POLITICAL DEBATE ADVISORY
The following phrase has been RECALLED until further notice:
"middle America"
If you or someone you know is currently using this phrase, please go
immediately to
Frameshop for repairs.
Anyone engaged in the following debates should exercise extreme caution:
Elections, Values, Media, Religion, Economy, The Culture War, the Future of
the Democratic Party.
WARNINGS:
Use of this phrase will result in serious damage to political debate
and harm to this country.
Repeated use of this phrase will strengthen a deceptive conservative
frame, further economic inequality in this country, and confuse the
American public.
EXTREME CAUTION ADVISED.
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Frameshop is open.
[I always like to start out Frameshop with a level head. But let me tell you: this "middle America" phrase makes me mad. It makes me mad because it's a manipulative lie that preys on people's idealism and churns up a threatening filth that clouds all public discourse. The evil twin of "middle America" is the phrase "elitist"--elitist media, liberal elite, East Coast elite, bicoastal elites. It's all the same. Elitists are the anti-middle Americans in this GOP logic. We're the elitists...if you buy into this language.
We can't afford to stay mad, because this accusation that Progressives are "elitists" who threaten "middle America" is one most paralyzing attacks currently being thrown at us by the GOP. We encounter it, and we're like deer caught in the headlines. We're stuck. Dead on arrival. We need to come up with some plain and simple verbal Akido for these phrases. We need to go into every single political debate prepared to step out of the way and let the accusation of "elitism" hit the wall behind us. And we need to hit first with our own frame invoking phrases.
There's a hitch: if we actually believe that people who live in the "middle" of the country or in the "middle" of your state are simple and more down to earth, and that people who live in cities are sophisticated snobs, well, then we're in trouble. We can't take back the debate if we don't believe--really believe--that the current terms are wrong.
The soul of the United States cannot be located by poiting a finger to the center of the 48 states. No political party can colonize a dozen states, paint them red, and call them their heartland. As of right now, we have to believe that each and every one of us is "middle America" or we won't be able to take this hill.
So, let's roll up the red and blue maps and put them up and out of sight. Let's think for a minute about what we know and believe this country to be.]
Problem with the phrase "Middle America"
The basic logic invoked by "middle America" is that majority of Americans share a set of values that have their origins in the rural Midwest, and that these values are at odds with the immorality of "elites" who live on the coast, in cities, and who run the media and cultural institutions.
This phrase is used most often, nowadays, on conservative talk radio and television, in particular by figures such as Joe Scarborough who constantly classify Democratic Party ideas as out of sync with "middle America." As a result, "middle America" and "East Coast Elites" or just "Elites" must be seen as just one half of two suspicious phrases invoking the same frame.
The frame invoked is that of an idealized, rural heartland where values are "simple" and folks are honest. It takes a very amorphous and contested concept--conservative moral values--and it associates them with a particular idealized American location: the middle of the country. And so we get the idea that the geographic "center" of the country is also the moral "center" of the nation.
This logic is flawed on many levels.
The notion that the unspoiled essence of national character can be found in the countryside first took shape in 19c Europe. Most modern nation states have generated a narrative about "true" national identity existing outside the corrupting influences of industrial urban life. Cities spoils character, according to these narratives, whereas a proximity to the land and to "simple things," preserves moral integrity. What we get in the contemporary use of this phrase "middle America" is an updated version of this very old ideology of the folk.
In the George W. Bush world of electoral politics, this idea "middle America" has been used as a strategy for making the red-blue distinction on the map a concrete division, a way of transforming electoral calculus into historicized cultural ideas about what it means to be American.
In this logic, Bush didn't win (or lose, depending on your view) because the "red states" voted Republican. He won because "middle America" rebelled against the "elitism" of the Democratic party.
No longer are we trapped in the politics of red and blue. When we begin to talk about "middle America," we are forced into a discussion about how we stack up against the "true" center of the American character.
In his essay The Right-Wing Revolution (The New Statesman on 9.27.04), Robert Reich pulls together a good portrait of how the GOP talks when it invokes this idea of "middle America":
With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, white southerners began their slow but steady march toward the Republican Party. The Republican presidential candidate
that year, Senator Barry Goldwater, one of only eight Republican senators to have voted against that measure, lost the presidential election but sowed seeds of the right-wing revolution.
The rest of the story is...a series of Supreme Court decisions, prohibiting prayer in public schools (1962), legalizing the sale of contraceptives (1965), barring the death penalty (1965), and allowing abortion (1973) offended the moral sensibilities of middle America.
As Reich explains, however, the rise of this idea of "middle America" has been part of a culture war first envisioned by Buchanan in his 1992 speech to the RNC, but which really only took off in the mid-1990s.
