to keep people from attending. You have to out-argue them, which shouldn't be difficult, but is more work and doesn't look as cool on short attention span social media.

This past decade, both of our major political parties have been the target of hostile takeover attempts.  I don't mean to both-sides this because the cruelty and rage on the right is a far more serious problem, threatening democracy itself. The hostile takeover of the Republicans was fully successful, but if I had the answer to Trumpism I could be president today. 

In contrast, the hostile takeover attempt against the Democrats failed in 2016 because it just plain couldn't persuade enough voters, despite very favorable conditions and no other opposition. But they deluded themselves into thinking every single vote was for Socialism! when half of it was simply for Not Her. With a wider menu of options for voters in 2020, they fared even worse. 

But it has left the Democrats with an internal faction that supports candidates who openly despise our party and use it only as a vehicle to hasten its own destruction. "I hate your organization, but I demand the right to choose its leaders." 

Meanwhile, the mainstream Democrats who have worked to build and improve the party - and our local mainstream is much closer to Elizabeth Warren than Joe Manchin - are held responsible for the positions and behavior of the most extreme people who want to destroy.

Over the past ten years I have read and re-read far too much 1930s history, and one of the many parallels I see is the far left treating the near left as a greater enemy than the far right. In 1932 Germany, the Communists and the Social Democrats, combined, outnumbered the Nazis. Together with the center parties, they could have commanded a majority. 

But Stalin decreed that "Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism." So the German Communists treated the Social Democrats as greater enemies than, well, literally Hitler. They were convinced that fascism was the last stage of capitalism and that The Яevolutioи would soon follow - just as Susan Sarandon said “some people feel that Donald Trump will bring the revolution immediately, if he gets in" in 2016. 

But as it turned out, the Nazis locked up the Communists even before they went after the Jews.

"The fanatic cannot be weaned away from his cause by an appeal to his reason or moral sense. He fears compromise and cannot be persuaded to qualify the certitude and righteousness of his holy cause." Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

I see the same dynamic today, in America and in Iowa City. Differences of tone and rhetoric and style and nuance and emphasis are treated as betrayals. People are called "fascist" not because they disagree on substance but because they choose not to lead their messaging with causes that, while just, are our least popular, or with issues that, while important, are not directly relevant to the office and the level of government at hand. 

Our community, our little blue island in a sea of red, faces very real constraints and is under a very real microscope. The Ministry is interfering at Hogwarts, undercutting the values of an academic community in an effort to force us to bend a knee to rural parochialism. Traps are being set for us - and some in our community, in the name of "resistance," want us to march headlong into those traps. 

If we do so, we run a very real risk of losing our local authority over substantive matters. 

Hunter S. Thompson, in the very piece in which he advocated for "Freak Power" in electoral politics, wrote of "the basic futility of seizing turf you can't control." If I am accused of "hating socialists more than I hate Trump," it is only because the right has largely abandoned our local politics, preferring instead to focus on state and federal races where they have more success. We saw that in this month's election, where the Republicans, already outnumbered four to one on registration within the Iowa City limits, turned out at less than half the percentage rate of Democrats. For every one Republican who voted, nine registered Democrats showed up. The electorate was, more or less, a Democratic primary universe. 

So I'm focused on the left side of the equation because it's more relevant to our community. Our local contests are no longer between liberals and conservatives - they're between liberals and leftists. Republicans watch from the sidelines and if they don't like the outcome, either electoral or policy, they just go over our heads and get the state to over-ride us. We have already seen that play out several times in the relationship between The People's Republic Of Johnson County and the State of Iowa, with the banning of our local minimum wage being just one example.

The governor and attorney general and legislature are playing gotcha games, trying to trigger the left, just waiting for someone to cross some line so they can impose their will on us - sometimes, simply out of spite (stay tuned for supervisor districts next year). At some point, the state will step in and make us do it their way. 

And if that happens, all of the local reforms and innovations we have worked on for decades that radicals dismiss as "incrementalism," the drug courts and the diversion programs, will be swept aside, and we will be forced into least common denominator lock `em up policy.

Demanding loud and specific ideological statements is like asking Oskar Schindler to post The List. But low-key quiet work to fix problems the state and the feds have created is not good enough for some people. A certain breed of cat likes the attention and the excitement of Defiance and Refusal. Then, when the shit hits the fan, they can wash their hands of responsibility for the unfortunate outcomes and feel good about themselves because they "resisted."

