Reclaiming the heartland
by Tom Sullivan
At Washington Monthly, a worthwhile examination of the conservative (and not so conservative) mindset extant in the American heartland and what progressives might do to reclaim the politics there. Driving across country with the radio on, it is easy to conclude that the heartland is a monolithic, Rush-fueled sea of conservative rage. Not so, writes Andrew Levison as part of a Washington Monthly/The Democratic Strategist roundatable on Stan Greenberg's "The Average Joe’s Proviso." To begin, Levison quotes Rutgers University political scientist, Lilliana Mason, on how it is that people who support some liberal policies elect Republican candidates:
Alaska elected a Republican senator and passed a recreational marijuana initiative, along with an increase in the minimum wage. North Dakota elected a Republican congressman and rejected a Personhood amendment. Arkansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota elected a Republican senator and governor, and passed a minimum wage increase. This led Zachary Goldfarb to write: “Americans will vote for Republicans even though they disagree with them on everything.”
My research suggests a key reason why this happened: our partisan identities motivate us far more powerfully than our views about issues. Although voters may insist in the importance of their values and ideologies, they actually care less about policy and more that their team wins.
Democrats are seen as representing alien ideolgogies, Levison believes. It is often not so much that heartland citizens embrace Republicans as much as they have been taught to loathe Democrats. Understanding how the heartland works is key to cracking it. Levison writes:
In non-heartland areas, such as the formerly industrial regions of the East and Midwest, however, there were also countervailing value systems in working class life as well. Trade unions, precinct level Democratic clubs and liberal catholic churches provided support for an alternative value system that supported New Deal liberalism.
In the conservative heartland regions these countervailing institutions did not exist and, as a result, the four traditional value systems [the church, the military, small business and the school system] seemed entirely hegemonic. They were not and are not visualized as “conservative” or even particularly “political” ideas by working people in these communities but rather as obvious, self-evident truths that ought to be completely apparent to anyone with even a modicum of “simple common sense”.
Levison explains:
The substantially increased role of negative partisanship in American politics leads to a profound difference between the way daily political life operates in the conservative heartland and non-heartland areas today. In the non-Heartland areas individual political loyalties are indeed often just as intense as in the heartland areas but within local community and daily neighborhood life politics is nonetheless understood and accepted as contested—at little league games and church socials Democratic and Republican white workers are friendly to each other and socialize together comfortably despite their deeply different political views. They accept the idea that some of their neighbors think differently than they do and that some yard signs in their neighborhood will support candidates other than their own.
In the conservative heartland areas, on the other hand, politics is simply not contested. Every single yard sign in many neighborhoods and communities will support candidates of the Republican Party leading to what sociologists call a “spiral of silence”; people with dissenting views decide not to express their opinions in public while advocates of conservative opinions loudly and confidently dominate daily social life.
Levison argues that outside Howard Dean's “50 State Strategy” Democrats have failed to contest the prevailing orthodoxy in the heartland. There has, however, been a tendency (Dean resisted) to simply write off the area as too difficult and to focus on turnout in friendlier areas of the country. But this leaves Democrats in the heartland starved of funds and permanently weak. Levison (and Dean, I'm sure) considered this strategy shortsighted and "morally and socially distasteful."
This has left Democrats with a bi-coastal electoral strategy that (as someone else said) depends on securing the populous blue states on each coast and hoping to hit a triple bank shot somewhere in the Midwest to pick up enough electoral votes to win the White House. Plus, it leaves Democrats permanently ceding a large swath of the Senate to the thinly populated heartland states. As I say, if you don't show up to play, you forfeit.
Levin recommends organizing on single issues of a nonpartisan character, or by supporting independent, "genuine grass-roots white working class candidates who depart in some respects from the GOP’s rigid free-market economic orthodoxy and bitter social intolerance while still exhibiting authentic 'real American' cultural traditionalism" as a way of loosening the GOP's grip.
Independent candidates have the potential to increase the divisions and conflicts between the extremists and the moderates within the GOP, an outcome which would be profoundly healthy for the future of America. In some cases it may be possible for Democrats to throw their support to independent candidates with whom they judge they can work with in the legislature on some issues as an alternative to splitting the vote three ways on election day and insuring a GOP victory. In other cases, the threat posed by independent candidates may allow moderates within the GOP to break the control the extremists now hold over the primary process. Right now, the extremists who participate disproportionately in GOP primaries can force all candidates to embrace their agenda because the candidates know that, regardless of how much they have to grovel and pander to the extremists in order to get the nomination, they can then be confident of winning the general elections in their heavily Republican states or districts. With the threat of third party independent candidates potentially depriving them of a majority in the general election if the primary process forces them to move too far to the right, more moderate GOP candidates will be forced to fight for control of the local parties once again.
This makes sense as a longer-term strategy, as does Dean's 50 State Strategy. But the left faces its own impediments to implementing it.
Like evangelicals, the left has its own Last Days tendencies, only now centered around climate change. We too believe The End Is Near, and that we will all burn ... in the UV fires of Sol. The same urgent, apocalyptic, short-term thinking that afflicts some on the religious right prevents the left from taking on longer-term projects like re-capturing the American heartland, just the thing that might be required to put the brakes on climate change (or corporate hegemony) over time.
When every election is "the most important in our lifetime," when every year might be the point of no return for the planet or for our democracy, there is no psychic bandwidth for efforts that require longer-term political organizing. Even for a renewed 50 State Strategy so many of us would like to see. Overcoming that might be as daunting a task as reclaiming the heartland itself.