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.”
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.”(The historian of conservatism couldn't help throwing in a Reagan reference.)
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.
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.
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.