Right before last year’s Iowa Republican caucus, just
about everyone I know circulated this video on Facebook called “Iowa Nice,” in which a
bearded-male-barista-type takes the viewer through a profane mini-history of
the state’s economic, technological, and civil rights accomplishments.[1]
The video resonated pretty strongly with my friends in Iowa—not so much because
it wore its liberal politics on its sleeve, but because this bearded man’s
straight-faced, fast-talking vulgarity was so starkly at odds with just about any
recognizable Iowan subject. People in Iowa—they’re just not like that. And by juxtaposing its depictions
of the state’s liberal strands with the implausibility of the man’s condescending,
douchebaggy delivery, the video actually sketched a more powerful and
ultimately familiar figure that exists in the man’s shadow: the polite,
principled, Midwestern progressive. Iowa Nice.
It is a surprisingly common type in Iowa, as anyone might
notice after visiting the state’s more liberal areas, including Ames, my hometown.[2]
The truth is that, despite the earnestly contested nature of many social issues
in Iowa (abortion, LGBT rights, etc.), there’s still a reserve to the way most of
these issues are actually discussed that reminds me of the incredible boundedness—the
inescapable fucking Midwesterness—in
which the Iowa Nice progressivism occurs. And this runs deeper than an incidental
intersection of personal demeanor and political leanings. Rather, in a state
that’s a hotbed of political diversity, the inevitable negotiation of
difference is often conducted in a startlingly straightforward and unironic way,
an unassuming and slow-moving dance between tradition and reason, ideology and
intuition. There are crazies there, obviously.[3]
But for a place with so much actual disagreement, there’s also a strong
aversion to conflict over political issues, which fosters this tentative,
benefit-of-the-doubt respectfulness—the Niceness!—that, more than anything else
I can think of, defines what it might mean to be Iowan.[4]
When I tell people I’m from Iowa I often get a
condescending “So, how was that?” or
a less loaded but still uncomfortable “That’s so interesting!” If we’re actually having this conversation, though, the
Oh-Haha-I-Get-It-You’re-From-a-Kind-of-Rural-Place smile is at least more
likely to disappear if I describe that: 1) yes, there are communities of very
smart, progressive people in Iowa, and that 2) being nurtured by a great deal
of these people while growing up there has been central to my own political
consciousness. I get annoyed by the “how was that” question, but it’s actually an important one for outsiders to
ask and for Iowans to answer, because trying to answer it honestly—defining and
articulating the that—begs one to
more precisely extract the essential principles a location fosters.
This project seems impossible to do right without
facing the Nice stereotype. Of course, there are other, much more harmful
associations I could be addressing (incestuous rednecks, hillbilly farmers, etc).
But Niceness has the interesting distinction of being something that is often
perceived as a positive on it’s face (“I drove through Iowa once and loved it—everyone
was so nice!”), yet is conceptually
very similar to other Iowan associations like simplicity, slowness, and a sort
of ineptness with the modern world—all of which tend to be imagined pretty
pejoratively. It manages to be both the subject of distant admiration and
subtle ridicule. And it’s this apparent paradox that makes the that question so fascinating: What does
it mean to be so Nice?
The Iowan caricatures, of course, don’t completely
come out of nowhere. But one might most productively think of their truth as a
pervasive sensibility that most Iowans do end up adopting to some extent; these
things aren’t static. Take the religiosity for one: first you become aware that
there’s an unusually high amount of Evangelical Christians in Iowa. You then internalize
that schema and, over time, conceiving of religion through the language of My Relationship
With God isn’t that weird a concept to think about, even if this relationship
is virtually nonexistent in practice. This is partially why I’m fixated on the
polite progressive archetype—it complicates three prominent elements of
Midwestern stereotype that seem to me often conflated or underexplored:
simplicity, single-mindedness (manifesting itself in racism, homophobia, and
general conservatism), and, of course, the ubiquitous Niceness. The polite
progressive unearths questions about how these overarching sensibilities,
especially those of simplicity and reservedness, affect the development and
relationships of just about everyone in the heartland. Specifically: in a state
where they’ll inevitably be confronted with extreme right-wing rhetoric, how
and why do Nice progressives stay so Nice?
