On pandering (to me)
A different kind of dispatch from the heartland
We’ll get to the Vice Presidential choice. I promise. But first, I want to talk about the fun movie about the tornadoes.
Have you seen Twisters? Oh man, you should see Twisters. It is two hours of extremely attractive people driving their trucks really fast into storms. Sometimes the attractive people yell “yeaahhhhhh!” and sometimes they yell “ohhhh noooo!” The Oklahoma landscape looks beautiful, which makes sense. Have you been to Oklahoma? It’s gorgeous. Fun as hell too, which the movie also depicts accurately. The movie’s take on tornadoes is that they are both awe-inspiring and scary. Fact check on that one? True, on both counts. The two most attractive people in the film are also the ones who understand tornadoes the most, which is convenient. They do a lot of staring into the middle distance, looking both hot and knowing. They notice that the wind is blowing in a certain direction and that it feels “heavy” and they’re like “it’s gonna be a big one.”
If you came here for a criticism of the blockbuster motion picture Twisters I am sorry to disappoint. I watched it late on a Sunday night in a nearly empty theater, which is peak dad movie-going hours. It was just me and another guy and when the credits rolled I had a half a mind to sprint over to him and propose that we jump in my truck (fact check: I drive a Prius) and go track down some EF5s (I do not know what that means). That’s the power of the blockbuster motion picture Twisters. It is dumb and fun and perfect and makes you feel like you could run through a brick wall made of tornadoes.
If you haven’t heard, perhaps because you’re a coastal elite, Twisters is a movie marketed specifically to me, a White guy living in the heartland. What makes me tick, in the eyes of my benevolent Hollywood panderers? Well, I like country music and Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones and wide open skies. I mean, that all tracks. What else? I’m overwhelmed by the state of the world and enjoy a little escapism now and then. But most of all, I’m told, I have a deep longing for movies that are apolitical, especially movies that are NOT WOKE. I’m going to the multiplex, damnit, not a goddamned DSA meeting. If you’ve read any reviews of Twisters, you’ve probably heard that the movie, which is about natural disasters that are growing in both severity and frequency, pointedly avoids discussing climate change. We wouldn’t like that, you see, us heartlanders. Save that buzzkill for the blue states. Here in real America, all we want is to either have a beer with and/or make love to Glen Powell in the vicinity of a truck.
If the reports are to believed, Twisters was deliberately marketed as a woke-free safe space because Hollywood was concerned that people like me (White guys who live in the Central and Mountain Time Zones and have limited access to Sweetgreen) weren’t buying enough movie tickets. And so they rolled out Nascar sponsorships and encouraged their stars to shotgun beers at country shows and kept repeating the same line about how this was an “apolitical” movie over and over again. As luck would have it, Twisters has been a box office smash, a fact that can lend itself to all sorts of assumptions about correlation and causality. Would it have flopped if its highly bankable young stars mentioned global warming? We’ll never know, because that wasn’t the bet Hollywood made.
Now, I’m a middle-aged White man. I’ve spent my whole life being pandered to, by mass culture and legacy institutions alike. The American project has a whole lot riding in keeping me as comfortable as possible, as consistently as possible. So there’s nothing new here, but it’s been a particularly busy summer in the “being pandered to” department. Not only does Hollywood want my theater-going dollar, but because of the creaky Rube Goldberg machine that is the Electoral College, both political parties care a million times more about my vote, as a Wisconsinite, than most of yours.
On the surface, being pandered to has its advantages. I mean, who wouldn’t want powerful institutions to actively try to cater to your proclivities? As you may have heard, Kamala Harris just picked a Vice Presidential candidate who possesses such powerful “upper Midwestern White dad” vibes that, as of the time of this writing, there is an 80% likelihood that he is in a Menards parking lot eating a Kwik Trip donut and listening to Darkness on the Edge of Town on cassette. Am I a fan of this pick? Are you kidding me? For the first time in my life, there is a Vice Presidential contender who checks my most important boxes (supports universal child care, could change my oil for me, and knows which of the two Hy-Vees in Mankato, Minnesota is the “fancy” one). Absolute clutch pandering, there. No complaints.
