Iowaste

The Heartland Goes Rancid

I covered my first Iowa Caucus in 1976. I did ten more after that. I figure I’ve probably spent two whole years of my life in Iowa, and it was almost always winter…though perhaps not as cold as Caucus Night 2024. There was real political-junkie pleasure communing with the folks tucked between the corn rows. The thing about Iowa, for a New Yorker like me, was that the people were almost always nice, and decent, and rational, even when they held opinions that I considered well off the beaten track. They said hello on the street. They gave directions, happily. The center-cut pork chops were delicious. The State Fair was a hoot.

I spent a lot of time interviewing Evangelicals there. These were not angry people. They were, for the most part, frightened. They were worried about their children. Most were working-class, two-earner families and they were freaked about what their kids were up to after school, while they were still at work. Their churches helped ease that concern: there were after-school sports leagues, and social clubs for teens and day-care for toddlers, praise bands, pancake breakfasts and spaghetti dinners, Bible study and just hangout space. The kids were safe there. There was a sense of community, not readily available in secular society. There was the comfort of faith. So I could understand why they voted for people like Pat Robertson, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum.

Iowa always seemed a classic, American place to me. I visited towns with names like Mason City and Ames and Council Bluffs and Cedar Rapids, counties with names like Linn and Story and Polk. Politics was serious business, and Iowans were stubborn about their right to question candidates, change their minds, and change their minds again. There was very little rancor. Questions were asked with respect. Rationality—sanity—was the rule. The public schools were famously good. Literacy was high. Iowa may not have reflected the diversity of America, but it was a place you could trust, even if the candidates they chose never quite made it all the way to the nomination.

That ended last night. Something very terrible has happened in Iowa. Reality doesn’t live there anymore, at least among Republicans, who have come to dominate the state. (Iowa was purple when I started visiting, with liberal populists like Tom Harkin to match every stolid conservative like Chuck Grassley). Iowa has gone nuts. How else can you explain the 62% of caucus goers last night who believe the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, according to the entrance polls; how else could a similar number say they would vote for Trump even if he were convicted of a crime?

Think about that for a moment. It means most Iowa Republicans do not believe that the most basic ceremony of our democracy functions properly, even after the 2020 vote counts were certified and reviewed by countless election boards and courts across the country. It means that most Iowa Republicans do not believe Donald Trump can get a fair trial—and so the judicial system, a second bulwark of democracy, can no longer be trusted, either. It also means they don’t care about morals or values; they care about the appearance of strength. They don’t care about crude language, fantastic lies, a flagrantly immoral lifestyle; they care about entertainment value. Trump’s Iowa legions may not represent a majority of the American public, but they are the most coherent force in our country right now. You can not sustain a democracy like that.

We’ve all read and watched and listened to endless accounts of the cult-like nature of the Trump constituency. But it just felt different, more concrete last night, as I watched the votes come in. I had entertained the notion that the big Trump poll numbers might not be real support, but a form of venting: a screw-you nose-thumbing directed against the elites who scorned them. His support would begin to evaporate when it came time to actually choose a President. It didn’t, at least not last night.

And all the usual punditry and speculation, all the bloviation about what the results might mean for Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley seemed a waste of breath. Both were rendered irrelevant by Trump. That may change for Haley next week in New Hampshire, which does tend to “correct” the Iowa results—although her Iowa showing will probably hurt her momentum. And then comes South Carolina, Haley’s home state, where Trump’s numbers look a lot like they did in Iowa. And all those other states after that, all those other places where the angry and deluded congregate. It seems clear that democracy just doesn’t mean very much to them; they assume they can live their lives without it. There will still be sports and game shows on TV. Arby’s will still have the meat. Average folks aren’t going to be deported or thrown in jail. You can make arguments—I have, at times—trying to explain or justify the half-crazed imaginings of the Trump cult. Yes, they have some legitimate gripes. But, in the end, they represent a form of gonzo-barbarity that is inexplicable in Sanityland. I wonder where all those nice evangelicals I used to interview have gone…and the store owners, and the folks gathered for their morning cup of coffee in the cafe. If Iowa has gone mad, how much confidence can we have about the rest of the country?