Casual use of “nice” often implies a superficialness, as if it can only exist as a social lubricant,
a means to the ultimate end of civility. But this breed of Capital-N-Nice
seemed to operate as something much deeper in practice. For many, it seemed like
Nice was about striving for the ideal of fluid communication in a world that was
too large, too diverse, too secular; Nice imagined a place where the worst-case
scenario would be agreeing to disagree, and everyone could always see where you’re
coming from. Most importantly, it imagined a world where empathy was the glue
to this communicative ideal—a world where empathy trumped ideology. Of course,
it didn’t always work that way in practice. But the expectation was there and the
aspiration was there. And as a result, the evolution of my views and the views
of those around me happened in a dynamic environment where it was completely
plausible for my friends’ parents to be liberal professors or fundamentalist
preachers. While these groups may not have interacted every day, they were all
expected to live with each other as humans—to attend the same community events,
and to speak and be heard within the same ultra-intimate public sphere. They
were expected to feel for each other because that what adults did.
An example: as a high school antiwar activist, I was
most often thrown into fits of self-doubt about my own views when community
members accused me of not supporting the troops and their brave decision to
step up. These character-based arguments registered with me more strongly than
their more cerebral counterpoints (about, say, the potential impact of a
withdrawal on Iraq’s security) because it was through the lens of such personal
appeals where my actions seemed to really hurt those who disagreed with me. Here,
my imagined pragmatism was really just callousness, and it risked violating the
social compact of our community. Though I think my counterpoint that
“supporting the troops can also mean not wanting them to get killed” is still
pretty straightforward and sound, it never quite felt like that was enough to
counteract the guilt associated with my views. Like: how the hell could I not
feel for those troops and their family? How
could I?
So if the Niceness was inextricable from a regional
brand of idealism and seeing the best in people, it’s a mindset I’ve nearly
done a 180 on since leaving Iowa.[5]
That is, it’s increasingly easier now to succumb to that instant gratification
of wholly villanizing those with the most offensive views to me, as if I’ve now
learned to assume they lack the same basic humanity I used to expect from
others.[6]
And I don’t think that this is simply an ancillary phenomenon to losing some of
that Iowa Nice over the years; it’s inescapably central to that process.
Niceness was a mandate for empathy.
In this context, it seems like no coincidence that the
Iowa Nice video was catalyzed by the 2012 Republican caucus, which happened to
also be the backdrop for one of the most spectacularly life-affirming visits to
Iowa in my own life. Discourse around the caucuses is and was, of course,
completely insane—this was the one that pathological gay-basher Rick Santorum won, after all. And while his supporters did seem like a bunch of crazy
bigoted reactionaries, the outcome also underscored the real and formative
influence of the values he appealed to. Simplicity, integrity, and moral
directedness—these ideals genuinely touched most everyone in Iowa, even when
packaged in pseudo-compassionate platitudes and millions of Super PAC dollars.
The point is that, while the majority of us still
choose a different candidate in November, the way Santorum’s campaign packaged
his values was still felt, and, more
importantly, the expectation of externalizing the feelings associated with
one’s values was still conspicuous in the public discourse. The caucus
mythology imagines that the civic process can create a bond among citizens
through rational discourse; not every caucusgoer’s candidate will win, but
everyone will have had a chance to plead their case to the educated
sensibilities of others.[7]
To the extent this narrative actually reflects reality, such a bond seems more
emotional than cognitive. That is, for every trembling, Obamacare-decrying
Santorum supporter fretting about the direction of their community, you could
find a Nice progressive who was equally confused, horrified, and energized by
these local culture wars. If these
parties were mutually bound by the ideal of empathetic Niceness, then such a bond—solidified
through treating each other as creatures who can and will feel emotions and can
and will express those emotions—is
pretty strong. The fear-mongering and hate speech that led so many Iowans to
caucus for Santorum might have been petty and destructive as a methodology for
political decisionmaking, but it was weirdly comforting in its expectation that
I, as a fellow human, could empathize with their fears.