If you zoom out from Harris’ selection of Tim Walz, though, you’re already seeing the shadow side of political campaigns pandering to guys like me. White guys, particularly White guys who live in advantageous political states, have a hell of a lot of power. But we’re also infantilized. The assumption, particularly when it comes time to talk policy, is that candidates can only get our vote if they appeal to our most selfish and fearful instincts. Harris has been on a tear since officially becoming the Democratic standard bearer, distancing herself from previous progressive policy stances. Medicare for All? Out the window. Fracking? She’s for it now. Immigration? At her Georgia rally, she referenced a Migos song in order to brag that she would be just as cruel, if not more so, than Trump.
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Putting aside that she quoted Quavo rather than Zach Bryan, we all know the intended audience here. She’s not doing this for a multiracial coalition of young dreamers and agitators, nor for those who are most impacted by the cruelty of the current system. It’s for people who look like me and live where I live, guys who, the story goes, are only capable of metabolizing the reddest of red meat.
Again, in some ways at least, the selection of Walz represents a departure from all that lowest common denominator pandering. His rise to fame has come, at least in part, from America’s collective surprise that a guy who looks and sounds like that is surprisingly progressive. But that’s the exactly the kind of subversion that reinforces the larger pattern. The assumption is, folks like me would never support universal school lunch if Kamala Harris was the messenger. We’ll only humor it if it comes from a guy who shops at Cabelas and knows exactly what day the Mankato Dairy Queen opens for the season.
I’ll have a companion essay coming soon, focused specifically on rural Wisconsin, about how coastal assumptions as to what kind of policies that region will and won’t support are wildly off-base. I won’t do that argument justice by cramming it into a paragraph, but suffice to say there’s no evidence to suggest that the way to win Rust Belt voters is for Democrats to try to out-MAGA the GOP.
But even beyond the electoral calculus, what’s our goal here? Is it merely to bare knuckle it from one “Most Important Election Of Our Lifetime” to the next without ever actually challenging any hearts and minds along the way? To keep business as usual mostly humming along unchanged? To consign ourselves to the fear that guys who look like me who will never learn, never care, and never be motivated by anything other than self-interest and vindictiveness?
Let’s return to Twisters again. It’s silly, of course, that the marketers have gotten away with calling it an “apolitical” movie. I mean, of course Twisters is political. What’s more, like the vast majority of human beings, its internal politics are a fascinating mishmash of ideologies. It may not mention climate change, but its villain is a greedy capitalist in a bolo tie. The female protagonist needs the influence of a straight-talking alpha male to overcome her trauma, but in the end saves the day on her own. The film humanizes working class victims of natural disasters, but with a clear pattern as to which racial group is at the center of the frame. It celebrates community care and mutual aid over profit-seeking, but has no imagination for structural change and government intervention. The two hot people don’t kiss at the end. That’s a lot of politics for an apolitical film.
Pandering, at its core, is about expecting the worst from the beneficiaries of our paternalistic attention. And I get it. My particular cohort of White guys has and will keep on providing plenty of reasons to doubt that we could be partners in building a better world than this one. But look again at Twisters’ confounding stew of political messages. Apparently, even when we’re being pandered to, guys like me can metabolize a strong anti-corporate message. So why stop there? What is climate change if not the biggest corporate con job of our lifetime. Would we have really stormed out of the theater en masse if a big fun movie wasn’t so concerned about offending our tender feelings that it made those connections explicit?
All disaster movies are allegories. We process fears on the screen because they help us make sense of all that bedevils us in the real world. In case it’s not clear, I’m not actually that invested in whether or not Glen Powell gives a soliloqy about Exxon Mobil’s specific culpability for climate volatility. I too mostly care about whether he is interested in either taking it me out for a beer and/or sweeping me off my feet.
When it comes to the stakes of this political moment, though, I’m awfully nervous. One heartening Vice Presidential choice notwithstanding, I’ve seen this particular movie before. Democrats will get worried about polling and assume that deliverance can only come if they pat guys like me on the head and repeat Republican framings about how the world works. The same crew of overpaid K State hacks will opine that the party will lose Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania if they say anything that might spook myself and the other hayseeds. Messages will continue to be massaged. Scapegoats will be trotted out. The campaign will repeat that they are “tough on crime” and will “secure our border” and “fight for the middle class, but not drive up the deficits.”
