Weekend reading- Clueless Coastals head to WIsconsin to figure out the 2016 election

Wanted to tell you about a brilliant article that came out this week in The Atlantic by Molly Ball. It’s titled “On Safari in Trump’s America”, where Ball travels to Western Wisconsin to look in on what locals had to say in the aftermath of the November 2016 elections.

Ball goes along with Nancy Hale and a few other members of Third Way, a DC-based think tank that wants “solutions that are not defined by ideological orthodoxy or narrow interests.” Hale was one of the founders Third Way 12 years ago, and their solutions generally involve the calculated, corporate-friendly centrism that defined Bill and Hillary Clinton’s career with a side order of social liberalism and tolerance.

Hillary’s defeat in 2016 to the divisive, race-baiting and policy-thin Donald Trump was a massive jolt to the Third Way crowd. Few places had more of a shift than Western Wisconsin, which went from giving Barack Obama a sizable advantage in 2012 to giving a majority of their votes to Trump in 2016



Ball said that Third Way’s visit to Wisconsin is part of a $20 million effort to figure out why voters in swing areas of the country backed Trump, and what messages they need to hear in order to keep it from happening again.

Open-mindedness was the sworn commitment of the Third Way team. The researchers were determined to approach rural Wisconsin with humility and respect. After the election, Hale told me, “You heard people saying, ‘These people aren’t smart enough to vote, they’re so stupid, if that’s what they want, they deserve what they get.’ That hit us, on every level, as wrong.” They wanted to open their hearts and their minds and simply listen. They were certain that, in doing so, they would find what they believed was true: a bunch of reasonable, thoughtful, patriotic Americans. A nation of people who really wanted to get along.

If you’ve lived in “divide and conquer” Fitzwalkerstan in the 2010s, I think you know that Hale is in for quite the surprise.

They first come across a number of farmers and other “hard workers” in Pierce County. They complain about “leeches” in bureaucracy, a lack of desire among young people to work certain jobs, lament the effect of women working outside of the home, and general dismay at the dead-end life that exists in towns like Ellsworth.

Hale finds this a bit disturbing, but it’s only her first focus group, She then heads off down I-94 to another focus group of workers.

At the Labor Temple Lounge in Eau Claire, nine gruff, tough-looking union men sat around a table. One had the acronym of his guild, the Laborers International Union of North America, tattooed on a bulging bicep. The men pinned the blame for most of their problems squarely on Republicans, from Trump to Governor Scott Walker. School funding, the minimum wage, college debt, income inequality, gerrymandering, health care, union rights: It was all, in their view, the GOP’s fault. A member of the bricklayers’ union lamented Walker’s cuts to public services: “If we can’t help each other,” he said, “what are we, a pack of wolves—we eat the weakest one? It’s shameful.”

But their negativity toward Republicans didn’t translate to rosy feelings for the Democrats, who, they said, too frequently ignored working-class people. And some of the blame, they said, fell on their fellow workers, many of whom supported Republicans against their own interests. “The membership”—the union rank-and-file—“voted for these Republicans because of them damn guns,” a Laborers Union official said. “You cannot push it out of their head. A lot of ‘em loved it when Walker kicked our ass.”

This type of bluntness and bleak outlook concerns Hale and her associated Third Wayers, who want to believe all Americans are rational, decent human beings that are all striving for the same outcomes, and assumes that America’s problems can be solved by reaching some kind of mushy middle-of-the-road consensus that is “good enough” for all parties involved.

The Third Way mentality might make sense if you were financially comfortable and lived in a high-educated, diverse area on the coasts with the prospect of a better tomorrow. In that circumstance, you have enough of a cushion in your life to worry about deeper issues, and can afford to walk away with half a loaf.

But that is not close to the reality for many in the left-behind parts of the Midwest. What finally sends the well-connected Boomer from Cali over the edge is when a café owner in a Viroqua focus group calls into question the entire political game and the limited outcomes that are being considered these days.

The cafe owner—a bearded man in a North Face fleece—had recently attended a town hall held by the local Democratic congressman, Ron Kind, a Third Way stalwart and former chair of the House’s centrist New Democrat Coalition. “I’m not, like, a jumping-up-and-down Berniecrat,” the man said. “But what you see in these congressional meetings is a refusal to even play ball” with ideas considered too extreme, like single-payer health care. “All these centrist ideals,” he said, “are just perpetuating a broken system.”

Hale ends up telling author Ball that it disturbs her that people aren’t willing to work with people that had a different opinion, and that many of the people involved had a “fuck you” mentality to many of those who opposed them. It’s almost like the small-towners didn’t want to debate the great issues of the day, and had been turned off by what America was offering in economic and political outcomes.

Naturally, Hale hides this reality in her final report for Third Way (admit that neoliberal American policy lets middle America down? No way!). Instead she says that us salt-of-the-earth Wisconsinites are turned off by all of the arguing they see (without mentioning the issues being argued about), and ultimately just want to get along.

According to the report, the community’s “biggest frustrations” are “laggard government and partisan squabbling.” “The idea that such bickering can be tolerated in D.C. is appalling to most,” it states. The good people of western Wisconsin, Third Way found, wanted nothing so much as a society where people could put aside their differences. The report quotes a man who said, “We come together on projects and solve problems together.” It doesn’t quote any of the Wisconsinites we met who expressed partisan sentiments or questioned the prospect of consensus.

Ball knows better than that, and gives you the real truth about what people were saying in the Heartland.

In Wisconsin, I had seen and heard everything the Third Way researchers did—and eaten at the same restaurants, and slept at the same Hampton Inn in Eau Claire, and watched the same landscape roll by the windows of the same SUV. I heard all the optimism they did, but I also heard its opposite: that one side was right and that the other was the enemy; that other Americans, not just the government, were to blame for the country’s problems. There’s plenty of fellow-feeling in the heartland for those who want to see it, but there’s plenty of division, too. And not every problem can be solved in a way that splits the difference.

This final note from Ball in the article is especially concerning, because it seems to indicate that the reality of the “Real America” isn’t seeping in to the Coastal elites that define groups like Third Way.

The researchers I rode with had dived into the heart of America with the best of intentions and the openest of minds. They believed that their only goal was to emerge with a better understanding of their country.

And yet the conclusions they drew from what they heard corresponded only roughly to what I heard. Instead, they seemed to revert to their preconceptions, squeezing their findings into the same old mold. It seems possible, if not likely, that all the other delegations of earnest listeners are returning with similarly comforting, selective lessons. If the aim of such tours is to find new ways to bring the country together, or new political messages for a changed electorate, the chances of success seem remote as long as even the sharpest researchers are only capable of seeing what they want to see.

If the DNC and the DPW are wasting time thinking that the key to electoral victory is to follow what well-connected Coastals in their Bubble want to believe, then they won't break the Bubble of destructive right-wing BS that distracts and fools a lot of Midwestern voters that are dealing with real problems.

And last I checked, voters decide elections, not Coastal insiders and party hacks. So maybe we should recognize the realities that voters face and not try to adjust it to what we wish it was. Just a thought.

Here’s another link to Molly Ball’s great article. Read it, and share with your friends.