How the Democrats lost the heartland

You're very critical of the whole red state-blue state paradigm that has obsessed us since the 2000 election. Explain what your problem is with it.

Well, there are three things. First of all, the model is politically motivated. It's not real sociology. Second of all, it's very easy to punch holes in it. And third of all, it has a grain of truth to it, that Americans really do need to talk about.

It's of a piece with all the Republican efforts over the years to describe themselves as a party of the working class. You start with Nixon's evocation of the "silent majority." This has basically been the bread and butter of Republican appeals to the blue-collar voters ever since the '70s. Think of Newt Gingrich talking about "normal Americans," or Ben Wattenberg's book "The Real Americans." This is a way of talking about social class without actually talking about class. The people in the red states voted for us, therefore we're the party of the working class. People out in the heartland are our voters.

As for punching holes in it, think of the way people in the blue states are always described. Illinois is a blue state, it went very heavily for Al Gore. You know, they say blue state people drive Volvos and sip lattes and eat sushi and all this sort of thing. And I'm like, "Uh, no, they don't." I lived on the South Side of Chicago, which went for Gore by 80 percent. You can't get sushi there! I knew one guy with a Volvo and he got it used -- it was all beat to hell! It's not that kind of place. Think about people who live in Baltimore, people who live in Iowa. People who live in Kansas City, Kan., which is one of the two counties in Kansas that went for Gore. It's one of the most working-class areas of the state.

When you're trying to make a political stereotype seem like sociology, you say all sorts of silly things. David Brooks, for example, has a lot of ways of dividing the two colors. One of them is that red-state people are supposed to be so earthy that they know what soybeans look like, growing in a field. Blue-state people are not supposed to know about that. But if you look it up, the three states that grow the most soybeans are Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota. All blue states! It's just stereotypes. It's just stuff these people invent. Sometimes these commentators will come right out and say, yes, I am talking about social class. Rich people are snobs who vote for Al Gore, and poor or working-class people are down-to-earth folks who see that George Bush is one of them.

David Brooks says affluent suburbs everywhere voted for Al Gore, and it's just not the case. There are affluent areas that voted for Gore -- we all know that's true. But not all, and probably not even half, although I don't know how you would measure that. Even the examples that he gives are wrong, like the North Shore suburbs of Chicago. The really affluent suburbs went for Bush, voted Republican, like they always do.

And then there's the grain of truth: There is a dramatic reversal that we need to talk about. If you compare it to the electoral map of 1896, when you had a genuine liberal Democrat, William Jennings Bryan, against somebody who openly was the voice of industry and the voice of the capitalist class, William McKinley, the picture was reversed. The heartland, the Midwestern states, went for Bryan en masse, and so did the South. Today these self-same places have switched sides.

That was the election where the populist language was being thrown around. What's the stupid poem about Bryan by Vachel Lindsay? "Smashing Plymouth Rock with his boulders from the West." That's where all our imagery about who the producers are and who the parasites are -- that's where it all comes from. Compared to that, there has been a remarkable shift. So the question of what happened to liberalism in the Midwest is a really good question. We should be thinking about that.

Essentially, you're arguing that the polarities have shifted, but the dynamic is the same. The Great Plains states are in rebellion against what they perceive as an oppressive power. That hasn't changed.

Right, it's the same. The populist spirit is aflame in Kansas, there's no question about it. And elsewhere in the Midwest, and all across the country. That's what the right-wing backlash is all about, harnessing that language of populism and that class anger, but appealing to it in cultural terms rather than economic.

So the perceived oppressor is no longer the capitalist class.

Right, it's the liberal elite. Nobody ever goes out and gives that a solid definition, it's another stereotype. But what that means is professionals and people with advanced degrees. That's the liberal elite.

As you frame it, there's this alliance between the blue-collar workers and the capitalist elite, in which the former -- in political terms -- are eagerly sacrificing themselves for the latter.

That's a very good description. It's an alliance between the money wing of the Republican Party and the foot soldiers who provide the vote; the rank and file who win the elections for them.

There's an element of this that is primarily psychological, or, to use a dangerous liberal-elite word, semiotic. You argue that American politics has become a struggle over the idea of "authenticity."

