Enlightened Librarian: Understanding the Midwest

Understanding the Midwest · Nov 5, 07:52 PM

I was born and raised in the centre of Canada, which makes me keen to understand the elusive attitudes of the Midwestern American voter. Difficulty in grasping the region’s persistent Republicanism has been well noted elsewhere: job losses in the manufacturing belt have done little to dampen the region’s support for Bush’s policies, economic and otherwise.

Here it should be noted that the attitudes of Canadian prairie dwellers are not a carbon copy of those further south. The Prairies, Saskatchewan and Manitoba in particular, have long been typified as a region of moderate Protestantism sympathetic to a soft-socialist political agenda, with a history of collectivization (think wheat pools) and cooperative impulses born Great Depression. In his 2003 book, Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values, pollster Michael Adams notes that these are key differences from midwestern Americans’ embrace of individualism and religious conservatism. (Lately, considerable ink has been spilled on efforts to reignite a progressive agenda in the U.S., which would draw on a Rooseveltian model of conservatism sympathetic to spending on social programs. Yet, little appears to have come of these efforts. The New Yorker profiled George Soros’s pro-progressive spending to unseat Bush—which apparently had little effect.)

The question remains: why would Midwesterners continue to enthusiastically support Bush in the face of continued job losses and policies clearly directed to benefit society’s wealthiest? In its debrief of the U.S. election, this week’s Economist
suggests that part of the answer may lie a choice simply not to change. The article points out the unanticipated emergence in exit polls of “moral values” as the campaign’s top issue—trumping the economy, Iraq or terrorism. The Economist speculates the term may have acted less as a cue for social conservatism than as a catch-all for perceptions of forthrightness and trustability in Bush himself—and in essence, a vote for the status quo over the unknown. (When prodded, Americans’ views on “moral values” tend to be less rigid than the term might suggest; when asked directly in the same exit polls, 55% support always- or partially legal abortion, and 26% and 35% support gay marriage and civil unions respectively.)

The Economist suggests that Bush’s traditionalism on social issues was a comfort, and I think it is the comfort factor—the ‘he’s one of us’ element—that was greatly underestimated in the run up to the election. That, and I think information overload itself played a huge factor in Bush’s reelection. By this I mean a failure of the majority of the electorate to overcome the disconnect between the facts of his record and his lubricious stump speeches. What we have really seen in this election, more than ever before, is the vanquishing of rational argument by phatic speech, “being,” according to the The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, “speech used to share feelings or to establish a mood of sociability rather than to communicate information or ideas.”

This will be the Democratic party’s biggest challenge in the next election—to overcome the Republican party’s stranglehold on charisma. This election showed that merely winning debates can’t stop a party that has monopolized feel-good sentiments to bolster its will to power.

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