Commentary

Rep. eyeing Iowa governorship thinks multiculturalism is enemy of freedom

Rep. eyeing Iowa governorship thinks multiculturalism is enemy of freedom

Now that Donald Trump has selected current Iowa Governor Terry Branstad to serve as his Ambassador to China, other Iowa politicians are eying the governor’s office beneath the gold dome of the Iowa Statehouse.

On December 8, Joe Scarborough on his MSNBC “Morning Joe” program asked ultra-conservative U.S. Rep. Steve King if he might be interested in taking the Governor’s office, when King admitted that “it piques my interest.”

King, who “represents” Iowa’s fourth congressional district, is arguably the most right-wing of all congressional Republicans. On January 24 of 2015, he attempted to play kingmaker by bringing some of the most politically conservative of the Republican Party’s potential 2016 candidates to his so-called “Iowa Freedom Summit” in Des Moines. This event kicked off Iowa’s first-in-the-nation presidential caucus. 

Don’t be misled by the title of this gathering since it is a form of false advertising. When Steve King talks about “freedom,” just what exactly does he mean? As a former resident living in his congressional district, I realized King’s definition included only people like himself.  

King certainly has no interest in promoting freedom for undocumented residents. Last year, he dismissed the notion that many undocumented immigrants are high-achieving students. He asserted that they should not receive a pathway to citizenship, saying that for every valedictorian who is granted legal status, “there’s another 100 out there that weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”

Steve King not only supports Trump’s call for a wall on the U.S. southern border, but he even drew detailed blueprints for its construction.

And King has no use for the concept of “freedom” for the diversity of cultural traditions in the United States other than his own. He claimed that the promotion of the concept of multiculturalism will ultimately bring about the demise of the country as we know it.

In the course I taught at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, titled “Multicultural Foundations in Schools and Society,” I showed students a video in which King spoke to supporters on August 21, 2012, at a Le Mars, Iowa, Town Hall meeting. King conjured up a supposed deep and sinister plot to ensnare young and impressionable first-year college students into campus multicultural groups to turn them into victims, which he asserted will convince them to work toward the eventual overthrow of the country’s power structure.

King talked about preparing for a debate focusing on the concept of multiculturalism some time ago on the Iowa State University campus. He discussed checking first the university’s website:

“I typed in ‘multicultural,’” he stated on the video, “and it came back to me at the time, 59 different multicultural groups listed to do, to operate on campus at Iowa State….And most of them were victims’ groups, victimology, people who feel sorry for themselves.”

He warned that these groups are “out there recruiting our young people to be part of the group who are feeling sorry for themselves….But just think of 59 card tables set up across the parking lot on the way to the dorm….And the first group says, ‘Well, you’re a victim that fits us. We want to help you. Why don’t you join us?’….And then you’re brought into a group that has a grievance against society rather than understand there’s a tremendous blessing in this society.”

Though King attended Northwest Missouri State University from 1967 to 1970, taking courses toward a career as a wildlife officer, he never completed his degree. His political career officially began when he was elected to the Iowa Senate serving from 1996-2002. While there, he was instrumental in passing the law mandating English as the “official” language of Iowa.

He was elected to the U.S. House of Representative in 2002 serving on the Agricultural and Judiciary Committees, Constitution Subcommittee and Immigration (really?) Subcommittee. He also chairs the powerful House of Representatives Conservative Opportunity Society caucus (and how does he define “opportunity”?).

While in public office, he has consistently taken stands championed by the political Right opposing affirmative action for women and minoritized people, marriage equality for same-sex couples, women’s reproductive freedoms, and gun control, among others.

Continuing his conspiratorial theory in Le Mars, King warned of the work and philosophy of Antonio Gramsci, whom he referred to as “the president of the Italian Communist Party from 1919 to 1926…” and “the father of multiculturalism.”

According to King, “[Gramsci] made the argument that Karl Marx was right in his broader theory but wrong in the details that the Proletariats (sic) would never rise up against the Bourgeois effectively because they needed the Bourgeois for their jobs….And so, he said they needed to find victims groups and then that way if they could have a common sense of being victimized, they would have a stronger resistance toward the establishment, and then you could bundle up these victims groups and they together could overthrow the establishment….”

Maybe King should have taken my Multicultural Foundations course since it is obvious he has lots to learn on the topic. Yes, Gramsci was a leader in the Italian Communist Party, as well as a political theorist, politician, and linguist whom the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini imprisoned for his outspoken advocacy of human and civil liberties (freedom!).

At Gramsci’s trial in 1926, the chief prosecutor argued: “For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning.”

While serving his sentence, he wrote more than 30 notebooks between 1927 and 1935 constituting over 3,000 pages of history and analysis together known as the Prison Notebooks. In these writings, he stressed the imperative for workers’ education founded upon the strong bedrock of history and understanding of social relations, and on the origins and functions of ideas.

Gramsci wrote about the concept of “cultural hegemony,” which describes the ways in which the dominant group successfully disseminates its social realities and social visions in a manner accepted as “common sense,” as “normal,” and as “universal.” This hegemony maintains and expands the marginality of groups with different or opposing views. Gramsci knew the true definition of “freedom,” and he worked to advance freedom tirelessly throughout his tragically short life.

Gramsci’s health deteriorated dramatically while incarcerated, and he died in 1937 at the age of 46.

Steve King is a prominent and outspoken member of the so-called “Birther Movement.” He has consistently tried to define President Barack Obama as “other” by attempting to prevent our President the right of self-definition – an apparent contradiction within a political party that emphasizes rugged individualism, freedom, and liberty over one’s life.

In August 2012, King made the absurdist accusation during a tele-town hall meeting that though his staff had found Barack Obama’s birth announcement in two separate Hawaiian newspapers, “That doesn’t mean there aren’t some other explanations on how they might’ve announced that by telegram from Kenya.”

In addition, according to King while Obama was running for the presidential nomination in 2008: “When you think about the optics of a Barack Obama potentially getting elected President of the United States…[w]hat does it look like to the world of Islam? I will tell you that, if he is elected president, then the radical Islamists, the al-Qaida, the radical Islamists and their supporters, will be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on September 11 because they will declare victory in this War on Terror.”

Rather than resisting the concept of multiculturalism and viewing it as a challenge to our country’s very existence, Mr. King would do well to embrace our rich diversity. Without a strong emphasis on multiculturalism in our school and larger society, we will continue down the shameful historical path laid by those who have gone before us in the United States.

Joel Spring refer to this path as “cultural genocide” defined as “the attempt to destroy other cultures” through forced acquiescence and assimilation to majority rule and standards. This cultural genocide works through the process of “deculturalization,” which Spring describes as “the educational process of destroying a people’s culture and replacing it with a new culture.”

Steve King’s ideas and policies — which align closely with the President-elect’s — represent the worst of our country. His brand of “freedom” and “liberty” expand the already wide cultural and political divide further.    

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