I’m scared because a month ago, the United Kingdom elected a centrist Labour government that, over the course of the election cycle, adopted its conservative opponents’ anti-immigrant rhetoric. Their thinking was that they’d lose the election if they told the truth to White guys in that country’s equivalent of the Rust Belt. They blamed immigrants instead of big business for that country’s woes. And no, I don’t think that a milquetoast Labour campaign is the primary reason why mobs of those White guys lit their cities on fire this past week. In a symbolic sense, those fires have been burning for decades now. What I do believe, though, is that the putatively progressive political party didn’t do anything to either challenge or inspire those constituencies in any meaningful way. Patterns that could have been broken were reinforced.
I would love to look back on this election cycle and be gratified not only at the outcome but the path we took to get there. I would love if at least one of my country’s political parties didn’t slouch into the familiar swamps of demagoguery. I would love to be trusted rather than feared. Today’s Vice Presidential choice was wonderful, but time will tell if it represents a one-off or a true break from the past.
As a middle-aged White guy in the Midwest, I am begging the Democratic Party: I would like to be asked to think. I would like to be asked to connect dots. I’d like to be asked to reflect— both on what I deserve from my government but also how I need to show up for others. I’d like to be expected to love, to be a member of a community rather than just a cloistered sovereign. And I hear the counterpoint. That I’m an anomaly. That too many of my neighbors hate immigrants and critical race theory and trans people and can’t stomach any challenges to our worldview. But that only becomes reality if that’s all we’re ever offered, if both parties trip over themselves in the race to pander.
Today, the Harris campaign signaled that it’s still pandering, but in perhaps a more subversive, hopeful way than the Democratic Party has in the past. My hope is that they keep pushing. If we’re about to shower so much attention on guys like me, it’s only fair that something be asked of us in return. You all are asked to care about guys like me all the time. You’re asked to cater to our feelings, to moderate your worldviews to match ours. It’s about time that we’re asked to start caring as well, to grow rather than shrink our hearts, to imagine a world outside ourselves.
End notes:
This is my day job, and jeez I don’t take that for granted. It can only stay my day job, though, if I regularly pass the hat and ask for some help. If you found this or any of my essays helpful, I’d love if you’d consider chipping in to help keep this space running. What helps? Becoming a paid subscriber, for sure (the perks ain’t bad, by the way), but also buying a book, donating to the Barnraisers Project or whatever works best for you.
Speaking of being pandered to effectively, you know when Twisters had me? When the cool hot meteorologists decamped for a motel parking lot and a few acoustic guitar troubadours were playing a cover of my favorite Richard and Linda Thompson song? Want to listen to “Wall of Death?” Of course you do. It’s about impending divorce and also carnival games.
As someone who grew up in a political family in the Midwest and who now drags my own kids to political events, I can echo this rant/plea to my party and an always clueless and condescending pundit class when they try to engage “my people.” But also, I think this take maybe misses a lot of the real, justifiable and existential fear that so many have felt trying to face down the current right wing menace. Women are literally dying because of what white men’s hatred of us has wrought. We’re correct to be scared. People of color are correct to be scared. Or at least really, really wary and careful. And do the white men on the progressive side of politics have our backs? Maybe? Sort of? Probably not? We do infantilize white men and give them a pass on WAY too much and that’s good for no one. But also, trust is earned. There’s a reason women and so many other groups in the larger progressive movement have learned to tiptoe around white men. Because the consequences of not getting that balancing act right can kill us. It has and it continues to. So we sort of treat men like children, but the kind that will suddenly lash out and make us bleed and hurt if we push too far. So not really children at all. And I don’t think it’s the job of Kamala Harris or even the institutional Democratic Party (unless you’re talking specifically to the white dudes who still expect to run everything while women and communities of color to do all the hard work) to fix that. Fix yourselves maybe? It’s the least you could do. And the rest of us would love the space to think and dream big without getting brutally slapped back every time we try.
Love a good four dimensional chess argument. This is a separate essay, but talking to Black organizers in low income neighborhoods in Milwaukee, while Harris helped rouse some energy that had died down in the last few cycles, there’s gonna be a long term process of rebuilding trust and building in hope for what Democrats actually deliver in working class communities of color. That’s not a counterpoint, but it’s a refrain I’ve heard a fair bit these past few years.
Re: brilliant political messaging, I absolutely laughed out loud at your last sentence there.