As you know by now, America was not okay. Our country has had to learn the hard way that laws are only as good as the people who uphold them, that without ethical officials to enforce it, the Constitution is nothing but a piece of paper. Americans have learned that our age-old institutions are weaker than we suspected, that our ability to function as a country rests as much on norms as it does on laws, and that both laws and norms can be shattered.
But Americans have also learned that we are our own greatest strength. We recognized our rights as we lost them, then we fought for those rights to be returned to us.
The years in which I wrote the essays in this book were marked by the erosion of political and economic stability—an erosion that long preceded the Obama administration, a social crime whose perpetrators were as diverse as its victims. Two wars, a recession, extreme partisanship, and antiquated political structures that could not keep pace with rapid technological change left America vulnerable to autocracy. And autocracy arose in the administration of Donald Trump. Americans have become locked in a constant test of checks and balances, in which a government with authoritarian ambitions fights against a citizenry accustomed to fundamental freedoms: the freedom to assemble, to write, to speak. Freedoms that can no longer be taken for granted.
The Trump administration has created so many new problems that the difficult era of the mid-2010s seem enviable by comparison. Under Trump, we worry anew about nuclear war, violent white supremacists, mass deportation of immigrants, and subterfuge of our most elemental democratic practices—like the right to vote—by hostile foreign parties. We have had to ask new questions, like “To which country does our president’s greatest loyalty lie?” We have had to call our representatives every day to beg them not to kill us by revoking access to health care. We have had to live under the whim of a president so fundamentally unstable that we worry one of his stray tweets will lead to war. These problems were previously unfathomable; these are the problems of a country shifting from a flawed democracy into an autocracy.
The motto of dictatorship has long been “It can’t happen here,” and that willful blindness prompted many pundits to proclaim—during the primary, the election, and after—that Trump would eventually “pivot.” But Trump is never going to pivot. His goal has always been to align Americans to his views, to pull the fringes to the center, and to make the extreme mainstream. In many ways, he has succeeded: he has installed white supremacists into positions of power and shifted public expectations of behavior so violently that his ability to give a teleprompter speech without saying something egregiously racist is often lauded as “presidential.” These are the delusions of Americans wounded by whiplash, who badly want their country to get back to “normal.”
But as understandable as that desire is, it is essential that we remember that “normal” is how we got here. The quieter crises of the pre-Trump era contained their own agonies, ones that have only been exacerbated or that have remained unchanged under his rule. In 2017, our political focus shifted from examining systemic flaws to stopping imminent disasters. But the fundamental problems that preceded Trump’s reign have gone unresolved.
Income inequality remains at a level unrivaled in modern U.S. history, as does household debt. Wages remain stagnant or in decline. Higher education remains an exorbitant barrier to middle-class jobs, while middle-class jobs continue to disappear. Geographical inequality, which Trump’s team expertly exploited, remains rampant, with prestigious jobs clustered in cities few can afford. The attacks on civil rights that had been gaining steam prior to 2016 have become a state-sanctioned assault on the most vulnerable people: ethnic, racial, or religious minorities; immigrants; LGBT Americans; or others scapegoated on the sidelines in Trump’s narrow vision of nationalism.
In the midst of Trump’s burgeoning autocracy, a phenomenon that I found jarring has arisen: the region where I live has become central to U.S. political discourse. Suddenly, the coastal politicians and pundits who had scorned the Midwest have become subsumed by it, eagerly seeking every extremist Trump fan they can find, with some media outlets like The New York Times interviewing the same people repeatedly. A new caricature has emerged: the righteous Midwestern racist, who is almost always an elderly man from a bottomed-out industrial town whose fealty to Trump is explained solely by his “economic anxiety.”
This narrative is as maddening as it is hurtful. It ignores the complexities and diversity of the region while also disregarding serious structural barriers, like new voter ID laws, that so narrowly ensured Trump’s victory—a victory that was presented, both by much of the media and by Trump himself, as the revenge of “the forgotten people.” But as usual, selective memory has ruled, and many have been forgotten from the category of “the forgotten.” Nonwhite Midwesterners vanished from election coverage; ambivalent white Midwestern voters—a category that includes many who voted for Trump—were shunned in favor of faithful fanatics. This misleading narrative is insulting to the groups persecuted by the administration, but it also does the Trump voters themselves no favors, as they too have been hurt by the chaos and callousness of his reign.
