by Paul
Street
This is a
quick, morning after reflection from Iowa City. The Iowa Caucus
results were exactly as I expected. Donald Trump got bested by Ted
Cruz despite his somewhat higher poll ratings. Of course: The Donald
did not have a ground game to match his opinion numbers (gee, imagine
that). Cruz was obviously more popular with the Evangelical
“Christians” who are prominent in the Iowa Republican Party.
Rubio
creamed everyone else in the so-called “moderate” GOP camp.
Naturally: Jeb Bush and Chris Christie are pathetic.
Bernie and
Hillary fought to a virtual coin-toss tie, replete with literal
coin-tosses in some Iowa precincts. This was just as the last Des
Moines Register poll indicated.
No
surprises.
I had
written off any chance of being able to report on the Iowa Caucus
from Iowa City, ground zero for Berniemania. I was working an evening
shift (2 to 10 pm) at Iowa City’s local giant corporate
monopoly-capitalist factory (and no, I am not referring to the
University of Iowa, though I could be), filling hoppers with small
plastic bottles destined to be filled with North America’s favorite
shampoo.
And it was
alright. The line was going down a lot and there was plenty of time
to talk to some of my fellow workers. One of them was from Guinea and
speaks four languages: French, English, Arabic, and his local African
dialect. He plans to attend medical school.
Another was
a woman from Haiti who also (imagine) speaks four languages: French,
Spanish, English, and Creole. She was asking me for advice on how to
publish a book on her life.
Another
co-worker was a young white kid who is doing graphic artwork for an
e-comic book. He showed me some of his (very impressive) sketch-work.
I enjoy
these people. It struck me once again that a lot of very interesting
and brilliant people are doing some very devalued and alienating
wage-work in America.
Another
co-worker is a young and somewhat awkward, endearing bi-lingual
Latino college student who wants to teach high school someday. He was
in the break-room at 6:15, hoping to caucus for Sanders. I informed
that he had exactly 45 minutes to sign in. Did he know where his
caucus site was? “Holy shit, dude,” I told him, “you better
find out.” He ran out of there.
I had been
joking around with folks, telling them that the company’s CEO was a
close friend of Donald Trump and that at 6 pm we would all be bussed
to an Iowa caucus site and told to caucus for The Donald or be fired.
I think two workers actually believed me.
Then came my
pleasant surprise. The word came down at 7 pm: we were all being sent
home because of a product changeover. “Sorry. Hope you weren’t
counting on eight paid hours.” There were no apologies necessary
for me. (I’ve never been a big fan of wage labor).
Reflecting
that a leading caucus site was right in the middle of my bike ride
home, I figured “what the hell. This is political history.” By
7:25, steel-tipped work-boots and all, I was standing at the back of
Iowa City High School’s cafeteria, watching the Democratic
presidential Caucus spectacle unfold. There were 600 caucusers in the
room, almost evenly split between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
I had an
interesting discussion about the unmitigated evil that is Hillary
Clinton (more on that below) with a middle-aged couple in from New
York to observe the curious Midwestern proceedings. We traded notes
on ugly Clinton history. We laughed about the comparative absence of
any actual contestation around the presidential election by the time
the spectacle reaches Chicago and New York. I didn’t tell them I
was Left of Bernie.
The first
thing that struck me was how completely white this crowd was compared
to my co-workers. At least 80 percent of the temporary production
workers at the aforementioned factory are Black, most from Africa.
Among the 600-plus people in the cafeteria, there could not have more
than five people of color. It seemed appropriate to me that the words
“caucus” and “Caucasian” share the same first four letters!
I saw two
Black men in the cafeteria. One stood with the Hillary folks. He wore
a T-shirt depicting Barack Obama as Superman: “Super-O.” The
other black guy sat with the Sanders people. I heard him tell the
Clinton crowd that they were “a bunch of Republicans.”
The second
thing that struck me was the differences in age and affluence between
the 300 Hillary supporters standing to the right side of the
cafeteria (wearing the little Hillary sticker with an arrow pointing,
well, to the right) and the 300 Sanders supporters standing on the
left. The Hillary people were considerably more white-haired. They
wore more expensive clothes. They were older and richer. A bunch of
them looked like, well, like Republicans.
The Bernie
people on the whole were younger, less well-dressed, and more, shall
we say, countercultural in appearance. Which is not to say that there
weren’t plenty of white-haired folks on the Sanders side, including
a number of 60-something gentleman with pony tails. One of these guys
looked just liked David Crosby!
There were
plenty of women on the Sanders side. As far as I could tell, it was a
50-50 gender split over there.
The third
thing struck me was the sheer and despicable ignorance, stupidity,
and/or disingenuousness of the people who spoke on behalf of Hillary
Clinton right before the 20-minute period of time in which the
Hillary and the Bernie supporters sought to “persuade”
uncommitted caucusers over to their side. Hillary’s Precinct One
captain was a bouncy, middle-aged brown-haired woman who wanted
everyone to know that Hillary is a “true progressive” because
Mrs. Clinton graduated from Yale Law School and could have walked
into a top corporate position but “chose instead to work for poor
and minority children at the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF)…All
this talk about Hillary being ‘pro-business’ and ‘right wing’
is nonsense,” because, the precinct captain claimed, “more than
90 percent of Hillary’s campaign contributions have come from
ordinary middle-class donors, not from big corporations.”