Most notably, the RNC has used this notion of a class of "elite liberal" and "middle American" values to seduce the electorate away from voting in its own economic best interests:
Republican fat cats must be laughing all the way to the banks and ballot boxes. They pose as heartland Americans and rail against Ivy League stuffed shirts when they themselves graduated from the same institutions. George W. Bush, a president's son, educated at prestigious Andover Academy, Yale, and Harvard Business School, plays at being a down-to-earth Texan. Republican leaders of congress curse haughty professionals when they themselves are mostly lawyers and bankers. Bill O'Reilly pretends he's a proletarian while taking home millions from his TV and radio shows and book tie-ins. Rush Limbaugh condemns drug addicts and turns out to be one. Newt Gingrich decries the gross immorality of liberals (especially Bill Clinton's extra-marital adventure) while having an affair. Bill Bennett, the Republican's self-appointed "morality czar," is revealed to be a gambling addict. The Bush administration poses as champion of blue-collar America yet is run by corporate tycoons.
Why doesn't middle America connect the dots?
Why indeed.
Realigning the Frame: Fairness
A line from Dean's speech, today, struck me as the starting point for realigning this frame:
We believe that if you put in a lifetime of work, you have earned a retirement of dignity -- not one that is put at risk by your government or unethical business practices.
The great moments of despair and anguish in American history have grown out of those events whereby people's belief in the fundamental fairness of American life has been tested or turned on its head.
Imagine working hard your whole life so that you could save enough to live a modest retirment, only to have your savings bankrupted by out of control drug prices.
Imagine working hard your whole life only to have your savings reduced to dust because your employer forced you to invest in company stock that was looted by corporate board members.
Imagine working hard your whole life and then being denied the right to visit your partner in the hospital because a few influential people in government don't approve of your family.
The core of American values is the belief that if you work hard you can get ahead, and that if you get ahead then you will not have all of what you have worked for taken away by someone simply because they are more powerful.
I find Europe to be a fascinating place, but what separates us from the Europeans is this belief that we are all social and economically mobile. It is a belief that has drawn people to this country for centuries, and it will continue to do so.
But listen closely: hard work only pays off if the playing field is level. If the system is fair.
Belief that this country is based on fairness is the dream that we export every day. True, it is in many places a dream differed, but it is the starting point.
This is how we respond to the accusations of "elitism" and the arrogant claims to dominion over "middle America" from the GOP.
The GOP is the party that claims moral superiority to justify cheating.
They cheat, but then claim that it's OK because they speak for "middle America."
The GOP is more concerned about boardroom entitlements than fairness.
They are more concerned about the boardroom table than the kitchen table.
The GOP is the party that believes it is fair for a few people to amass great amounts of wealth, while others have no place at the table.
They cheat to get ahead, and once they are ahead, they use their power and influence to cheat for people who look like them and believe what they believe.
It's not elitist to believe in fairness. It's American. Morallity is not the anchor at the center of this nation. Idealism is the anchor. And we don't look to the middle for idealism. The most idealistic people in this country are those who are struggling towards to make it or stay in the middle--the new arrivals, the economic strugglers, the elderly, the young.
Don't Think of "Middle America"
As always, the critique is easier than generating new language.
Here are some starting points:
- FAIRNESS: Start talking about fairness; stop talking about morality. Fairness must become a buzzword that overwhelms morality. Let's write hundreds and hundreds of diaries about fairness.
- IDEALISM IS THE HEARTLAND OF AMERICA, NOT MORALITY: It's time to start telling stories about the struggle to make it, and the belief that it is possible. And it's time to stop anguishing over what our moral fabric is. We are a nation that tolerates many different ideas of morality. The only thing we are not supposed to tolerate is systemic unfairness.
- CALL THEM CHEATERS: Go back and read the story of the 1972 Olympic Men's basketball team whose gold medal was stolen by judges who cheated for the Russian team. 1972 was not that long ago. But that was a time when cheating outraged us. But let's not get outraged just by the GOP. Let's think bigger--much bigger than that. Let's get outraged by cheating in the system. We've lost our credibility with outrage, lately, because whenever we react to cheating, it always leads back to the GOP. People, the problem with the GOP is not that they are the only ones in society who cheat. The problem is that they promote and protect a culture of cheating that benefits the wealthy to the detriment of the rest.
Now let's roll up our sleeves and get to work...
Update [2004-12-8 22:58:0 by Jeffrey Feldman]:
There is some debate in the thread about whether or not "middle America" or "heartland" should not be dismissed, so much as claimed by progressives. This being a time of flux, we could have a chance at taking it back.
While no consensus has been reached, many comments have suggested that the multiple levels of meaning in "middle America" could be exploited to take control of an already ressonant term.