There’s a popular line of thinking, embodied in David Hogg’s “Leaders We Deserve” PAC and Samuel Moyn’s forthcoming book Gerontocracy in America, that says elderly, out-of-touch leaders like Chuck Grassley are behind a lot of the country’s problems. Certainly with people like Dianne Feinstein and Joe Biden, there’s a pattern of politicians staying in office long after it would have been sensible to retire. But you’ve got to be careful here, because the problem with these leaders is not only that they’re old. In general, age is a bad proxy for policy preferences, class allegiance, and even competence. The presumption behind the “gerontocracy” narrative is that younger equals more progressive, more worker-friendly, and that’s statistically likely, but not always true in individual cases. Even basic on-the-job ability varies. Bernie Sanders is old, though eight years Grassley’s junior, and he’s still doing (mostly) solid work. Ritchie Torres and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez are young, and they’re terrible. In Grassley’s case, the real problem is a more insidious combination of things. He hasn’t just been hanging on to power like a barnacle for decades, he’s also been making policy choices that directly harm the people of Iowa, and he’s been exhibiting some truly bizarre behavior along the way.
Like a lot of older people, Grassley’s posting style is terse, full of abbreviations and run-on sentences, and somewhat incoherent. In a recent article, the Iowa-based Little Village described it as having “the start-stop, quiet-loud, herky-jerky quality of an E.E. Cummings poem.” The subjects, too, are odd. “Windsor Heights Dairy Queen is good place for u kno what,” the senator tweeted in 2014, causing a collective huh? to spread across the nation. He would repeat the sentiment the following year, writing that “I'm at the Jefferson Iowa DairyQueen doing ‘you know what’ !!!” Apparently, “you know what” just means “eating ice cream”—or at least, that’s the story he’s sticking to. (...)
Grassley is a fascinating figure, because you never know what you’re going to get next with him. And all of his corn and vacuum-related antics might be charming, if he didn’t have any political power, and was just somebody’s weird grandfather (or, at this point, great-grandfather). There’s an entire category of American political grotesques like this: figures who’ve been defined in the public eye by their personal strangeness and entertainment value, as much as their actual politics. Trump is another, with his constant stream of garbled utterances about the relative merits of death by shark vs. electrocution or how “nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen.” Or there’s RFK Jr. with his brain worms and quack cures, or even New York City’s favorite sons, Eric Adams and Curtis Sliwa. But the problem is, these people do have power. They control things like public health, the police, and the military, and they decide the outcomes of people’s lives. Like Sideshow Bob on The Simpsons, they’re a lot less funny when you realize they’re actually trying to harm you, and Chuck Grassley is no exception.
So what has Chuck Grassley done with his considerable power? When the curtain finally falls on his life and career, how will he be judged? Not well, if you’re an ordinary working-class Iowan. At every turn, Grassley has consistently made decisions that make their lives worse. (...)
Then, too, as head of the Senate Judiciary Committee Grassley had a major role in converting the Supreme Court to the openly right-wing institution it is today. Back in 2016, when he first led the committee, it was Grassley who delayed the vote on Merrick Garland’s confirmation to the Court until after the 2016 election, effectively stealing a seat from the outgoing Obama administration. Afterward, it was Grassley who was among the staunchest defenders of Brett Kavanaugh, even (and especially) after it became clear that Kavanaugh had lied to the American people about the sexual assault accusations brought against him by Christine Blasey Ford. So in a sense, all of the decisions that make up the Court’s post-2016 rightward turn—from the dismantling of women’s reproductive rights to the sweeping criminal immunity granted to Donald Trump—are Grassley’s handiwork.
Good news, though: if you’re a mentally ill person who wants to get a high-powered gun, Chuck Grassley is your best friend! One of his pet projects in 2017 was to repeal Obama-era regulations that prevented people from buying firearms if they had “mental impairments” so significant that they needed a third party to help them claim Social Security benefits. That seems like a rule even the most avid hunters and rifle collectors could agree with—if you can’t fill out a form unaided, you shouldn’t have a gun—but Grassley objected, claiming that the standards were too “vague” and that “if a specific individual is likely to be violent due to the nature of their mental illness, then the government should have to prove it” on a case-by-case basis. Never mind that, by the time the “proof” arrives, a school or a Walmart could be riddled with bullets and bloodstains.
This is who Chuck Grassley is. He makes decisions in Washington that ruin people’s lives, and then he flies back to Iowa to post incoherent gibberish about Dairy Queen online. The wacky grandpa image is a cloak for the deeper depravity. And his constituents know it. In 2021, only 28 percent of Iowans wanted him to run for re-election, with “the age thing” cited as the most common reason. More recently, Grassley’s town hall events have become outpourings of frustration against Republican policy: “I’M PISSED!” one man recently yelled at him, after he made a mumbling defense of the Trump administration shipping people to a gulag in El Salvador without due process. He spoke for millions.
Which leads to another, even grimmer question: why, in Grassley’s 45-year career in the Senate, have the Democrats never been able to unseat him? (...)
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the kind of leaders a system of government throws up in its dying days. You probably remember them from your high school history books. Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor of Rome, who ruled for only ten months before being deposed by the Barbarians (who found him so non-threatening they let him retire to a monastery). Kings Louis XIV through XVI in France, swanning around Versailles in their fur capes while the revolution was brewing outside. Nicholas II in Russia, letting Rasputin whisper in his ear as more and more of his people got blown to bits in World War I, while Lenin and Trotsky drew up battle plans of their own. Later, President Boris Yeltsin, who had crippling alcoholism even by Russian standards, to the extent he “wandered into the street in his underwear” during a state visit with Bill Clinton—and who played a key role in the downfall of the Soviet Union. In each era, the pattern is the same. The people in power are incompetent, corrupt, and personally contemptible, pale shadows of the leaders the country or system had at its peak—and yet, there seems to be no way to get rid of them.
Contrary to the “great man” (or rather “weak man”) theory of history, it’s not that these leaders cause the downfall of their regimes through their personal failings. Just the opposite. They’re not catalysts of decline, but morbid symptoms. The fact that they ever got near power is proof that the system itself is no longer functional. The mechanisms that are supposed to produce strong, effective leaders, from education to military promotion to party leadership contests, are no longer doing so. The skills and attributes needed to reach the top of the hierarchy no longer have much, if anything, to do with the skills and attributes needed to actually rule. Nepotism, mutual back-slapping, and financial corruption have taken hold, like rust. In the early 1800s, Napoleon was able to sweep across the map of Europe like a holy terror, in part because the ancien régime was still choosing military officers based on their noble bloodlines, while Napoleon only cared about effectiveness and would promote any old commoner who could win battles for him. Monarchy was dying, and the last things it belched up as it expired were tenth-generation, third-rate Hapsburg cousins, ripe for the slaughter. In the USSR, the bureaucracy elevated people based on how well they recited the Party line like a catechism, as much as their actual abilities. Thus, they eventually produced a Yeltsin.
And today in the United States, we have Chuck Grassley.
by Alex Skopic, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Good point. In my experience, once an incumbent wins a couple elections they're almost impossible to unseat. Seen it all my life: out of sight, out of mind (in DC).]
