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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Taylor Made for Iowa

Can a state senator lead a new Corn Belt rebellion?

Map,View,Of,Des,Moines.,(vignette)
Featured in the April 2023 issue
href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/map-view-des-moines-vignette-312790838">(Tudoran Andrei/Shutterstock)

I want to tell you about an Iowa political scientist and state senator. 

No, please, don’t turn the page!

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Iowa’s cultural and intellectual fecundity over the last century has generated a veritable cornucopia—consider anti-imperialist historian William Appleman Williams, regionalist painter Grant Wood, Music Man composer Meredith Willson, and the luminous Donna Reed for starters—but when it comes to producing worthy politicians, drought’s the word. Oh, there was the admirably isolationist skinflint Republican congressman H.R. Gross, who opposed Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia on the grounds that it cost too much, and Democratic Governor and U.S. Senator Harold Hughes, a recovering alcoholic trucker whose Christian leftism high-beamed a tantalizing road not taken in the 1970s, but by and large the Ethanol State has given us boring moderate Republicans and faux-populist Democratic tools of agribusiness.

As for political scientists holding elective office, the example of Woodrow Wilson should have closed that door forever.

But the world hasn’t run out of surprises, so an Iowa political scientist is among the most interesting and refreshingly wholesome elected officials in America today.

Jeff Taylor grew up across the street from a cornfield in Spencer, Iowa. After the usual academic peregrinating he ended up at Dordt University, a school in the Dutch Reformed tradition. (Taylor says that he is “an irenic evangelical indebted to a variety of Christian traditions, including Quakerism and Kuyperianism.”)

As a Corn Belt sage, Professor Taylor has written trenchant and rewarding books on the Democratic Party, the decentralist impulse in American politics, and Bob Dylan. (His favorite Dylan songs? “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” “Visions of Johanna,” “Simple Twist of Fate,” “Slow Train,” and “Blind Willie McTell.”)

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Elected to the state senate in 2020 from one of the most conservative districts in Iowa, Senator Taylor cuts a political profile that makes perfect sense but would set a CNN-junkie’s head spinning.

I’ll leave the description to him: “I’m a ‘constitutional conservative’ in the strict construction tradition of Jefferson and Ron Paul, combined with the social morality emphasis of people like Pat Buchanan. The ‘for the common good’ half of my slogan is an indication that I’m still committed to my La Follette/Bryan progressive populism roots.” The stanchions of his platform are “populism and peace, localism, and integrity.”

Taylor was a Ron Paul delegate to the 2012 GOP convention—he praises the gutsy libertarian’s “peace-minded, America First foreign policy”—an act for which he and his renegade comrades were targeted by establishment drones in Des Moines. Yet as David Bowie once sang, the shame was on the other side: never forget that obedient Republicans marched in lockstep with George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and the Iraq War chickenhawks. 

Senator Taylor welcomes collaboration with the anti-monopolist left. He drops clues to this cross-partisan openness with frequent rhetorical nods to William Jennings Bryan, but “sadly,” he says, “there’s little of Bryan in today’s Iowa Democratic Party. The Bernie Sanders wing of the party is strong among the grass roots and it does have more of a pro-common people, anti-corporate-monopoly perspective, but the cult of identity politics and wokeness has infected that wing of the party as well.” Senator Taylor’s current crusade is to prevent farmers and small landowners from having their land stolen via eminent domain for the carbon-capture pipelines that soon will deface the Upper Midwest. Iowa alone is slated to be scarred by at least 1,600 miles of government-subsidized arteries.

It is a classic study in bipartisan sleazebaggery. As Taylor explains, Iowa-based Summit Carbon Solutions, which covets 2,900 parcels of land for its $4.5 billion pipeline, is “led by a large Republican campaign donor and his friend, the former Republican governor [Terry Branstad, who was Trump’s ambassador to China], but it has also hired the son of former Democratic governor and current U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to be the company's general counsel.”

Senator Taylor has feathered the hopper this session with five bills protecting landowners against the eminent domain upon which the pipeline project depends. Last year a Republican caucus snuffed Taylor’s efforts, but this time around he has the Iowa Farm Bureau, the Iowa Cattlemen’s Association, and the Sierra Club in his corner. 

Taylor frames the pipeline fight in Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, Minnesota, and both Dakotas as a David vs. Goliath contest that “pits a coalition of small farmers, county supervisors, Constitution-minded conservatives, and fairness-minded progressives against politically well-connected crony capitalists and leaders of the ethanol industry.” Public sentiment is strongly against multibillion-dollar corporations stealing people’s land, but public sentiment doesn’t always translate into public policy, for as Senator Taylor’s favorite Minnesota balladeer sang, “In a political world/Love don’t have any place.”

Maybe. Or maybe thoughtful, principled Jeff Taylor is sowing the seeds of a new Corn Belt rebellion. It’s about time.