Flyover Country
FIONA PEARL MILLER
I spent last Summer’s July driving around to and through different towns in states deemed unimportant to the political party that, perhaps until recently, has considered itself as belonging to “the people.” In South Dakota, you can apprehend infinity just by looking over and across the vast expanse of grass field known as the great plains. They stretch out before you—and under a blue or changing sky with the wind against you or at your tail either way really just so long as there’s movement in the air you can breathe in deep and wonder about wading through that long grass. And I only really passed by on I-80, or stood around at a gas station. For most of it at least, until I got to the Badlands and that's a whole different ball game because nothing can grow there, not that I could imagine. The badlands are fallow field. But oh man did I feel the spirit of America in that National Park. And not just because they charged me $30 to take a drive-thru gander.
Before the Badlands and right after Murdo—where a toothless man and his “not so bright” brother checked us into the rose-papered DAKOTA LODGE INN,—we drove through a “ghost town” called Okaton. Some 100 years ago it was a railroad town and when they shut down the railroad Okaton shut down too. In the ‘50s some entrepreneurial idiot bolstered by the post-war economic boom decided it would be a good roadside attraction, and did it up: painted “GHOST TOWN GENERAL STORE” and “SALOON” etc in large red letters. Eventually that crumbled into disrepair too, so by the time we came around to see what it was all about Okaton was made up of buildings sparse and sinking into the ground; time and gravity had taken their toll on that makeshift lumber which was never meant to last.
But Okaton was beautiful. Planted on a county sideroad between wide swaths of green land with blackbirds moving all around, and as we drove in there was a brown cow, and a dog barking wild. On one of the buildings there was a cowboy mural, partially peeling teal and maize painted, faded but he was staring at us still stoic and calm. Beyond the old railroad tracks the ground dropped away and while we were looking over that vista of Real America a man came out of what must have once been a gas station to see what we were all about.
He wore a red flannel shirt with a hole in the belly, and a long white beard. He told us he was born in Alabama and lived in California most of his life but came out to Okaton some 15 years or so ago because you don’t need money in Okaton. I told him we were heading to Mount Rushmore for the Fourth of July, that we had just learned there weren’t going to be any fireworks this year. I said something about Joe Biden’s America. He said something about how the veterans don’t like fireworks, and so that was alright with him. He was a real American and he liked his life. I wish that I had asked him his name, but he seemed like a private person and I didn’t want to be rude.
There are plenty of Real Americans in the middle of this country. I’ve met a few of them. I used to think you knew them when you saw them. Sometimes you do, but sometimes people surprise you. At a bar in Cody, Wyoming I spent the better part of 45 minutes talking to Carter, who I was giving lots of attention on account of I thought he was a Real American. I was trying to have a dialectic with Carter, who’s about my age and does hard work on the oil fields. I told him I thought that was a real job, and that I understood his assessment that it didn’t seem fair that the immigrants and unemployed were taking all of his money away. I was being empathetic and a good listener. I was listening so well and understanding so well that I thought maybe he would let me say something about how the rich people were the problem. That backfired because it turned out his parents were multimillionaires in Texas. He himself would possess millions once he came into his trust fund. His parents got their money from guns. No kidding.
So I asked Carter, “Carter, if your parents are so rich, why are you working on the oil fields? It seems like such hard work. You could do something else, you don’t even have to work.” But Carter wanted to work. Carter hated unemployed people and people who didn’t work for a living. And just when I was starting to like him again, he started being much too persistent in wanting to sleep with me and when I said no thanks he called me stupid for being a Jew and looked at me with hate. Then he wouldn’t listen to me at all.
I thought it would be easy to write a strictly political essay, to put my grievances on paper and explain everything I find deeply wrong with this country. To, in the same breath, also explain everything beautiful and right. When I was four years old, the Fourth of July was my favorite holiday. I broke my wrist, and when the doctor showed me the plastic photobook of color options for my cast, I chose to be draped in the stars and stripes.
***
In August I attended a panel of bonafide politicos singing statistical gospel. Their circle-jerk of data had deduced that the undecided voter in this upcoming election is, on average, the “white non-college educated suburban woman.” Moreover, the experts announce, the issues most salient to said white female non-college educated suburban voters are abortion, immigration, and the economy. In their minds, then, these three issues will determine the fate of Election 2024. Democrats, polls say, are weak on immigration, weak on the economy. Strong on abortion. As such, their prognosis: in order to win 270 electoral votes, the Democratic party must keep focusing on an abortion-forward message. Never mind that the policy stances of the two parties regarding abortion are common knowledge.
Here are some anecdotes from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago:
During the week-long DNC festivities in Chicago, there was a van that offered free medical abortions and vasectomies on-demand.
A youtube video went viral in which a young woman inside of United Center, the festival grounds of this grand-scale “meeting of the minds,” stated that, if forced to choose between abortion and democracy, she would choose abortion.