The story may be apocryphal but it is said that Adlai Stevenson once gave a deep and thoughtful and intellectual speech and an audience member said, “Every thinking person in America will be voting for you.” Stevenson supposedly replied, "That’s not enough. I need a majority.” He lost two landslides to Ike (the original Antifa candidate).

"Demand" is a big word on the left. But before we can demand, we need to persuade. We need to persuade people who do not share all of our values and views, and we have to do so in the face of cynical manipulation of powerful cultural symbols. We must not fight on weak ground, and we must speak in a recognizable language, not "Hey hey, ho ho." And sometimes we need to not insist on 100% agreement on our least popular issues as the price of a place under what is supposed to be a big tent.

Talk is important. Symbolism is important. Ideology matters. There are times to push the boundaries.

But there are times when substance and pragmatism are more important than symbolism and ideology. And sometimes the symbolism gets in the way of the substance. That is where our community now finds itself. 

For a couple years, we were choosing symbolism over substance. Granted, elections don't happen in vacuums and individual candidates have flaws. But three times in a row, with relatively low turnout each time, we chose protest candidates over pragmatic mainstream liberals.

• November 2023, Iowa City: 9,989 (split outcome)
• June 2024, Democratic primary, countywide: 6,847
• March 2025, Iowa City: 6,902

On November 4, with high turnout, and with control of city government hanging by one seat, we came to our senses and dodged a bullet.

• November 2025, Iowa City: 11,176 

It's an indicator that the extremists, who excel at low turnout conventions and caucuses, are noisy out of proportion to their real numbers.

But that was just the first of three important rounds of local elections. 

We face big choices again in June and next November. We face choices between responsible progressive policy within the unfortunate constraints of the current federal and state governments, or symbolic gestures based on rigid ideology.

We face choices between making real peoples' lives better, sometimes in small ways, or making ourselves feel better through purity and self-righteousness.

We need to choose whether we want to do the real work of government, or if we'd rather just be the cosplay revolution. 

This Is What Joe Strummer Trained You For

Winston Churchill, one of the original Antifa, is often quoted as saying “a man who is not a liberal at 16 has no heart, but a man who is not a conservative at 60 has no head.” The actual origins of that aphorism are lost to time, but whoever said it, it speaks to a truth about political evolution as one ages.

I had an excess of heart in my youth, and I may suffer from a deficit of brain as I approach retirement age. It's been more than a decade now since I retired this site's slogan "too old to be cool, too young not to care" because I was, in fact, too old. And my cultural touchstones show that age.

My first political hero was a musician, not a politician. At the impressionable age of 17 I discovered the Clash and their leader and lyricist, Joe Strummer. It was the dawn of the Reagan Time and I was terrified of getting drafted and sent to Central America, and Joe Strummer had written a gigantic record just for me, with the in your face title "Sandinista!". It taught me about draft resistance and revolution and imperialism.

 

I went through a grad student proletariat phase when I fancied myself quite the political expert. I didn't do or accomplish anything, but I talked a good game and I insufferably thought I knew it all. 

Then I got to Iowa City intending to pursue a Ph.D. and instead I walked into a campaign headquarters, where my real postgraduate education begin. I still had a lot of Joe Strummer in my head, and there's a third party vote in my past that I can't honestly say I regret. But bit by bit, I grew more pragmatic and gained more experience: as a volunteer, as a campaign staffer, a failed run for office, and finally the career in government where I found my calling.

Sometimes I cringe at my younger self, especially when faced with people who remind me of myself at that age. For those who are going to attack me: I get it. I was you once. Sometimes I still look deep inside myself and wonder "what would Joe Strummer do?"

Strummer struggled with contradictory goals. He struggled with it within the music itself, self-awarely noting the irony of "turning rebellion into money." He wanted to keep the uncompromising purity of punk rock yet he also wanted the mass popularity and success that would allow his message to reach a mainstream audience. The dissonance eventually destroyed the Clash right at their moment of commercial breakthrough.

Unfortunately Joe Strummer can't speak to today's events. He died at age 50, far too young, in 2002. The autopsy found an undiagnosed congenital heart defect, though personally I think the only thing wrong with Joe Strummer's heart was that it was too big.

During those grad school days, I found another musician who has now become a role model: Peter Garrett. He is a gigantic man, an imposing presence with an intense stage manner and a shaved head. (He may have been separated from J.D. Scholten at birth.)

