Hubbell vs. Glasson: Another Evaluation
***Note: Lenin’s designation of “Social Democrat” is not synonymous with the contemporary denotation of social democracy, which is a strictly electoral approach to achieving socialism.
On June 5th, Fred Hubbell and Cathy Glasson will contend against each other in the Democratic primary for Iowa’s next governor. While it’s possible that the three other unremarkable candidates in the Democratic race could substantially split the vote shares and prevent a direct primary victory, odds are that the candidate will be selected that night. There is a romantic, almost comic quality to the competition between an establishment millionaire and a union nurse.
Fred Hubbell is clearly no real friend of the Iowan underclasses.
We have seen his ilk in every level, every branch of state and national politics, wealthy paternalists offering platitudinous visions of society. The Democratic machinery produces Hubbells en masse and delegates them to pursue the hegemony of technocratic, slightly-less-than-austere capitalism, a strategy that has proven to be thoroughly unpopular considering the sheer number of elected positions that Democrats have lost nationwide in the last two decades.
Hubbell would have to compel significantly more voters than the standard blocs of Iowa Democrats to the polls in order to overcome the current Republican quo. It’s possible, but recent history shows that crowds are not clamoring for the centrist ideals of bipartisanship and process.
Hubbell’s appeal is derived from purchased screen time and Des Moines register features. The realities of his antagonistic class loyalties are veiled by the persona his moneyed campaign has designed and disseminated. Fred isn’t just another effete liberal, he’s a dutiful and progressive community member and family man. At least, that’s what the advertisements he could afford to broadcast several months earlier than his rivals depict. Hubbell, through television and newspapers, has been subsumed by Debord’s conception of spectacle, or “the omnipresent celebration of a choice already made in the sphere of production, and the consummate result of that choice.”
The Hubbell campaign is substantially more affluent than its Democratic opponents. Current fundraising estimates show that Hubbell has eclipsed his closest challenger Glasson by over 2 million dollars. Because of this ample purse, Fred can domineer state media and reinforce his crafted personal narrative as indisputable realism. It’s an unfortunately effective method of garnering votes, an approach that enshrines his familial image within civil society.
Fred, and his campaign confidant spouse Charlotte, utilize domestic appearance to ennoble the Hubbell candidacy. In various interviews, Fred has proclaimed that he discovered over time that he wanted to be both a father and a community leader (and apparently a bourgeois manager). This ideological embrace of family and politics becomes realized within his campaign, affirming conclusions presented by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus;
social repression needs psychic repression precisely in order to form docile subjects and to ensure the reproduction of the social formation…The family is indeed the delegated agent of this psychic repression, insofar as it ensures “a mass psychological reproduction of the economic system of a society.”
Fred invests his vast wealth into widely publicizing his image. In turn, Iowans are ideologically impelled into supporting this familiar patriarchal figure and the capitalist political mechanism that is the Iowa gubernatorial race continues with its bleak formality.
Despite the apparatuses that favor his campaign, Hubbell technically has not secured the nomination. The primary ritual still has to be indulged. This leads me to consider Cathy Glasson, the only sympathetic politician organizing in Iowa presently. Since the last Great Recession, Iowa has been beleaguered by the ascension of Tea Partyists and Trumpian neocons. Our medical infrastructure has been eviscerated, our water has been poisoned, and our communities have depopulated, all while our GOP rulers gleefully parrot buzzfeed articles that laud the sublime myth of “Iowa Nice.” The malevolent capitalists have extracted from Iowa with utmost cruelty while the benevolent ones have been steadily ousted from executive and legislative control.
Unlike her contemporaries, Glasson understands that the Democratic party is rotten and this is what urges me to entertain her run for office. Unlike Hubbell or McGuire or Norris or Wilburn, Glasson recognizes that the policies Republicans have instituted in the past years are attacks on the working and marginalized. It’s refreshing to hear a Democrat acknowledge the existence of class warfare.
While the uptick in social democrat campaigns following the wake of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential run is mildly encouraging, it has to be accepted that reformism is a dead end. There is no electoral route to socialism. History has shown this over and over. That being said, another Reynolds governorship would be disastrous. The pretense of electoral pragmatism has typically halted revolutionary currents. Would a possible Glasson Democratic nomination be a similarly stifling affair? Likely yes, but it is still prudent to discuss the potentialities of her campaign.
According to Lenin, “Our business as Social-Democratic publicists is to deepen, expand, and intensify political exposures and political agitation.” No committed socialist would assert this implies an obligation towards Glasson. But, Lenin’s thought also does not advocate for the perilous accelerationism of another Reynolds term. It would be dubious to argue that class consciousness can be fostered under Republican astringency. It’s hard to organize when one’s allies are being smothered by medical debt.
Glasson is not a New Deal Democrat, a bourgeois arbiter tasked with appeasing the furious working class with welfare programs. Glasson is also not going to be leading a vanguard against the Iowan overclass. More so than any other candidate, her platform only offers economic respite to the state’s downtrodden people. This is appreciated, but her plan is ultimately a charity of bourgeois rule.
If one was implored to vote in the Democratic primary, Glasson would be the only choice that isn’t unilaterally repugnant. However, if she does succeed in attaining the Democratic nomination, the socialist project will remain the same, opposing capitalism by, as Lenin proffered, training “our Social-Democratic practical workers to become political leaders, able to guide all the manifestations of this all-round struggle, able at the right time to ‘dictate a positive programme of action.’” Iowans would possibly be less alienated under a Glasson governorship, providing the House and Senate flip as well, but her hypothetical triumph would principally presage a scenario in which state socialists would have to engage the Iowan underclass even more fervently.
Of course, no one is obliged to participate in the machinations of the Democratic party. Glasson’s campaign promises policies of welfare, ecological preservation, racial equality, and other commendable goals, but even if she defies odds and beats out Hubbell, and then Reynolds, the class struggle will endure.
I wish her luck.
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