States that do not matter
by Tom Sullivan
Land for sale in Pottawatomie County OK.
A year-old post from Rick Perlstein at Bill Moyers’ website came across Twitter yesterday and led to discovering that BillMoyers.com went into archive mode on December 15. I was delighted to have Bill’s team run a couple of my Hullabaloo pieces this year and will miss his spotlighting posts like Perlstein’s Mother Jones piece. It has gnawed at me since reading it.
Perlstein was teaching a weeklong seminar on the history of conservatism in Oklahoma ahead of last year’s election. One straight white male, a very bright kid Perlstein dubs “Peter” wrote an essay for the class that he found “extraordinary” on why he was supporting Donald Trump. In a private postscript, Peter wrote:
“My wishful hope is that my compatriots will have their tempers settled by Trump’s election, and that maybe both sides can learn from the Obama and Trump administrations in order to understand how both sides feel. Then maybe we can start electing more moderate people, like John Kasich and Jim Webb, who can find reasonable commonality on both sides and make government work.”
That’s pretty stunning. But what drew a gasp and applause when Peter read it to the mostly black class was (emphasis mine), “for those people who have no political voice and come from states that do not matter, the best thing they can do is try to send in a wrecking ball to disrupt the system.”
In trying to make sense of Peter’s accounting for the Trump victory, Perlstein asks, “Is it, in the main, a recrudescence of bigotry on American soil — a reactionary scream against a nation less white by the year? Or is it more properly understood as an economically grounded response to the privations that neoliberalism has wracked upon the heartland?”
Plenty of studies suggest the former. Upon doing a little research (it doesn’t take much), Perlstein discovered the latter does not hold much water. By comparison with Detroit or Chicago, median household incomes, poverty rates, GDP growth, and cost of living in Peter’s remote town of 3,000 was no worse off or even better:
Peter, though, perceives the region’s economic history as a simple tale of desolation and disappointment. “Everyone around was poor, including the churches,” he wrote, “and charities were nowhere near (this wasn’t a city, after all), so more people had to use some sort of government assistance. Taxes went up [as] the help became more widespread.”
He was just calling it like he saw it. But it’s striking how much a bright, inquisitive, public-spirited guy can take for granted that which just is not so.
(The historian of conservatism couldn’t help throwing in a Reagan reference.)
“Is it bigger than the Daniel Building?”
A close high-school friend grew up Greenville, SC in the 1960s. At 25 floors, the Daniel Building downtown was the tallest building in the state. “Is it bigger than the Daniel Building?” he once asked in reference to something large. I’m from Chicago. Twenty-five floors is nothing. He measured bigness by his experience.
It struck me that Perlstein countering Peter’s sense of poorness by referencing Detroit or Chicago misses that. Peter measures poorness and economic decline by what he knows, not by comparing himself to places he doesn’t.
Perlstein writes:
Feelings can’t be fact-checked, and in the end, feelings were what Peter’s eloquent essay came down to — what it feels like to belong, and what it feels like to be culturally dispossessed.
Peter’s sense that people like him come from “states that do not matter” ought to give us pause as progressives work to retake the House and Senate and state legislatures across the country. As I have argued repeatedly here, geography matters in our system. Whether or not the left and right coasts like it, the left needs to be more competitive in those “flyover states” and rural counties that don’t matter because they hold fewer votes. They still hold state legislative and U.S. Senate seats. But they won’t be won by seeing the people in them as a means to an end.
Howard Dean got that. The Democratic establishment still doesn’t. Rebuilding trust is doable, but time-consuming. Campaigns are more about expediency and efficiency than building relationships. They are all about shortcuts and timelines and win numbers. You don’t win people’s hearts by changing their minds. It’s the other way around.
First you have to care enough to show up, whether it’s Flint, MI or Shawnee, OK.
Markos Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong wrote in 2006 about then-Virginia governor Mark Warner:
As Warner asks, how many more times will the Democrats run presidential campaigns where they abandon thirty-something southern and western states and “launch a national campaign that goes after sixteen states and then hope that we can hit a triple bank shot to get that seventeenth state?”
For another decade at least.
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