Perhaps the most vivid impression that the Iowa left
on me was this, though: the realization that my own tools of rebellion against the
Niceness—which I used pretty frequently—were still wholly bound as an Iowan. As
was the case for many young people, it grated on me. Not just the conservatism,
but the way that the Niceness packaged that conservatism and made it feel so
much more OK than it feels now. I have a deep affinity for the Niceness now,
but it’s a profoundly retroactive one; imagine living somewhere like that when
you’re seventeen, opinionated and angry. Of course, it’s clear to me now that
any form of resistance I tried to express would still fall into this same
matrix of Midwestern Niceness that still holds extreme resonance.
Consider: the first time I got drunk I was sixteen,
rafting down a slow-moving river on a homemade raft that some friends and I
constructed out of discarded lumber and blueboard from local construction
sites. You could apply some nasty rural stereotypes to the premise, but—to me
at least—the social meaning was vastly different. It was a statement about our
determination to act hedonistically and individually, despite the limited
outlets that Ames had for teenagers to enjoy themselves without chemical inebriation.
It was about carving out space to make our own decisions, and while in this
case the decision was to fuck around and drink, the initiative it took to do so
also drove me to be politically active, intellectually curious, and—ultimately
and crucially—to leave Iowa.
Looking back now, its easy to understand that, to the
extent that I still earnestly associate my own sense of testy independence with
an act so unequivocally rural, I’m also reinscribing my identification and ties
as an Iowan. If that river represented my escape from the oppressive Niceness,
it’s appropriate that it eventually flowed back to the same town I was trying
to escape.
But really, though, how was that?
I’ve used the raft anecdote to answer the real-life that question before, to varying degrees
of success. And it would certainly be easy to dismiss the image as a bunch of
stupid hicks getting drunk because there wasn’t much else to do, or—maybe if you’re
really invested in the simplicity and Niceness lenses here—it could be like
this fascinating distillation of rural adolescent vigor. These perceptions are
entirely reasonable. But these slices of Midwestern life were actually the
experiences through which people like me navigated that fraught space between
rebelling against and embracing our own local sensibilities, and that feels
anything but obvious or stereotypical. So I fixate on the hypothetical that question because it’s a hugely
important one if we really care about what Niceness is and why moving away from
it is so complicated, so simultaneously alienating and liberating.[8]
My hope, though, consistent with the spirit of Midwestern optimism about
communication, is that the question might actually spark a moment of
stimulation—of realizing that growing up with engrained values that are then
distorted and reproduced to the world as stereotypes actually creates real human drama for Midwestern people.
And if our responses don’t evoke that drama right away, it’s possible we’re
just quietly taking in your question, trying to feel where you’re coming from, remembering
to be nice about it.
[1] Ending with “We’re nice, Fuckwad.”
[2] It’s worth mentioning that this entire
essay is in relation to a fairly non-representative place within Iowa. But
that’s almost the point: there are things that seem to be true across the state
& region, even in the least representative areas.
[3] See: King, Steve
[4] It seems important to point out that the
effect of this political diversity could, theoretically, have swung the other
way: that the only thing separating Iowa from being a collection of
ideologically divided people de facto segregated by political leanings,
stubbornly and bitterly siloed like a small-town emulation of the internet, is
Iowans themselves.
[5] Especially now that I work for an
organization whose main strategy for social change is aggressive litigation,
which tends to frame actors and actions as straightforwardly just or unjust. I
don’t mean this as a criticism of the ACLU, as my appreciation for impact
litigation has gone up exponentially since working there. The point, though, is
that the whole process is kind of un-Iowan.
[6] Like one time I dreamt that I kicked
Mitch McConnell in the stomach and he just physically deflated. Just like that.
[7] Caucusing doesn’t work like a normal
primary. For Iowa Democrats, you are literally put in a room with all the other
caucusgoers and stand together in physical groups based on which candidate you
support. A designated captain for each group gives a short stump speech to the
room, and you are then given a chance to realign to a different candidate if
you so choose (or if your group has under 15% of the total crowd). After three rounds of this, the numbers are finally
counted. Though apparently the Republican version is more of a straightforward
primary process, Republicans have their own version of this collective
decisionmaking process in the much lower-stakes Iowa Straw Poll. In the 2008
Democratic event, the team Kucinich captain ended his speech with “he may not
be the best-looking candidate, but I promise you he’s the best one.”
[8] The more I think about it, “The
Niceness” is actually a pretty valid answer to both the best and worst things
about my time in Iowa.