At the same time, a few blocks away, I encountered a group of Chicago firemen picketing because they had not had a fair contract renegotiation with the city for three years. Firefighters aren’t allowed to go on strike. There could always be a fire. I asked one of them, a Lieutenant who had been with the CFD for 20 years, whether he felt abandoned by the Democratic Party. He said he had, partially because he felt they were no longer the party of working people, and partially because he was a pro-life Catholic and the Democrats didn’t represent him any longer. He was a born-and-raised Good Old Chicago Dem. I asked him who he’s voting for in this election, he told me “100 percent I’m voting for Trump.”
“Nobody has their own political beliefs.”
An 18 year old floor delegate in town for the convention from one of our bluest states told me this after I inquired why he, at such a young age, chose to spring headfirst into the Democratic Party. He believed, like a good APGov student and a natural party democrat, that one's political opinion is a product of their culture, their family, their educational attainment, their race, religion, and class—so under the fluorescent lights of the University of Chicago’s “Media Village,” speaking to someone (me) he considered a credentialed journalist (lol), employing a tone usually reserved only for those lab-coated or enrobed in habit he revealed his own absolution from autonomy. His holy church; his Hippocratic oath? The information regime, a new totalitarianism which takes the “rule of no one” literally by domesticating all actors into allo-exploitative consumer cattle, unable or unwilling to form worldviews for themselves. When I scrawled down into my notebook the inciting sentence: NOBODY HAS THEIR OWN POLITICAL BELIEFS—he asked that it be struck from the record. This invoked in me a sense of maternal pride; it was good that he was so conscientious of his image, and clear he was going to go far. He has a long career ahead of him, this kid, making incremental gains for a party he will never truly believe in.
The information regime utilizes information and data to unconsciously control the will of its subjects. The Dataist dogma is seductive. Its manifesto is written in code; its constitution is algorithm. The infocratic man absolves himself of responsibility: no longer must he attempt originality of thought or action. Instead he views statistics, reads infographics, and reposts headlines. Whereas the object of the disciplinary regime is isolated from others (as in Foucault’s Panopticon) and controlled via apparati of punishment, the individual ruled by infocracy is dominated by their own willing visibility and participation in digital communities. The individual under infocracy is thus both subject and object. By voluntarily providing algorithmic systems with data about the self, the individual manufactures his own reification—while still feeling free. It’s a perfect system.
The experts say that climate change is human-made, they assert that the correct resolution is to go green. The subject now knows he is to separate plastic from paper and paper from tin. The subject is white, for this he feels ashamed. The subject watches an episode of The Bear, he knows he liked it once the credits roll and he opens his phone and types into google.com The Bear Season Three Episode Four Review. Google AI assist tells him it was good. Everyone says so. The subject agrees, he is very agreeable, especially with people he already has decided that he agrees with.
This view of the world kills ideas, kills revolutionary hope, kills the potential for human action to be taken seriously. Things are how they are, and they’ve been how they are for a while now. The data doesn’t point towards there being any potential for change. Hannah Arendt explains that “the aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.” Convictions are messy. They make those who hold them feel. And those who feel, who act based on emotions rather than reason cool and refined, cannot be studied according to scientific standards. Feeling people are thus the bane of Dataists existence, whose entire worldview presupposes the ability of scientific methods to not only compute but understand human decision making. Though he believes he can, the Dataist cannot comprehend human emotion. When faced with a man autonomous in mind and action his worldview crumbles. Polls fail.
After listening to the Vice President’s keynote speech at the DNC, a friend of mine declares: “Never in my life have I witnessed an election where the choice between good and evil is so clear.”
Good, in this case represented by Kamala Harris, the telegenic Democratic party nominee who bypassed a primary and has been unable to clearly articulate her policy opinions beyond joy, brat, smile, laughter, prosecutor, no-nonsense, pantsuit, heels, middle class, not going back. Supporters of the Vice President will object to this claim—and of course, her official campaign website does in fact list her stances on “the issues” clearly and in print. An eighty-two page economic policy book linked to the site details explicitly, through expert analysis and red-white-and-blue design, what she will do, how she will do it, and why it will work. It’s erudite, thorough, persuasive. It also doesn’t matter. Who’s going to read all that?
And evil represented by Donald Trump. The Official 2024 GOP Platform—and I am referencing here not “Project 2025” (which the former president has continually disavowed throughout his campaign) but the sixteen page document listed on Former President Trump’s campaign website—begins with a dedication: “To the forgotten men and women of America.”
Infocrats operate under the assumption that human beings can be studied and predicted based on scientific rules. Friedrich Hayek classifies the attempt to conform the social studies to pseudo-scientific modes of measurement “scientism,” an approach that is fundamentally flawed because, in Hayek’s words, “...what men know or think about the external world or about themselves, their concepts or even the subjective qualities of their sense perceptions are to Science never ultimate reality, data to be accepted. Its concern is not what men think about the world and how they consequently behave, but what they ought to think.” It is to this code that Democrats have resigned themselves. They believe that if immigration, the economy, and abortion are reported to be the three most important issues to the electorate, then the candidate’s performance on these issues will be what determines the outcome of the election. I am no expert. But my intuition is that this election is less about policy than it is about dueling notions of truth. That the winner will be chosen based not on “the issues” but by their pathos. Here there exists, despite my friend’s claim to the contrary, no clear choice between good and evil.
