by Lance Selfa
This pattern is particularly ironic since Democrats in many of these areas had cast outsized votes for her during the 2008 primaries. Indeed, this had been presumed to be Clinton country. “How could they lose Michigan with 10,000 votes!” groused Stanley Greenberg, a key architect of Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory, when he saw the final figures.20 But one overriding fact determined the outcome: the Republicans have had an aggressive strategy for winning dominance in the Rust Belt, supported by an elaborate infrastructure of state-level think tanks, regional billionaire donors, ready-to-wear legislation from the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and wizard gerrymanderers from the Republican State Leadership Committee. In contrast, the Democrats, especially those in the industrial but nonmetropolitan counties so common throughout the upper Midwest, have been left to swing in the wind by a national party that offers no serious remedies (the 2009 GM and Chrysler rescues aside) to further decline and communal pauperization.21
As readers of David Daley’s bestselling Ratf**ked know, Karl Rove and his conservative quants had responded to the meltdown of Republican power in 2008 with an audacious scheme for retaking power in Washington through control of decennial redistricting. The Midwest was the bullseye. “There are 18 state legislatures,” Rove wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “that have four or fewer seats separating the two parties that are important for redistricting. Seven of these are controlled by Republicans and the other 11 are controlled by Democrats, including the lower houses in Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana and Pennsylvania. Republican strategists are focused on 107 seats in 16 states. Winning these seats would give them control of drawing district lines for nearly 190 congressional seats.”22
In the event, as Daley shows, chump change (about $30 million) spent on targeted state races in 2010 produced a revolution in party power, with the Republicans winning nearly seven hundred seats and control of key legislatures in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan as well as Florida and North Carolina. Computer-generated redistricting punctually produced a dream map that made Republican control of the House virtually invulnerable until the 2020 Census, despite the demographic forces favoring Democrats. The pièce d’résistance was the gerrymandering of Ohio overseen by John Boehner. “The GOP controlled the redrawing of 132 state legislative and 16 congressional districts. Republican redistricting resulted in a net gain for the GOP state house caucus in 2012 and allowed a twelve-to-four Republican majority to return to the US House of Representatives—despite voters casting only 52 percent of their vote for Republican congressional candidates.”23 (There are worse cases: in North Carolina in 2012 Democrats won a majority of the congressional vote statewide but gained only four out of thirteen House seats.)
Table 3
Republican Lock on Midwestern State Houses (as of December 2016)
In the Midwest the 2010 Tea Party victories brought a new generation of feral Republicans to power, many of them groomed by far-right think tanks such as Indiana’s Policy Review Foundation (once headed by Mike Pence), Michigan’s Mackinac Center, Wisconsin’s MacIver Institute and Minnesota’s Center of the American Experiment, all of them spoiling for a fight to the death with the region’s public-sector unions and progressive big-city governments. Coordinating through the State Policy Network (sixty-five conservative think tanks) and ALEC, they launched campaigns to destroy public-sector bargaining rights, defund unions through right-to-work laws, and privatize public education through vouchers. They focused, in other words, on increasing their structural and legal advantages in ways that Democrats would find difficult, even impossible, to roll back. Unions and students, of course, conducted an epic resistance in Wisconsin but were unable to recall Scott Walker, in large part because of the lackluster character of the Democratic candidate. In Ohio, the unions were more successful and repealed right-to-work by referendum, but in Indiana, Michigan, and West Virginia, Republican majorities rammed through right-to-work and, in Michigan, a Mackinac Center–inspired receivership for Detroit’s schools.24
The Republican “down ticket” in 2016, from Senate incumbents to state representatives and judges, ironically benefited greatly from Trump’s poor backing from the Kochs and other conservative megadonors who switched funding from the presidential race to preserving control of Congress. For the first time, super PACs spent more on the Senate races than on the presidential campaign. Trump, whom the New York Times estimated received $2 billion of free publicity from the media, was little affected, but the huge injection of dark money into state races was revolutionary. More than three-quarters of Senate campaign funding came from out-of-state sources in 2016 and “just three groups, One Nation [Adelson], the Koch network’s Americans for Prosperity, and the US Chamber of Commerce, account[ed] for 67 percent in dark money spending.”25 The result, according to some political scientists, has been the “nationalization” of state politics. “As a result of the growing connection between presidential and state elections, the once clear divide between state politics and national politics has largely disappeared in most of the country.”26 Thus, for the first time in history, there were no split votes in 2016 between Senate candidates and presidential contenders; the thirty-four states with Senate contests all voted the same party for both offices.
Obama ended his presidency with the Democrats having lost nearly one thousand legislative seats across the country. With all attention now riveted on Congress and the Kremlin West, the media has largely ignored the Republican ALEC-scripted blitzkriegs in the state legislatures they won in 2016. In Iowa, for example, where the Democrats lost control of the senate, the Republicans took little more than three weeks in the new session to decimate public-sector bargaining rights. Similarly, Republican legislators are now targeting Missouri and Kentucky—possibly Ohio again, as well as Pennsylvania and New Hampshire—as the next right-to-work states. In Missouri and New Hampshire, right-to-work amendments recently had been passed by the legislatures but were vetoed by Democratic governors. Both states now have Republican governors and the counter-revolution continues.