The economic anxiety of the Midwest was real, and it continues. But economic anxiety is no excuse for racism or cruelty, and that continues as well. As Trump persecutes his nonwhite targets, media outlets allow the Midwest to stand in as his representative region, which is a convenient way to ignore the prevalence of bigotry in coastal states or among the wealthy and educated. We are still “flyover country,” only now all our whites are racists and the rest of our population has disappeared.
My own state, Missouri, has become a model of low-key autocracy, replacing Kansas as the go-to example of American political dysfunction. After Trump’s election, the Missouri legislature lowered the minimum wage by $2.70, passed a law that made it possible to fire women who use birth control, and handed over private voter data to the Trump administration even as other conservative states resisted. Missouri even became the first state to receive a travel warning from the NAACP declaring it was too dangerous for black people to visit. The nightmare scenarios that some envisioned for the United States as Trump consolidated power play out in Missouri every day, along with the widespread economic devastation and social unrest that preceded his election and remained unresolved.
But resistance remains as well. The biggest barrier to a strong resistance is a refusal to acknowledge not only that the worst can happen, but that it has happened before. “Who could have predicted a Trump win?” pundits pondered, and the answer was often blacks, Latinos, Muslims, and residents of the ignored heartland regions where he gained popularity—the people whom Trump treated as target practice, and people in regions he targeted for votes. These folks are the “no one” in the oft-said and inaccurate phrase of “no one saw it coming,” a phrase that indicts the fool that utters it. Many Americans saw it coming, but their warnings were often dismissed as implausible or, worse, hysterical, when they were simply logical predictions based on lived experience. The people pushed to the margins in the heartland knew it would not be okay, because it had never been okay. For many, the hypotheticals had already happened.
Trump’s win was fairly easy to predict; how the public would react was far less certain. But from the moment his administration took power, Americans have been fighting back against their president’s autocratic aims. They have been fighting for themselves, and they have been fighting for people they don’t know. As social trust has eroded, they fight to rebuild it, not through blind faith in a failing system, but by exhibiting the willingness to stand up for each other and for constitutional principles that were not being honored in practice. What has become known as “the resistance” is simply people helping each other, an idea that is subversive under an administration that peddles cruelty as conventional. Some speculated that the resistance would burn out, but people do not burn out when they are fighting to survive.
With nearly every day bringing a crisis that would have seemed unimagi
nable a decade before, America’s famous optimism has begun to fade. This may seem like a loss, but it is a gift, because the denial of encroaching darkness was what prevented so many from seeing the light. The insistence that “things would work themselves out” circumvented compassion, it negated solutions, and it made people enraged when their expectations were not met. Assurances that their anxiety was unfounded left people ashamed to speak out. Far fewer people are afraid to speak out now.
Repairing the damage that has been done to American society will take a long time. Underneath the explosive residue of the Trump administration lies the rot of systemic problems that have lingered for decades. They will not be fixed overnight. But they will never be fixed if they are not addressed with honesty, pragmatism, and compassion. The willingness of so many Americans to do that today gives me hope, however tentative, that the conditions described in this book may someday seem unfamiliar, that they will become the relics of an era remembered best as a cautionary tale.
—September 2017
Acknowledgments
The print version of this book is six years in the making, and they have been a very memorable, exciting, and painful six years. If I were to list all the people to whom I’m grateful, you’d have another book, so apologies in advance to those who I omit.
First I’d like to thank my editor at Al Jazeera English, Naz Khan, who took a chance on me when I was a PhD student, let me speak my mind unimpeded on controversial topics, and was a great source of support over our years working together. Similar thanks to my literary agent, Robert Lecker, who sought me out before my work achieved mass popularity, and proved a steadfast advisor throughout this process. Thanks also to the team at Macmillan, including: Whitney Frick, the former executive editor at Macmillan who first introduced this project to Flatiron Books; Bryn Clark, the associate editor who brought the print version to fruition; my Flatiron publicist, Amelia Possanza; and the rest of the production team at Macmillan.
Thanks to everyone who has worked as my editor in the years after I left Al Jazeera, especially Amberly McTeer at The Globe and Mail; Meredith Bennet-Smith at Quartz and NBC News; Anjali Khosla at Fast Company; and Erica Moore at De Correspondent. You all helped make me a stronger writer. Thanks also to Joy-Ann Reid at MSNBC for giving me a platform to discuss the Trump regime and other social ills on television.
You may notice that I am largely thanking women in this section. To a large degree, it has been women who supported my writing and who did not dismiss my concerns about our country’s future as hyperbole or hysteria. We need more women in editorial positions and more female writers covering issues like politics, technology, and the economy. We need more women in positions of power in general. I hope I will have many more women to thank in the years to come.
