Hope for democracy has to be more than just sentimentality

By ART CULLEN

Storm Lake was quiet, so quiet, for the holidays. Balmy, too, with no snow leading up to New Year’s. Peach and I had Buena Vista’s campus to ourselves. It provided time and space to think. By New Year’s Eve a dull headache started to come on. Over the week I realized that I had grown old, there is no time to waste, and it makes me mad. The temperature plunged to 10 below.

The kids gathered at our house, talked of marriage, fixed a feast and drank wine, and I sat in the chair reading this New Year poll from the Washington Post: Roughly a third of the country (including 58% of Republicans) think that Joe Biden was not elected legitimately. Some 40% believe that violence against the government is acceptable.

Likewise, an earlier Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll reported that only half of those surveyed believed that the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was an insurrection and threat to democracy.

I’m scheduled to talk with Sue Fitzpatrick about Medicare supplemental insurance. Sixty-five comes in May. My jaw clenches and shoulders draw tight. What happened while I was asleep on my feet?

They used to pump your gas, wipe the windshields and check the oil. The union wage set the base rate for the town. A family could save a fortune from a women’s clothing store on Lake Avenue or a sale barn where every independent farmer and bidder knew the price. You could believe The Des Moines Register because ace Clark Mollenhoff said so.

Now you check yourself out at Walmart, the union is something over which gramps waxes nostalgic, and you buy your clothes on Amazon. Wall Street or China owns the hogs. The free press is called the “enemy of the people.”

If you were sentimental you might sense a loss upon waking up.

A loss of faith.

In each other, if that is what democracy is all about, we the people.

Disaffected liberals and conservatives can get their heads around violence against the government of the people. Democrats thought the election was stolen by the Supreme Court from Al Gore, and they thought Hillary Clinton got robbed. They got over it. Most Republicans think the election was stolen from Donald Trump, despite all evidence to the contrary (fully vetted by Republicans in Arizona and Georgia). They can’t seem to get over it.

We don’t believe each other like no time since the Civil War.

That was just not something in the Iowa vocabulary in the mists of my memory. Yet the legislature, convinced that fraud is in the air, is threatening to jail county auditors for mistakes honestly made. Likewise, zealots are talking about prosecuting teachers for offering “obscene” materials to students — obscene as defined by some legislator from Sioux County. The elementary principal is married to a local boy who comes from good people. Can’t we trust that the certificate on her office wall means anything anymore?

We survived 2020 with democracy largely intact. But when only half of us believe that armed insurrection is a problem, and none of us believe that the House panel investigating it will have an effect, the road ahead is perilous.

You hope that the anger will somehow be exhausted. That, punch-drunk from the fight, we can return to the bar like John Wayne would and wash all the enmity down the gullet. How does that happen? This damned pandemic just made it worse.

The older I get the less certain I become of nearly everything. You have to somehow get to the root of what is eating at us. If you are willing to attack the government, you believe you are not of it. That’s something new for an old white guy to process. If you were Black or Mexican or Native, you always knew that you were not part of the order. Now, White men have figured out they’re mucked up in the same swamp pumping their own gas. You wonder how that all happened. This was not supposed to be how it all worked out in the movie. John Wayne won the day.

So much has changed in so short a time. The outside money came in and goes right back out. We lost the farm. Then we lost our sense of each other. We have come to arms over what we think are our rights, and there is enough money out there to keep the whiskey flowing and the fists flying among those who can least afford to take the blow or the hangover.

Shared experience leading to shared prosperity and faith in your neighbor seemed to be the Iowa way. A shared predicate of informed self-governance was our foundation. That conclusion cleared up my nagging headache: We know how to do it, because we have. That has to be something more than an old man’s sentimentality; at least it serves as a comfort against the cold.

Art Cullen, managing editor of The Progressive Populist, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in his day job as editor of The Storm Lake Times in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He is author of the book “Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” A documentary film, “Storm Lake,” on the challenges of running a rural biweekly paper during a pandemic, is available for streaming on the Independent Lens series on PBS at (https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/storm-lake/). Email times@ stormlake.com.

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2022

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