The Upside-Down Political Story of "Middle America"
Trump plans to harm it, Biden isn't telling his own story, and the press is oblivious.
As haphazard as Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign seemed while it was in progress, once it was over, it became clear that Trump had presented an intelligible story to the people of what is sometimes called Middle America, a term that encompasses not just the geographic but the economic, racial, and cultural as well. It’s eight years later, and while his policy intentions are no more likely to help the people who populate it (and will likely harm them), he isn’t really telling that story anymore. Unfortunately, Joe Biden has not told a similarly intelligible story about his own record and intentions, and the press isn’t helping either.
In 2016, Trump told Middle Americans a truth about the past and a lie about the future. His argument about the past was that there exists a “system” that had long been “rigged” against people like them, and everything they didn’t like about their own lives, the fate of their communities, or the nature of social progress could be blamed on that fact. The power of that argument came from both the ways in which it was true — the American economy is indeed dominated by rapacious capitalists who are unconcerned about how many lives they destroy in their relentless quest for profit — and its vagueness. Who is a part of this “system,” and what did the “rigging” consist of? Most of the time, Trump left it to the listener’s imagination.
He tapped into a powerful vein of anger that politicians in both parties had been unable or unwilling to wrestle with, and nowhere was it more clear than in America’s beleaguered rural areas. This is a story Tom Schaller and I tell in our new book White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, which will be released February 27; I’ll be writing in more detail about it in a post next week. But anyplace where people — especially White people — were struggling, Trump promised something better, and the fact that the present wasn’t so great made a lot of voters say “What the hell, let’s give him a shot.”
While today Trump sometimes repeats his old lines, he’s not really making that case with the same force and consistency. He’s more likely to just say that everything was perfect when he was president, the America of today is a shithole, and if people elect him then we’ll be in paradise again. The critique of “the system” has receded to the background.
So one must ask: What exactly are Trump and Republicans promising the country on those vaunted “kitchen table issues”? What do they actually want to do?
Because the truth is, what Trump and Republicans are offering is not just likely to be economically ineffectual, it singles out the places and people most loyal to Trump for ill-treatment, almost as though the GOP is determined to immiserate its own supporters.
If only the media cared about the substance
Unfortunately, reporters are not going to ask either of the candidates about the things that will actually affect people’s lives; they believe there are far more important matters to explore, like whether Joe Biden is old or how Trump will pay his hundreds of millions of dollars in fines.
Nevertheless, reporters are quite interested in the political questions surrounding Middle America. Are Democrats not showing up enough? Are they too “elite”? Do they not have the right “tone”? Do they talk too much about issues like abortion (as though that issue isn’t of intense concern to people everywhere) and not enough about economics?
Those same reporters find discussions of the substantive question of what Democrats and Republicans do or don’t do for Middle America too boring to waste their time on. How much have you heard about the Biden administration’s industrial policy, which is largely focused on promoting economic development in places other than the “superstar cities” that have come to dominate our economy? Or the billions of dollars the administration is spending to bring high-speed internet to rural areas? Probably not much. They operate from the baseline assumption that Republicans are on Middle America’s side, demand that Democrats prove that they care about Middle America, yet ignore the proof when it’s right in front of them.
Helping those forgotten places has been a key focus of Biden’s economic program. As a recent Brookings Institution report on the administration’s investment in areas like clean energy, electronics, and semiconductors documents, “after decades of economic divergence, strategic sector investment patterns are including more places that have historically been left out of economic growth.”
Meanwhile, Donald Trump and his party are preparing to continue and intensify what has been nothing less than a war on their own supporters. Consider health care. There are ten red states that still refuse the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid, free federal money to insure their constituents, improve their state’s economies, and stabilize their health systems. Some of the worst victims of this intransigence are the rural people on whom Republicans build their power: They’re more likely to need Medicaid, and rural hospitals are especially dependent on the program.
And now Trump is once again promising to “repeal and replace” the ACA. That won’t happen — he couldn’t get such a plan through Congress, it’s a practical impossibility (repealing it now would be an upheaval to the health care system many times more dramatic than implementing it in the first place), and in the end, Trump just doesn’t care enough about it — but just the fact that he talks about it discourages red-state Republicans from doing the right thing on the Medicaid expansion, because they know they’ll be called traitors to the cause if they do.
Turning Trump’s trade war up to 11
But didn’t Trump start a trade war to help the people that had been hurt by globalization? Indeed he did, and you’ll never guess what happened. According to a recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, Trump’s trade war provided no benefits to the residents of the “heartland” he claimed to be helping — but did give him a political boost. From the abstract:
The trade-war has not to date provided economic help to the US heartland: import tariffs on foreign goods neither raised nor lowered US employment in newly-protected sectors; retaliatory tariffs had clear negative employment impacts, primarily in agriculture; and these harms were only partly mitigated by compensatory US agricultural subsidies. Consistent with expressive views of politics, the tariff war appears nevertheless to have been a political success for the governing Republican party. Residents of regions more exposed to import tariffs became less likely to identify as Democrats, more likely to vote to reelect Donald Trump in 2020, and more likely to elect Republicans to Congress.
This is about as succinct a summary of Republican political/economic strategy as you could find. Trump enacted a policy that he claimed would be a boon to the heartland; it not only failed to produce positive results but actually harmed the people and communities he said he would help; and those voters rewarded him and his party anyway.
The other side of this story is that Biden has left Trump’s tariffs in place, no doubt because whatever the economic consequences of removing them, he’s afraid he’ll be seen as “soft on China” if he did so. But now, Trump is pledging to take a failed policy and make it even worse, with a 10 percent tariff on all imported goods. “I think we should have a ring around the collar,” Trump said, apparently forgetting (or perhaps not) that “ring around the collar” is a term used to refer to an unsightly stain on a men’s dress shirt. The economic effects are almost guaranteed to be the same: higher prices for consumers, retaliatory tariffs that hurt US exports, and no positive effect on American jobs.
These are just a couple of examples that demonstrate the larger point: Biden has attempted, with limited but real success, to enact policies that help Middle America. The press takes only momentary notice of those policies, then moves quickly back to where it feels most comfortable, speculating about the horse race. As little time as they spend on the likely policy consequences of a second Biden term for those people and sectors of the economy, they spend even less on what Trump would do and the harm he almost certainly would cause.
Unfortunately, the Biden campaign — an entity that as far as anyone can tell barely exists — is not presenting any coherent story to voters on this subject either. Hopefully that will change. Because if they don’t do it, nobody else will.
Back in the 90s I was shocked after watching one of Clinton’s SOTU speeches — a speech I strongly approved of — to find the media reacted with utter disdain. Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw and others slammed the speech as too long, too boring and just a “laundry list” of “small bore” proposals. It was clear that they took for granted that we unwashed masses would share their disdain. The next morningI was pleasantly surprised to watch them eat crow after overnight polls showed the public not only strongly approved of the speech, but viewership had kept increasing as the speech went on.
I naively thought that humiliation would make journalists change their puerile ways. The 2000 election coverage showed how quickly they had forgotten. If anything political coverage had become even more shallow. Bush was “more fun to have a beer with”; Gore foolishly wore earth tones. I was beyond disgusted when I read the WaPo’s revered David Broder’s reaction to Al Gore’s acceptance speech. Broder carped that Gore had talked so much about what he would do if elected it had almost put Broder to sleep.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/10/gore200710
Is the Biden campaign vestigial because it only exists in "battleground" states? Some, like Wisconsin, have genuine, fighting, Democratic parties. I understand that the media finds the economic betterment of the majority of us boring. Industrial America is so 20th century ... Looking forward to your book ...