STEVE JOHNSON

Iowa Dem Caucus Position Paper

Steven H. Johnson, Ames

For those who might not have read "Caste" by Isabel Wilkerson, its message goes to the heart of what we're up against in 2024. Caste societies assign different kinds of identities to different groups of people and then build ferocious "stay in your place" ranking systems to enforce each caste's assigned role. Just as India has long had a caste system, just as Germany under the Nazis had a caste system, America has long had a caste system. People of European descent were at the top, people of African descent were at the bottom, and immigrants from other parts of the world were in the middle. 

Demographers are now predicting a day, roughly twenty years from now, when American white people will no longer be America's dominant group by size. Conservative politicians are now playing on this prediction to inspire fear in white voters.

If the Supreme Court agrees that the 14th Amendment prohibits Trump from being a candidate, this issue won't play nearly as extreme a role as it surely will if Trump is allowed onto the ballot.

I am relatively indifferent about which candidate we run. I'm fine with Biden on almost all issues except the Middle East, but I don't know that anyone else in our party would be that different. I'm intrigued by the idea that the Supreme Court might give us the chance to have Nikki Haley as the Republican standard bearer, which would certainly tempt me to have Kamala Harris as our standard-bearer. The only sure way to end up with a woman president is to have a race in which both parties run women for President. If that option opens up, I'm for seizing it. 

What I'm more concerned about is our ability, as a party, to get our message right. If the message isn't strong enough, it won't matter who we run. We'll have hard sledding, no matter what.

So here's how I see America's challenge. We live today in an America that has fused the corruptions of social prejudice with the corruptions of economic privilege. If we are to put our nation on a healthy footing for the future, we will need to generate an aspirational vision that overcomes both our nation's core domination systems, the domination system of Enrichment Capitalism (which I personally would call "Depravity Capitalism"), and the cultural domination system of Caste, i.e. "White Supremacy." 

Isabel Wilkerson's book "Caste" describes America as a country in which the subservience of African-Americans was enforced by ruthless white violence for ever so long, and continues to be reinforced by cultural snobbery and still more violence, even today. 

The depravities of Enrichment Capitalism weren't that much of an issue from the New Deal years of FDR through the Carter Administration. But then Reaganism turned our economic order upside down. 

What the FDR years had given America were four or five decades of Prosperity Capitalism. What we have had since Reagan's presidency has been an economy that would politely be described as "Enrichment Capitalism" but that would more accurately be described as "Depravity Capitalism."

Several years ago, I was browsing Cal-Berkeley professor Emmanuel Saez' website. On it I discovered an Excel file showing the relative share of America's earnings received by Americans in the Bottom 90%, the Next 9%, and the Top 1%, on a presidential administration by presidential administration basis, running from the Truman presidency to part way through the Obama presidency, at which point Professor Saez' research interests took him down a different path, and the database I was admiring had therefore come to a halt. 

Americans in the "Bottom 90%" did reasonably well for quite a long time. The Truman years. The Eisenhower years. The Kennedy years. The Johnson years. The Nixon years. The Ford years. The Carter years. Total earnings going to the Bottom 90% ranged from sixty to seventy percent of the total, except for the Truman years, in which those in the Bottom 90% topped the 70% line.

But with the advent of the Reagan presidency, America's Capitalist Elites got even, big time. Earning shares for the Top 1% had generally been confined to the 1% to 10% range for seven straight post-FDR presidencies. But, BAM! With Reagan, the share going to the Top 1% exploded, running generally in the 20% to 30% range, or even better. As an inevitable result, the share going to the Bottom 90% got knee-capped. It hasn't topped 50% since, and during the recessions of both Bush presidencies, the income share going to Americans in the Bottom 90% turned negative. Members of the Bottom 90% were worse off at the end of the two Bush presidencies than they had been at the beginning. 

So - if we are to see our nation for what it really is - we need to acknowledge not only America's dark social reality, a caste system for oppressing African Americans that's been with us for four centuries, but also the dark reality of a capitalist economic system for oppressing working Americans of all races, a capitalist economic system that was yanked in a far more savage direction in the 1980s than had been its norm previously. 

In short, American Conservatism, aka The Republican Party, is in the Depravity Preservation Business. Societal Depravity. Capitalist Depravity. 

Theirs is a value system of pure madness. We're Americans. We shouldn't let ourselves be defined by the dark social and economic values of Conservative Propagandists and Republican office holders. We can and must do better.

As Americans, we should all be in the Integrity Culture business. The Caste System of yesteryear needs to be consciously dismantled and shut down. All humans are god's children!

And as Americans we should all be in the Integrity Economics business. It's the only proper platform for America's future. 

Let's lay that out, us Democrats, and let our conservative friends know that:  Both as Americans, and as Democrats, we want to see America in the Integrity Culture business, and we want to see America in the Integrity Economics business. 

An Integrity America will be a healthy America for all its people. Culturally Healthy. Economically Healthy. We're Democrats. We understand America's higher promise. The GOP doesn't believe that we Americans have the right to realize our higher promise. Nuts to that. Join us!

That's my recommended message for our 2024 campaign. Regardless of who our standard-bearer turns out to be.

Steven Johnson

Ames, Iowa