This is one of the themes that comes up in my other books. Authenticity is the name of the game in the advertising industry and the world of consumer goods. People have been convinced since the 1960s that they inhabit a fake world where everything is plastic and computer-generated and air-conditioned. The idea of the falseness of mass society, as I wrote in "The Conquest of Cool," has become a perma-critique that has been embraced by the advertising industry. Think of the millions of products that are sold with the promise of authenticity, from Starbucks to microbrewed beer. Now Budweiser and Miller are counterattacking; which one of them has the slogan "True"?

This is also how the Republicans sell themselves. They are the voice of authentic Americans, and liberals are in some way deracinated, effete, devitalized, affected, arrogant. David Brooks has a survey where he claims if you poll liberals they like to show off. I don't know where you get a survey like that.

And when you have this contest over who is more authentic, the educated classes are always going to be on the defensive, right?

They're always going to lose. They don't have a prayer in this contest.

It's like they buy into this too. You know, we see John Kerry on the news, pretending to go out duck-hunting. Who is he kidding?

Yeah. Have you noticed that the Republicans are going way out of their way to talk about Kerry's yacht, and the fact that he speaks some French. Whereas Bush is supposed to be a man of the people. By what criteria is this one guy different from this other guy, in any essential way? They're both from almost precisely the same exalted quarter of American life. They're even both members of the same secret fraternity. The fact that we are so obsessed as a society with images rather than substance -- and I'm falling back on cliché here -- is one of the reasons why the Republican appeal to authenticity works. It's one of the reasons they have been able to convince voters to overlook their material interests.

One of the things that might surprise people is that when you go out to Kansas and meet these real working-class, right-wing foot soldiers, these antiabortion activists, these anti-evolution people, you don't dislike them. In fact, you have a certain kind of admiration for them.

Yeah! When I had my colleagues here in Chicago read it, that was something they picked up on right away. Instead of really lambasting these people, who I obviously disagree with, I'm, you know, attracted to them. I think that's really obvious.

They really see themselves as crusaders, and in this funny way they're attaching themselves to the history of the left. It's remarkable how often the antiabortion movement compares itself to the abolitionist movement. They all want to be John Brown, which maybe is specific to the history of Kansas.

That has a particular resonance in Kansas. I mean, it obviously has a resonance everywhere. Slavery was a horrible crime that nobody today is willing to countenance. But Kansas was basically founded as part of that fight, as a free-soil state. Everybody in Kansas knows that. When you go to elementary school in Kansas, that's one thing you come away knowing. They don't talk about Populism. They sure don't talk about the fact that we had a socialist newspaper published in Kansas at one time. But they do talk about John Brown.

You have a whole critique of pop culture that is difficult to summarize, but let's talk more about your sympathy with the right-wing activists. When they bemoan how coarse and cheap pop culture has become, you almost seem to agree, or at least to feel that they have a certain kind of point.

Well, look. I should say this: I started out as a punk rocker, and we try to deal with cultural dissent, genuinely shocking things, at the Baffler. But as I have written about many, many times, so much of the shockery that surrounds us is not genuine. There's no avant-garde about it. It's not the real thing, it's a watered-down capitalist projection. You've seen this argument before, "the commodification of dissent."

The argument I'm making is not that they're absolutely right to be disgusted by our culture -- although when I'm away from the country and I come back and turn on MTV, I'm always like, "Holy shit!" I'm just trying to play up the flagrant contradiction. If you hate this stuff, talk about capitalism! Talk about the forces that do it! I'm focusing on the contradiction there, rather than accepting their argument about obscenity or whatever.

Right, so your real problem is with the kind of cultural-studies intellectual who believes that pop culture really is subversive.

Yes, exactly. The cultural studies people read these products of capitalism as face value. They see fake rebellion as the real thing. To put it in very vulgar terms, that's the argument.

Madonna kissing Britney is somehow actually socially meaningful.

Right, exactly. And the heartland people often see it that way also. I'm saying it's not that, it is as pure an expression of business rationality as is a McDonald's hamburger. This is where I stop being a partisan of one side or another and I'm purely talking about history, and, if you'll forgive me, about social science. We have to understand the way capitalism works and what it does. And that is a subject that is so shrouded in mystification and invective by both the cultural-studies people and their great enemy, the Christian right. Both sides are saying these things are subversive, and I'm saying it just isn't that way.

In some ways, these two movements are weird mirror-images of each other. Because the right-wing backlashers understand themselves as people without agency in the world. They can't ever win, the culture industry never listens to them, and they're surrounded by subversion. And the cult-studs people say everyone has agency, especially when they consume these "subversive" products.

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