We all own the status of our republic today

In the heart of the campaign and election season, it is important for citizens to take stock of where we are today as a country, ask how we have arrived at this point, and what our personal responsibility is. At the national level, we have a narcissistic President who cares more about slapping his name on the people’s buildings and helping himself and his billionaire buddies avoid paying their share of taxes than he does about initiating social policies that can help the average American. We have a simple-minded President who believes raising tariffs on friends and allies is the solution to all economic woes. We have an incompetent President who was led into starting a needless war that he has no clue how to resolve.  We have an authoritarian President bent on limiting our constitutional rights. 

Things seem no less bleak at the state level. We have Republican Ashley Hinson who opened her Senate campaign emphasizing alignment with Donald Trump, stating her goal is to be his “strongest ally” in the Senate. Most Iowans were probably under the misimpression that her primary goal should be serving her constituents in her home state. Senator Grassley caved to the MAGA movement long ago, perhaps in the interest of his grandson’s political career? The Republican candidate for governor is a billionaire carpetbagger from Kansas whose knowledge about Iowa seems dubious at best. He wants to import a Kansas policy agenda that even his fellow Kansans have rejected since it was implemented with devastating results in his true home state. And so it goes.

How have we moved from the land of the free and the home of the brave to the land of the grift and the home of the gullible? Many of us are shocked by what our government and elected officials have become. But the truth is, Trump, Hinson, Zahn and many others are merely the distillate of the general drift in values that shape political attitudes and outcomes. If we’re unhappy about what we see happening, we can change it. We CAN make a difference. We have to make our voices heard, and we have to vote! As Benjamin Franklin famously responded in 1787 to a question about what kind of government the founders had created, his reply was, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Not since the Civil War has the answer to this statement been more open to question. How will you respond?

Fred Waldstein is a Storm Lake native and lifelong Iowan and Wartburg College emeritus professor of political science.