Garrett's band Midnight Oil was big in their native Australia in the early 80s, and Garrett ran for office as a third party candidate of the Nuclear Disarmament Party  while still in the band. They had a very brief window of American and global success with their album "Diesel And Dust," a thematic record about the very Australian yet universal issue of native land rights. It was uncompromising - "it belongs to them, let's give it back."

This platform was not enacted, the international success did not last, and Midnight Oil faded back to their previous rank of being big only in their home country.

 

Garrett left the band in 2002, and two years later announced a run for Parliament - but now as a member of the Labor Party (the mainstream center left party filling the role the Democrats play in the USA).

This time Garrett won. He served a decade and was in two cabinet posts, Environment (where he was a friend of endangered turtles) and later Education, until stepping down in the wake of an internal party power struggle. Then he called the guys up and joined Midnight Oil again.

Henry Rollins, 2017

Musicians only need to get support from a niche, a relatively share of the audience. Protest vote politicians can also push the limits.

But serious politicians? They need to win a majority.

 

 

 

I still ask myself "what would Joe Strummer do?" 

But now I also ask "what would Peter Garrett do?"

All of this, somehow, relates to our local politics of the moment. Stay tuned for that.

City Election Recap: Part 1

Local elections in Iowa City aren't like general elections, and aren't even like local elections in other places. We have some conservatives here, sure; Republicans come in here and raise money from them at closed door events all the time. But true conservatives have long since checked out of local government.

Instead, our local elections have become contests between mainstream, Elizabeth Warren type liberals vs. the Sandersesque left. That's an oversimplification, but it pretty much captures the flavor.

More on this later.

That was sharply drawn in last week's Iowa City election between two de facto slates. At large liberal incumbents Bruce Teague and Megan Alter, with Shawn Harmsen in the separate District B race, defeated the leftist challenger slate of Clara Reynen and Newman Abuissa in the at large race and Amy Hospodarsky in District B. 

It's the first win for the mainstream liberals in three local cycles. In 2023, Laura Bergus, who took a sharp left turn after winning her first term, switched races and defeated fellow council incumbent Pauline Taylor. Mandi Remington knocked off Royceann Porter in the June 2024 supervisor primary, and self-described anarchist Oliver Weilein won big over Ross Nusser in a March 2025 city council special election.

Turnout saw a sharp jump over the past few cycles to 11,174 in Iowa City. It's the highest ever, setting aside three elections with extreme extenuating circumstances (the 2007 and 2013 elections that saw student turnout spikes due to ballot issues on the bar admission age, and the 2005 election with a public power measure that prompted Midamerican Energy to spend $400,000 on a No campaign). In real terms and taking into account growth, it's a return to the levels we saw in 1997 (10,097) and 2001 (10,668).

That turnout growth, compared to the March special election (6,902 - pretty good for a special and rivaling recent regular city election cycles) was uneven across precincts, and that may be the big story as to why the outcome was so different. Of course, in this election the mainstream liberal candidates were all experienced people who have won elections before, unlike first time candidate Nusser in March. All other things being equal, someone who has won an election before is usually more likely to win than someone who has not.

The turnout increases were smallest in the core downtown/student precincts, with precincts 5, 11, 20, 21 and 25 at 100% to 113% of their March turnout (this includes absentees) and precinct 19 actually dropping to 79% of the March turnout.

In contrast, ten precincts saw turnout more than double the March numbers. The biggest jumps were on the south and southeast side (precinct 10 at 277%, precinct 12 at 263%, and 27 at 226%) and on the west side (26 at 242% and 8 at 228%). 

These precincts saw turnout between 215 and 279 voters, other than 8 at 471, and there were some split outcomes. In 10 and 27, the liberal incumbents all won. But in 8, 12 and 26. Hospodarsky led Harmsen while Teague and Alter led the at large contest.

But elections are counted in raw numbers, not percentages, and the big numeric spikes were in older established east side precincts like 1, 16, 17, 23 and 24 and west side precinct 2. These precincts all had between 558 and 861 voters (with increases of 152% to 210%) and Harmsen won all with 57 or 58% (except for 55% in 24).

Harmsen's strongest vote was in these precincts along with 60% of the absentee (which is not broken out by precinct). Hospodarsky had several hot spots on the southeast side and west side and in the core campus precincts.