Cradles of the CIO
In 1934, a konor predicted not merely the coming of a four-funnelled steamer with Mansren on board but an event which was to become a very important element in the Cargo ideology of northern Dutch New Guinea movements: the miraculous coming of a factory.27
The millenarian aspects of the Trump campaign—the magical nativism and promise of a world restored—have received surprisingly little comment, although together with his raving Tourette’s syndrome they were perhaps its most striking features. Clinton’s promise to competently manage the Obama legacy seemed utterly jejune next to Trump’s assurance, more chiliastic than demagogic, that “jobs will return, incomes will rise, and new factories will come rushing back to our shores.” Amongst “Trump Democrats,” especially those white, working-class Obama voters who flipped Ohio and Pennsylvania, the embrace of Trump took on the desperate overtones of the Papuan cargo cult, its members praying for a magical factory, described in Peter Worsley’s classic The Trumpet Shall Sound.
If Trump is one part P. T. Barnum and one part Mussolini, he’s become another part John Frum: the “mysterious little man [an American sailor?] with bleached hair, high-pitched voice and clad in a coat with shining buttons” whom some Melanesians worship because he supposedly brought “cargo” out of the sky to the island of Tanna during the Second World War.28 At the end of the day, is the Trumpian field of dreams—Mexicans depart, Chinese surrender, factory jobs return home—that much different from a landing strip hacked out of the jungle?
But perceived anthropological condescension is precisely what drives people in Dubuque, Anderson, and Massena to pick up their pitchforks against “elite liberals” as well as “establishment conservatives.” “Deplorables” indeed. The counties in table 4 all have industrial unionism in their DNA; they were the cradles of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the great labor wars of the New Deal. With few exceptions (1972 and 1984), they remained loyally Democ
ratic in rain, sleet, and snow, voting strongly for Obama in 2008. So why, in the face of positive economic indicators and the lowest national unemployment rate in a decade, did these older industrial counties suddenly desert the Democrats and embrace Trump’s reindustrialization cargo cult?29 Fumbling with the odd pieces of the Trump puzzle, the Economist decided that “the pitch of economic anxiety motivating Mr. Trump’s supporters has been exaggerated.”30 But when analysis goes micro, plentiful reasons for such anxiety emerge. Table 5 itemizes plant closures that occurred during the campaign season—striking evidence of a new wave of job flight and deindustrialization. In almost all of these “flipped” counties, a high-profile plant closure or impending move had been on the front page of the local newspaper: embittering reminders that the “Obama boom” was passing them by.
Some examples: Just before Christmas, West Rock Paper Company, the major employer in Coshoctin County, closed its doors. In May, GE’s century-old locomotive plant in Erie announced that it was transferring hundreds more jobs to its new facility in Fort Worth. The day after the Republican Convention ended in Cleveland, FirstEnergy Solutions announced the closure of its huge generating plant outside of Toledo, “the 238th such plant to close in the United States since 2010.” At the same time in Lorain, Republic Steel formally reneged on its promise to reopen and modernize the enormous three-mile-long US Steel plant that had once been the area’s largest employer. In August, meanwhile, GE warned of the closing of its light bulb plants in Canton and East Cleveland. Simultaneously, pink slips were being handed out to workers at Commercial Vehicle Group’s big stamping plant in Martin’s Ferry on the Ohio River (Belmont County). “I think 172 job losses in the community and even the county in an area like ours is devastating,” said the local superintendent of schools. “This is another kick in the gut to the valley, with the coal mines closing, the power plant and now this. It’s just one piece of bad news after another.31
Table 4
“Trump Democrat” Counties
(Table shows percent change in vote for Democrats and Republicans from 2012 to 2016)
Table 5
Plant Closures during the 2016 Presidential Election Campaign
But what about race? Trump, of course, won the white vote nationally by 21 points (one point more than Romney), and his campaign rallies were Woodstocks for bigots. Yet, as commentators on both the right and the left have emphasized, these flipped counties had with only one exception voted at least once for Obama. (Trump nationally won 10 percent of Obama supporters.) Perhaps a distinction should be made between the true Sturmtrumpen who mobbed the rallies and the former Obama voters who joined the cargo cult in protest. As a British journalist, contradicting his own paper’s characterization of the white working class as the “engine” of the insurgency, pointed out: “At over a dozen Trump rallies, in almost as many states, over the past year, your correspondent has met lawyers, estate agents, and a horde of middle-class pensioners—and relatively few blue-collar workers.”32
On the other hand, there is evidence for a regionally generated backlash, long nurtured by Tea Party types, against immigrants and refugees. In part, this may be the result of federal policies that allocate refugees to areas with cheap housing and a low cost of living, where they’re often perceived as competitors for remaining service-sector jobs as well as beneficiaries of state support denied to citizens. Erie, where refugees now constitute a tenth of the population and a labor reserve army for the nearby casino industry, is a well-known example. In other Rust Belt areas, such as Reading, Pennsylvania, rapidly growing Mexican communities have been the target of sustained nativist attacks, encouraged by Tea Party and alt-right types. In a recent study of state policies and programs, Ohio was ranked worst in its treatment of undocumented immigrants, a rating that was confirmed when Republicans in the legislature drafted a congratulatory message (HCR 11) to Arizona and Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
A Note on a Forgotten Land
“We’re going to put the miners back to work!” Trump declared just minutes into his speech. The crowd roared, Trump smiled, and several miners frantically waved aloft signs that read “Trump digs coal.”33
Newfoundland, Ordinary, Sideway, and Spanglin are hamlets in Elliot, a typical Appalachian county in eastern Kentucky. Its residents once grew tobacco and corn; now many of them—“fortunate” by local standards—work at the Little Sandy state prison. Elliot’s great distinction, however, is its voting record: the last white county in the South to vote Democratic. Indeed, it has been blue in every presidential election since the county was formed in 1869. George McGovern, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis all won here, and in 2008 Obama buried McCain by a two to one margin. In 2012, despite having endorsed gay rights, he nudged past Romney. Last year, however, Elliot finally put out the lights for the Democrats, voting 70 percent for Trump and the old-time religion of the Republican platform.
