Each year I drive from the upper Midwest to the Pacific Northwest and back again. Being on the road is a different world from my normal round of classrooms, books, ideas, grades and tests. On the freeway is a world where jobs are about concrete things: hauling things, assembling things, fixing things. It’s the world of the 7/11, of trucks and tools, fluids and fuel.
This world is influenced and sometimes controlled by the larger, abstract worlds of finance and by many social forces only indirectly sensed, but it is a world of the specific, the visible.
It is also a world of kindness and trust from strangers, full of openness and easy conversation – in complete contrast to the radio, which is too often screaming about conspiracies and apocalypse.
The balance between the the radio and the concrete world go back and forth. I’ve driven through Iowa at the height of an election campaign and the radio’s endless shrieking about zombie immigrant hordes and elite sellouts to the global world government seemed to turn every tree into a jagged place for a hangman’s noose. And I’ve had an hour of country music’s lament about struggles to hold lives together and celebration of loves matured by the years usher me to old-time hotels where the elderly clerk loves to chat while she calls me ‘hon.’
Fear of the asphalt
Too many liberal Americans are slightly afraid of this world, regarding a journey through it as a somewhat risky adventure to a thoroughly foreign country. The challenges rise before them: driving on two-lane roads, surviving without specialty coffee or constant wi-fi. They are quietly appalled by the food and embarrassed by the naïve religion. They know they can’t “pass” and wonder if they will be in the middle of a reboot of “Deliverance” if they are called out for not being conservative enough.
Many certainly had their reasons for being worried. More than a few escaped a narrow world where nothing seems to change and everyone has to be the same for the big city where they could find others who believed as they did, looked like they did or loved as they did.
Two cultures
Rural isn’t always identical to conservative, or to blue-collar, nor do urban, liberal and money always go together, but there is a good deal of overlap. I’ll characterize the two perspectives as “liberal” and “rural” because I think that calls to mind the most salient aspect of each.
One aspect of our political polarization is that rural, conservative, lower-middle-class America senses liberal discomfort, the lack of ease which they suspect masks condescension.
They may not follow the politics of position papers and policies, but they sense that the public leaders of the Democratic party, such as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden, would not look at home walking across a muddy farm yard with manure on their boots. This is why it mattered, as absurd as it sounded, that people could see themselves having a beer with George Bush but not John Kerry.
The key question here isn’t policy positions but culture. And the face of liberal culture is too often alien to the people it supposedly defends. A Sunday edition of the New York Times advertised a pair of women’s high heel shoes. Elaborately detailed, they retailed for $1,300. Sophisticated clothes, food, wine and art — this is not a big part of the rural world.
That’s why the insults directed at liberals, tasteless and crude as they often are, are revealing: “granola eaters,” “sandal-wearers,” “hippy” and the like. It is the liberal culture that is being rejected for being expensive, effete and weak. Flip those negative values and you have the positives that rural culture claims to value: being modest financially, standing on your own, able to handle adversity and survive.
Rural, conservative America may vote against its financial interests, but it votes with its cultural interests. This is the key observation, the key insight, to understand why liberal policies, offered in support of “ordinary people,” are so often rejected by those same people.
There are two different frames to look at rural, conservative, blue-collar culture. Rural resents liberal for seeing their culture through a series of negative lenses: racism, sexism, white only, homophobic or reduce it to a set of positions: anti-abortion, pro-religion and anti-immigration.
They want their culture to be seen in terms of family and patriotism, but also as one of limited disposable income, worry about dying institutions and a vague suspicion that outside forces control agriculture, education and finance.
What’s really the matter with Kansas?
Before we criticize the liberal approach to this culture any further, it must be pointed out that the way rural culture defends itself is often even more dysfunctional than the liberal view of it. Too often what comes out of rural culture is the defensive bluster of the chronically insecure. Adverts for farm products are telling in how often they speak to self-esteem, promoting the virtue of rural life in general, rather than how their products will enhance their customer’s life.