The geographic patterns were simpler and different in the vote for two at large race. Most precincts finished in the citywide order: Teague, Alter, Reynen, Abuissa. There was no precinct where Alter ran ahead of Teague, and nowhere that Abuissa was ahead of Reynen. (The part I can't figure is why, in a race that was so polarized, Abuissa ran 1000 votes behind Reynen.)

The exceptions were the core five student precincts - 3, 5, 11, 19 and 20 - which all finished Reynen, Teague, Abuissa, and Alter. But of those five precincts, only 20 saw significant turnout; the others had the four lowest vote totals. And, again, these were the places where turnout increased the least over March. Just anecdotally, this election seems to have attracted fewer of the young voters who don't normally participate in local elections than the special election did - or maybe they just got hidden in the higher overall turnout. My sense is that Weilein had a particularly strong personal following.

The least controversial item in the election was the local option sales tax referendum. That's odd for those of us with long memories. Johnson County has long been the last holdout in the state on LOST, with the regressivity argument having more strength here than anywhere else. Iowa City briefly and narrowly passed a sales tax in 2009 for flood relief (Coralville just as narrowly voted it down), but that expired after four years. There were landslide defeats in 1987 and 1999 (the exquisitely poor timing of scheduling the 1999 vote the day before property taxes were due didn't help) and a narrower loss in 2014.

This time, the liberals and the left seemed to be in agreement that the state had given the cities few revenue options, and the inclusion of affordable housing in the resolutions made the regressivity pill easier to swallow. There was no visible organized No campaign like there was in 2009.

In any election involving money in Johnson County, there's about a 15 or 20% unpersuadable vote that I call the Automatic No. They're just going to vote against taxes, period. That means a Yes campaign has to get their 50% (or in the case of a bond 60%) out of the remaining 80% of voters.

Set aside the Automatic No, and the Yes campaign got everyone else: 77% in North Liberty, 84 in Iowa City and 85 in Coralville.

Looking at that Automatic No a little more closely: Given a choice between a slate of Warren liberals and a slate of Sanders leftists, local Republicans didn't make a "lesser of two evils" choice, they just opted out. The city's voter registration is roughly four Democrats for each Republican (countywide it's more like 2.4 to 1). But the final election turnout was nine to one Democratic. Looking at turnout percentage, Democrats were voting at more than twice the rate of Republicans.

Also pointing to the Republicans Skipped This One analysis: Over 1100 voters, ballpark of 10% of the total turnout, voted in the sales tax contest but skipped the District B race. So the Automatic No vote got out to vote against the sales tax, and if they don't like what the city council (which keeps its status quo ante split of four liberals and three leftists) does, they'll just get the state legislature to overrule them.

Briefly touching on other races:

The Iowa City school board race saw incumbents Ruthina Malone and Jayne Finch comfortably ahead and a close race between two strong challengers who presented as liberal. Jennifer Horn-Frasier narrowly prevailed (as of this writing 248 votes) over Dan Stevenson with last second surprise candidate David Noerper way behind. It's a big change from 2023 when a conservative slate lost in a landslide as liberals packed the polls to vote against them.

The left made its first serious run in Coralville, which saw all time record turnout of 3841, surpassing even the "Koch Brothers Election" of 2013 that drew national attention. In the open mayor's race (incumbent Meghann Foster is running for Zach Wahls' open state senate seat), mainstreamer and longtime council member Laurie Goodrich defeated lefty Ryan Swenka. There was a very sharp geographic split with Swenka carrying the precincts south of I-80 while Goodrich prevailed in the higher turnout north.

The council race was a free-for-all with eight candidates for three spots. Incumbents Hai Huynh and Mike Knudson were consensus choices. Lefty Katie Freeman took the third slot by just over 200 with support from just 38% of city wide voters, as a bunch of hard to tell apart candidates split the vote.

The other notable local result was in Solon. One of the three council seats was open, and it was widely understood that former Iowa football equipment manager Greg Morris (long rumored as a potential candidate for something) would win,and indeed he placed first. But late starters Matthew Macke and Tim Gordon, who both presented as conservative, knocked off incumbents Lauren Whitehead and Cole Gabriel, both active Democrats, in what feels like a backlash election.

So status quo for Iowa City and North Liberty, some shuffling in Coralville, and a big step backwards in Solon. Now, on to the next one, a June primary with unusually high stakes.

More to say about that later.