In the American heartland, the landscape itself seems to embody American values. And a majority of the residents are enthralled by the profoundly unAmerican Donald Trump. How does this compute?
This is by now an old question. What’s the matter with Kansas? To pose the question suggests it has no good answer. But traveling across Nebraska, South Dakota and Wyoming on a road trip — just when the 2016 election campaign and autumn colors are peaking — you might get it, intuitively, by osmosis. The very landscape may instill a fear of all that Hillary represents, a world in transition faster than a person can keep up, and at the same time it virtually expresses the appeal of Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan.
There is a timelessness to the heartland, and it’s not just the vast plains and hills, the empty spaces, and the immense sky. It’s also the weathered barns, the picturesque homesteads, the antelope on the side of the road, and the fading towns out of Edward Hopper. You can’t help but feel an immense nostalgia driving through the outback in these states. You want to believe, you may even sense, that the best traditional American values are intact: kindness to strangers and neighbors, ruggedness and independence, essential decency, and, yes, patriotism. Donald Trump is not kind, rugged, decent, or even patriotic. But a majority of the residents in the Heartland have embraced him because of one promise: to turn back the clock.
The American heartland is manifestly something out of the past, barely alive in the present, and utterly without a future. The people who were born there or were drawn there draw sustenance from its beauty, but they can’t beat its brutal economics. There are only two industries out there: agriculture and resource extraction. Agriculture has long since been overtaken by enormous companies and provides little in the way of good employment. And energy production, while it provides the only good jobs out beyond the West’s urbanized areas, is precisely what Hillary and the rest of us liberals want to take away: no more coal, oil, fracking, we declare. So of course climate change must be a hoax, a plot to punish the Heartland. All you need to do is look around at the unchanging scenery to see that it’s a hoax. Everything looks the exactly the same (mostly) as last year or ten years ago.
Except that the towns have been emptying out and blowing away. When the last coal is mined and the last gigantic coal-fired power plant is shut down and even fracking is finished, it will all be over. All that will be left will be a few businesses at Interstate exits to feed and shelter passing motorists.
If Hillary Clinton represents the present and the future, a future of female empowerment, racial and religious diversity, rapidly changing economies and social norms, the unquestioned dominance of urban areas over rural places, and global challenges that will require international solutions; and Donald Trump represents a quick halt to all that (even if it means nuking the Chinese, partnering with Putin, or hating on people of color), if you live in North Platte or in any of thousands of other Heartland towns, the choice may be beyond obvious.
From this perspective, Trump’s inconsistencies and character failings are minor glitches and Hillary Clinton’s very competence is a deep affront.