Simply put:
Harris is really just doing what the data says will work.
Trump is speaking to something greater.
He’s speaking to feelings.
Data doesn’t care about feelings.
But voters do.
An excerpt from Trump’s official party platform: “We will be a Nation based on Truth, Justice, and Common Sense.” That Trump so proudly stakes his claim to truth might surprise established party Democrats, who view him first and foremost as a liar and consider truth theirs. What they don’t understand is that Trump’s claim to truth is a nearly Emersonian assertion of individual responsibility. That common sense can serve as a moral foundation for a body politic is a fundamentally democratic idea, in the spirit of Jefferson, Jackson, Paine. It allows for the potential that truth can be revealed not solely by the expert-class, but can be apprehended by each individual from peering inward: “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.” Yes, Trump lies, but all politicians do. And in Arendt’s words, “truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues.” All politicians lie, manipulate, and break promises. Trump is operating his campaign based on an understanding that what is “true” in politics is not necessarily perfectly synonymous with what is “factual.”
The problem, of course, is that a Trump presidency will not save the working class. It will most likely make things much worse, and expedite further the scale of wealth inequality. His McDonald’s photo op is genius, his backing by Elon Musk chilling. The potential risk to the electoral system, the potential for (yes it’s cringe to say but unfortunately here I am compelled to) a fascist overhaul of our institutions cannot be overstated. But if he wins, the Democrats have only themselves to blame.
***
In the opening scene of the pilot episode of SEMINAL HBO CLASSIC TELEVISION SERIES “The Wire,” Detective McNulty is investigating a murder. Someone killed a man colloquially known as “Snot Boogie.” We learn that Snot Boogie was famous around the neighborhood for stealing money from a regular alley craps game. As Snot lies dead in the street, Mcnulty asks a bystander familiar with the deceased’s antics why, knowing he would steal the money, he and his friends would nevertheless continue to invite him to the game. The man responds, “Got to. This America, man.”
Here are the only statistics that I think matter: income inequality in this country is at its greatest since the Gilded Age. Billionaire wealth skyrocketed during the pandemic, growing by 88% in the past four years. The top 10% now hold over two-thirds of the country’s total household wealth, while the bottom 50% hold only 2.5%. Concurrently, since Citizens United, undue and unholy masses of wealth have entered our electoral system: campaign spending increases exponentially with every election cycle, corporations are allowed unlimited spending power, and regulation is basically nonexistent. Unions have all but been put to rout; homeownership is no longer a realistic expectation of adulthood; the middle class is dissolving. The democratic party has not had a legitimate primary in eight years. These facts are not groundbreaking. But they should be. We are living in an oligarchical state and nobody seems to care.
No longer is the average American a consideration of their elected representatives. Politicians, once elected, have no incentive to change the very conditions that elevated them to power. Their primary goal is maintenance, their secondary goal elevation. Congressional representatives are reported to spend half of their working hours fundraising. They answer not to their constituents, but to those on the other end of the telephone writing the checks. The system is not working for real Americans. So with both Democrats and Republicans equally beholden to big-money interests, working people have been left with poison in their throat, unease in their gut, a knowledge that things used to be better than they are now, and no clear way forward. And so the vacuum of space that should have been filled by an economic populism is permeated, its energy co-opted by Trump’s cultural populism.
Increasing technological automation of once-important industries has left our middle class with neither sufficient income nor sense of purpose; the influx of billions of dollars into our electoral system has put our political power to assert our own convictions in jeopardy, while the imposition of infocracy has left us without the ability or desire to form them. Neither the Democratic or the Republican party has any real interest in attempting to bolster the self-determinative abilities of their constituencies, and so in the absence of empirical political freedom, we are left to decide between two conflicting doctrines—neither of which will save us, both of which promise to. And yet we continue inviting the same thieves to the game, knowing they will steal the pot.
I don’t want to be negative. I do hold some hope, and I don’t think we’ve quite reached the end of history. Experts who study only the past will always underestimate the potential for something new. In his essay “Politics,” Emerson writes, “[u]nder the dominion of an idea, which possesses the minds of multitudes…the power of persons are no longer subjects of calculation. A nation of men unanimously bent on freedom, or conquest, can easily confound the arithmetic of statists, and achieve extravagant actions, out of all proportion to their means.” In order to achieve real, empirical change, we need an idea. And I’m not sure what that idea could be, but I know it has something to do with the feeling I had driving down back-country roads, something Obama once put his finger on with his unfulfilled promise of “HOPE,” something similar to prairie fading into plains, plains into canyon, canyon into mountain towns, thoughts of wild horses and Jesse James, a tattered old flag high up and illuminated, blowing gently, metal pole high, sky blue. Sunlight on soft snow banks, melting down, little pools of water. I’ve only seen a bald eagle once, but it made sense to me then. Something like easy laughter, a three-chord country song, rough voice, hard work. Something like talking to strangers who aren’t ever so strange—something like the feeling of realizing you know them, they know you, something I never felt abroad: it’s something like knowing you’re a real American, and you’re proud.