Rather than defending (or analyzing itself) there is often a great deal of projection. Instead of talking of the loss of tradition, it attacks all those who are different from it.
And they are always attacking the wrong enemy. Instead of focusing on real enemies who are generally far away and never visit the “fly-over” country of the country’s middle, they attack the college student, the environmentalist and others who often have no more money than they do.
This attacking the wrong enemy is perhaps related to how we do not have much public language to describe abuse of power by corporations. We are well equipped to talk of government abuse, but corporations are, it appears, without sin. So we want the government “off our backs” even when the force oppressing us is private.
Populism
The solution to this divide is not more cultural liberalism but populism: a movement that is not anti-capitalism, but anti-monopoly, not anti-white but pro-opportunity, not anti-religion, but pro-stability.
We need a political movement that comes as much from the mid-west as the coasts, a movement comfortable on two-lane highways and the farm yard and the local café. And a movement that isn’t obsessed with tinkering changes to the tax code but speaks to the fears of so many that they are right at the edge of losing their grip on their small piece of the American Dream.
Reframing issues
What this new direction is, involves reframing issue after issue. Take immigration. The liberal dismissal of immigration worries sounds to rural America like saying that breaking the law doesn’t matter. As long as the liberal position is that all opposition to immigration is nothing but racism, there will be no chance of seeing what does matter to rural folk, and no chance of building a new consensus for guest worker programs and amnesty for those immigrants who’ve made a constructive place for themselves in the United States.
Take the social safety net. Until liberals can come to terms with the high value rural America places on self-reliance and are able to explain who is actually helped by these programs they will always be on the defensive.
Take the urgent need for more deficit spending to stimulate the economy back to full employment. As long as stimulus programs are top-down, or bailouts of large companies they will not attract support. Build a stimulus program from the bottom up instead: one that starts by rehiring the 1 million laid off fire fighters, police and K-12 school teachers, that will fill pot holes and hire construction crews to build bridges, schools and sewage treatment plants. Then package this all as an investment in the future and there will be a chance to sell it to people who make less than six figures annually.
Mobilizing the hick vote
In Robert Penn Warren’s masterful political novel about a southern state in the 30s, “All the King’s Men,” there is a moment when his protagonist, a candidate for governor, makes the switch from policy wonk to progressive. Stung by the realization that he is being played by rich boys in the capital, he lashes out at a crowd at a county fair. Calling them “hicks” he tells them they don’t need anyone to tell them what they need: “Did you ever hear [your stomach] rumble for hunger? And you, what about your crops? Did they ever rot in the field because the road was so bad you couldn’t get ’em to market? And you, what about your kids? Are they growing up ignorant as dirt, ignorant as you ’cause there’s no school for ’em?”
He explains in blunt language how his ambition to better himself got co-opted by the string-pullers. He challenges them not to wait for someone to save them, but join his efforts to take back control of their own lives. “Now listen to me, you hicks! Listen to me, and lift up your eyes and look at God’s blessed and unfly-blown truth. And this is the truth. You’re a hick, and nobody ever helped a hick but a hick himself! … Are you standin’ on your hind legs? Have you learned to do that much yet?”
This rhetorical appeal works because the man making it came from as humble a beginning as did his audience. It is hard to imagine any multimillionaire politician carrying this off.
It is perhaps telling that the clearest example of this identification of liberalism with rural poverty is a fictional one. But it doesn’t have to be fictional. Jessie Jackson, with a similar appeal (whatever his personal failings) was surprisingly popular in rural America when he ran for president.
Class warfare
A populist movement will be seen as class warfare, pure and simple, and the outrage it would generate from those that control traditional media would be intense. But, as the saying goes, “Its only class warfare when we fight back.”
Today’s Democratic party can’t do this; it is captured by Wall Street. The Occupy movement never defined a clear agenda. There was a populist movement in the 1890s that was based and thrived in the Midwest. We need it back.