Opinion: We didn’t used to be conservative, but we are now

No one ever accused the two of us, or our famous Iowan grandfathers who served in President Franklin Roosevelt’s Cabinet, of being conservative. The New Deal was something conservatives hated.

But today we embrace the label. Some of Americans’ most basic freedoms and rights are in danger of being stripped away. They desperately need conserving. We refer to retirement security, a healthy planet, and women’s reproductive freedom.

Retirement security encompasses Social Security and Medicare. They’ve been under assault before, like with Donald Trump’s plan to terminate the main funding source for both programs, the payroll tax.

FDR knew there would be pushback against his program to help ordinary American workers avoid the poorhouse. He carefully designed Social Security to be an earned retirement insurance program. Workers pay into it their entire lives, through payroll taxes. That gives them, FDR said, “a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.”

More: Our grandfathers helped FDR design Social Security. We can't allow it to be willfully destroyed now.

Republican President Dwight Eisenhower was equally blunt. There may be “a tiny splinter group” of politicians who want to mess with Social Security,” he wrote, but “their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

Well, stupid is back. MAGA Republicans today have a shocking plan to kill the guarantee of Social Security and Medicare. The plan originated with the top Republican in charge of making sure that Republicans win U.S. Senate races this November, Florida Sen. Rick Scott.

Our Iowa grandfathers personally helped FDR design Social Security. Henry A. Wallace, a product of Adair County and Iowa State College, was FDR’s secretary of agriculture and later vice president. Harry Hopkins, raised in Grinnell and a graduate of Grinnell College, was FDR’s closest adviser and later secretary of commerce. The legislation they produced was unanimously supported by every senator and congressman from Iowa, Republican and Democrat.

The radical Republican plan would wreck Social Security and Medicare. It would sunset both programs after five years. Social Security, Medicare and the payroll tax would continue only if Congress agreed on how to renew them. Congress would have complete discretion to cut them, privatize them, turn them into unearned welfare, or let them “go bankrupt.”

None of the five Iowa Republicans running for the U.S. House or Senate has condemned this betrayal of Iowa’s seniors. So they own it. Social Security covers more than 660,000 Iowans. Medicare covers about the same number.

We are mystified. Seniors are the most likely voters to show up at the polls — 75% turnout in 2020. Any “conservative” Republican who doesn’t actively condemn this proposal from their top leadership is courting electoral suicide.

A true conservative would conserve Social Security, via the obvious route of lifting the income cap on what rich people pay into the program. Currently, the Social Security payroll tax does not apply to earned income over $147,000. Why can’t the rich pay the same 6.2% rate as everybody else?

True conservatism also requires that we conserve planet Earth — the only home we’ve got. FDR prioritized natural resource conservation. When our grandfathers joined him during the Great Depression, farmers made up almost half of the American workforce. They bore disproportionate suffering from brutal environmental conditions that ruined their livelihoods. The New Deal’s agricultural reforms rescued their soil, their crop prices, and their livelihoods.

Today, farmers are faced with massive problems because of inflation and climate change. One Iowa storm, the 2020 derecho, cost $7.5 billion alone, and climate disasters cost the country $145 billion in 2021. The new Inflation Reduction Act will invest in the transition to clean, home-grown energy that can create jobs and save Iowans $1.2 billion in energy costs.

Iowa already is in the top handful of states leading the transformation to renewable energy. But even though the new law embraces Iowa’s leadership in this transformation, every single Iowa Republican in Congress opposed it.

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And what is more “conservative” than freedom from government control of our private lives? Our grandfathers shared FDR’s vision that rights should be always expanding —and always conserved. Henry Wallace and Harry Hopkins would be appalled that, for the first time in history, freedoms are being taken away from American women.

FDR’s famous Four Freedoms included “freedom from fear” and “freedom from want.” But new state laws in Republican-controlled states shred constitutional freedoms that have stood for a half century. They threaten criminal prosecution for women who have suffered a rape or miscarriage, striking fear into the hearts of both women and their health care providers. They will inevitably apply only to low-income women (people of “want”) who cannot travel to a distant state where abortion remains legal.

Real conservatives don’t strip away basic rights and replace them with governmental dictates.

More: Kansans rejected an anti-abortion constitutional amendment. What does that mean for Iowa?

The conservative voters of Kansas — a state that went for Donald Trump by 15 points in 2020 — recently voted overwhelmingly to retain their constitutional freedom of reproductive choice. We think Iowa tradition tilts similarly toward protection of individuals’ rights, and against government usurpation.

Threatening long-established rights and freedoms is not conservatism. It is radical, destructive, and even cruel. On behalf of our esteemed grandfathers, two of the most celebrated Iowans of the 20th century, we believe that our economic security, our planet, and our fundamental personal rights must be conserved.

Henry Scott Wallace is an attorney and head of the foundation Wallace Global Fund. June Hopkins is a retired history professor and author. 

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Opinion: Seeing freedoms in danger, we realized we're 'conservative'