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.