In all of postwar political history, Appalachia (defined by its regional commission as 428 upland and mountain counties, from Alabama to New York) has had only a single season in the sun. Thanks to bestselling books by a New York socialist, Michael Harrington (author of The Other America), and maverick Kentucky lawyer Harry Caudill (Night Comes to the Cumberlands), the region briefly became a major focus of the War on Poverty, but then was shunted aside after the inauguration of Nixon. The largest concentration of white poverty in North America, the Southern mountains have been orphaned not just in Washington but also in Frankfort, Nashville, Charlestown, and Raleigh, where coal lobbyists and big-power companies have always dictated legislative priorities. Traditionally, their henchmen were county Democratic machines, and the blue faded from Appalachia only reluctantly at first. Carter won 68 percent of the vote in the region and, in 1996, Clinton won 47 percent. However, as the national Democrats became increasingly identified with “the war on coal,” abortion, and gay marriage, local Blue Dogs were euthanized by popular vote.34 The United Mine Workers (UMW) and Steelworkers, under the best leadership in decades, fought desperately in the 1990s and 2000s for a major political initiative to defend industrial and mining jobs in the region but were turned away at the door by the Democratic Leadership Council and the ascendant New York/California congressional leadership.
Ironically, Clinton this time around did have a plan for the coal counties, although it was buried in the fine print of her website and poorly publicized. She advocated important safeguards for worker health benefits tied to failing coal companies and proposed federal aid to offset the fiscal crisis of the region’s schools. Otherwise, her program was conventional boilerplate: tax credits for new investment, boutique programs to encourage local entrepreneurship, and subsidies for the cleanup and conversion of mining land into business sites (Google data centers were mentioned—talk about cargo cults). But there was no major jobs program or public-health initiative to deal with the region’s devastating opiate pandemic. It was a mirror image, in other words, of her equally slim offerings to the urban poor. Ultimately the plan made no difference, as the only Clinton promise that everyone remembered was: “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” Her only Appalachian victories were a couple of college counties. Trump, meanwhile, hitched a ride with Jesus and recapitulated Romney’s vote.
The exception was formerly blue West Virginia where the Democratic wipeout was so enormous that it will probably end up in the Guinness Book of Records. Only Wyoming gave Trump a higher percentage of its presidential vote. But even more striking than his 42-point margin of victory was the fact that Clinton received 54,000 fewer votes than were cast earlier for candidates in the Democratic primary—a contest that Sanders won (125,000 votes total) in every single county. The failure to carry primary voters was a stunning index of her unpopularity. Meanwhile, the Mountain Party, West Virginia’s sui generis affiliate of the Greens, focused on the governor’s race (won by billionaire Democrat and self-proclaimed pro-coal populist Jim Justice) and picked up 42,000 votes, an encouragi
ng result. Otherwise the Republicans took over the legislature and congressional delegation of this once famous Democratic state for the first time since dinosaurs roamed the earth.
Making sense of West Virginia’s nonlinear politics is not always easy, especially since the Democratic Party has largely devolved into a personal election machine and survivalist cult for Joe Manchin (ex-governor, now senator) and his sidekick, Jim Justice. But one lesson is clear and it probably holds true for most of Appalachia: a large minority of working people, custodians of a heroic labor history, are ready to support radical alternatives, but only if they simultaneously address the economic and cultural crises of the region. The struggles to maintain traditional kinship networks and community social fabrics in Appalachia or, for that matter, in the embattled Black-majority counties of the former cotton South, should be every bit as important to socialists as defending individual rights to make free reproductive and gender choices. They’re usually not.
What Witches Brew
Any future demagogue who attempts to carve a road to power in the United States—for instance through the next depression if one comes—is almost certain to follow Huey’s path.35