Like most people, I have a love/hate relationship with Twitter, but I am very grateful for the friends I have made there over the years. I’m particularly grateful to Linda Tirado, Leah McElrath, Sydette Harry, Andrea Chalupa, Imani Gandy, Melissa McEwan, and Mikki Kendall for half a decade of feedback, support, and survival tips. I’d also like to thank my friends in St. Louis, particularly those involved in the Ferguson protest movement who stayed in the region and continue to work for change against long odds, and especially my friend and occasional cowriter Umar Lee.
My deepest thanks to my readership, who have stuck with me through tumultuous times. I’m very lucky to have an audience as engaged and informative as you, and I appreciate all the emails, letters, and tweets over the years. I hope you are as pleased with this updated version as I am.
Most of all, I’d like to thank my family. In memoriam: thank you Emily and Leo Kendzior and Hope and Sherman Tonkonow for your love, advice, and making me the person I am; I miss you. Thanks also to my parents, Barbara and Larry; my in-laws Sally, Phil, Liz, and Dave; my sister, Lizzie, and her husband, Mike; and my nieces and nephews Jack, Kate, Karl, and Julia. A huge debt of gratitude for my extremely patient husband, Pete, who has put up with me throughout this wild ride.
But above all, thanks go to my two favorite people, Emily and Alex. I wrote The View from Flyover Country with the aim of exposing problems we all face and contributing to a better world for you and your generation. Hopefully by the time you’re old enough to read my work, it will seem as far-fetched as fiction. I love you.
About the Author
Sarah Kendzior is best known for her reporting on St. Louis, her coverage of the 2016 election, and her academic research on authoritarian states. She is currently an op-ed columnist for The Globe and Mail, and she was named by Foreign Policy as one of the “100 people you should be following on Twitter to make sense of global events.” Her reporting has been featured in many publications, including Politico, Slate, The Atlantic, Fast Company, Chicago Tribune, Teen Vogue, and The New York Times. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Introduction
PART I: FLYOVER COUNTRY
The View from Flyover Country
Expensive Cities Are Killing Creativity
The Peril of Hipster Economics
Mourn the Fall of the Mall
PART II: THE POST-EMPLOYMENT ECONOMY
Surviving the Post-Employment Economy
Meritocracy for Sale
Survival Is Not an Aspiration
Zero-Opportunity Employers
A Government Shutdown, a Social Breakdown
The Men Who Set Themselves on Fire
Charity Is Not a Substitute for Justice
The Unaffordable Baby Boomer Dream
The Millennial Parent
Mothers Are Not “Opting Out”—They Are Out of Options
PART III: RACE AND RELIGION
The Wrong Kind of Caucasian
The Fallacy of the Phrase “the Muslim World”
In the Trial of Trayvon, the U.S. Is Guilty
St. Louis’s Sons, Taken Too Soon
The Freedom to Criticize Free Speech
PART IV: HIGHER EDUCATION
The Closing of American Academia
Academic Paywalls Mean Publish and Perish
Academia’s Indentured Servants
The Political Consequences of Academic Paywalls
The Immorality of College Admissions
College Is a Promise the Economy Does Not Keep
PART V: MEDIA
Managed Expectations in the Post-Employment Economy
Who Is a “Journalist”? People Who Can Afford to Be
Blame It on the Internet
When the Mainstream Media Are the Lunatic Fringe
PART VI: BEYOND FLYOVER COUNTRY
U.S. Foreign Policy’s Gender Gap
Snowden and the Paranoid State
Iraq and the Reinvention of Reality
Where Following the Law Is Radical
Water Is a Human Right, But Who Is Considered a Human Being?
The Telegenically Dead
CODA
In Defense of Complaining
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
THE VIEW FROM FLYOVER COUNTRY. Copyright © 2015 by Sarah Kendzior. All rights reserved. For information, address Flatiron Books, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.flatironbooks.com
Cover design by Keith Hayes Cover photograph © Luke Hayes/Millennium Images
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Kendzior, Sarah, author.
Title: The view fr
om flyover country: dispatches from the forgotten America / Sarah Kendzior.
Description: First edition. | New York: Flatiron Books, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017049753 | ISBN 9781250189998 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781250189981 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Trump, Donald, 1946– | American Dream. | United States—Politics and government—21st century. | United States—Social conditions—21st century.
Classification: LCC JK275 .K45 2018 | DDC 973.932—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017049753
eISBN 9781250189981
Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at [email protected].
Originally published as an ebook under the same title in 2015 by Amazon Digital Services, LLC
First Flatiron Books Edition: April 2018
The View from Flyover Country Page 16