The New York
couple and I shuddered. Like me, they know some Clinton history and
have a capacity for detecting populism-manipulating bullshit. They
know that in Arkansas during the 1970s and 1980s Bill and Hillary
helped pioneer the pro-Big Business, right-wing, neoliberal wing of
the contemporary Republican-lite Democratic Party. They know that
Bill and Hillary made their early mark in Arkansas by attacking
public education and teachers’ unions. They know that the Clintons
passed the pro-Big Business, investor rights North American Free
Trade Agreement and the disastrous deregulation of finance during the
1990s. They know that Hillary personally oversaw the killing of hopes
for real (single-payer, Canadian-style) national health insurance in
1993 and 1994.
They know
that Hillary heartily approved Bill and New Gingrich’s vicious and
punitive neoliberal elimination of AFDC – of poor women and
children’s prior entitlement of federal family cash assistance –
in the Orwellian name of “personal responsibility” two decades
ago. They know that that terrible action cost the Clintons the public
loss of their prior friendship with the CDF’s founders Marian and
Peter Wright Edelman. They know that the Clintons’ pernicious
“welfare reform” has proven to be a disaster for poor families.
They know that campaign finance’s malignant “free speech”
influence is weighted in dollars and that Wall Street and other
wealthy sectors have far outspent “ordinary” people when it comes
filling “Hillary Inc.’s” war chest.
They know
that corporate and financial America hasn’t provided Hillary with
lucrative backing without capitalist strings attached and that the
backing has come with full knowledge that her populist- and
progressive-sounding campaign rhetoric is nothing more than cynical
marketing necessity. And they know that Hillary’s is a bellicose
and imperial militarist who voted for George W. Bush’s invasion of
Iraq and promises to inflict considerable bloodshed on the global
stage. (We had some time to talk during the “persuasion” period!)
Another
Hillary speaker was a 30-something white man who told us that he has
a daughter and that this was “our chance to make history by putting
a woman in the White House.” He didn’t even attempt to suggest
that there was anything more to it than pure-and-simple identity
politics. He said nothing about policy, nothing about ideology or
values or Hillary’s commitment (real or fake) to the common good.
He related nothing, of course, about the Clinton’s numerous and
many-sided assaults on poor and working class women at home and
abroad. He just mentioned gender, in and of itself. So, Margaret
Thatcher for president? Condoleezza Rice? How about Eva Braun?
After
“persuasion” (the 20-minute period when the “viable” camps
compete for un-decided caucusers), Hillary eked out a narrow delegate
victory (6 to 5) in Precinct One. I left slightly dejected only to
happen the younger and less affluent Precinct Seventeen in City
High’s auditorium. An old acquaintance of mine showed me the
numbers there: (a) the biggest precinct turnout in history (900, more
than 200 above the prior record from the year of Obama) (b) a
crushing 2 to 1 victory for Sanders.
Wow, I
thought to myself, what a difference a little bit of college town
geography makes. Precinct 17, it appears has more college students,
young people who will be entering the miserable labor market in the
stinking, “elite”-rigged New Gilded Age of savage inequality,
rampant economic precarity, and environmental collapse brought to us
by global neoliberal capitalism and its many political agents,
including Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, and Bill and Hillary Clinton.
“Bigger
than Obama,” I said to my acquaintance. “Damn. And this time it’s
for an actual progressive, not a fake one.” A young lady, a college
student, gave me a big smile when she heard that.
I left the
high school and found that the back tire on my bike was flat. I had a
half-mile walk home in the cool and misty silence. There were rumors
of an approaching winter storm. It gave me time for reflection. I’ve
been quite critical from the anti-capitalist and anti-imperial Left
of Sanders, of the Iowa Caucus (which I was able to observe only
because of a fluke of a production-line shutdown), and the
quadrennial candidate-centered presidential electoral extravaganza. I
stand by my criticisms.
Still, I
can’t lie. It felt good to see that vicious neoliberal sociopath
Hillary take a black eye at City High. And it felt good to see
hundreds of people ready to stand up for a politician who calls
himself a “democratic socialist,” even if he’s really just a
social-democratically included New Deal liberal at best – and a
sadly imperial one at that.
There’s
something to work with in all that, not to be taken lightly. I see a
lot of the people who stood on the left side of the cafeteria
refusing to line up dutifully behind the corporate-neoliberal
Democratic Party in coming months and years.
Something
left and radically democratic is up with young folks and others and
it’s not going to disappear with the eventual fading of Bernie.
Consider it an approaching left storm, bigger than the electoral
major party Sanders sensation. We may well be moving into a good time
to talk about revolution and socialism, the real things.
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