Rise of the Right in the U.S. Heartland: a Bibliographic Essay
Since I’ve only made brief visits to other parts of the country, this is my quest to understand the rise of right-wing reactionaries in the hinterlands, and why they are sympathetic to white nationalism and have electorally supported Donald Trump.
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Triumph of the Swill
Friday’s event was my first Trump rally in a sporting arena, which, I soon learned, is where he makes the most sense. The scene outside Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum set the tone for the evening’s entertainment; while Democrats may dispute Trump’s claims to have created some 7 million jobs as president, nobody can deny that he’s now providing employment for the dozen or so merchants who trail his events selling bootleg merchandise, including some of the only Black men to be found outside the average Trump rally. The latest designs include: “Support Diversity” alongside a row of different sized bullets; a heavily-armed Smoky Bear saying “Only You Can Prevent Socialism”; Trump clutching cats alongside the message “Make Pets Safe Again” in reference to the campaign’s anti-Haitian blood libel; an austere looking Trump standing with open arms outside the White House beneath the bolded pink announcement “Daddy’s Home”; a heavily stylized Western illustration of Trump and Vance in cowboy hats labeled “The Outlaw and the Hillbilly”; and a rendition of Kamala Harris’s face with a line through it, as part of the message “Say No to the Hoe.” There are also the ubiquitous Trump hats, which more attendees than not showed up already wearing, creating a striking visual effect that’s also a bit disconcerting, especially when viewed from the center of it.
Iowa Bluffs
This piece was originally published on October 4, 2023 and is one of a series of Trump-related articles we’re republishing.
Crossing the Mississippi River from Illinois into Iowa by car is an almost effortless glide, eliding entirely the forceful pull of the Great River and the centuries of violence greater still that harnessed its bucking current into an engine of commerce unsuitable for fishing, swimming, or drinking. It’s difficult to imagine that this momentary glimpse of blue in my peripheral vision was once the artery from which fortunes gushed or trickled, the playground where the nineteenth century’s Saint Hucks found death and adventure, and the vanishing horizon for the freedom of enslaved people sent ever-southward as the human traffic on which this nation’s wealth was built drew the entire southern social order into its own death spiral.
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Middle Class War: A Visit to Staten Island’s Autonomous Zone
This piece was originally published on December 20, 2020 and is one of a series of Trump-related articles we’re republishing.
Transmission rates are on the rise again in New York City. Hospital beds are filling, the temperature is dropping, and most have accepted a renewed lockdown to be a foregone conclusion.
But the talk of the town has been a humble pub on Staten Island’s East Shore pushing against the trend. As the transmission rate in the vicinity pushed it into the “orange zone,” Mac’s Public House declared last month it would not abide by a state-mandated closure but instead stay open with a “suggested donation” model intended to skirt business regulations.
“The Last Stand of Freedom in America”
This piece was originally published on December 9, 2020 and is one of a series of Trump-related articles we’re republishing.
“How many of you have an easy life?” the speaker asked the audience. To his dismay a handful of people raised their hands. “Well, okay, I guess some of you have it good, but many of you clearly don’t.” His voice could be barely heard and the audience shouted at him to speak into the microphone. They were gathered to express their defiance at the voter fraud that cost Donald Trump the 2020 election.
Thankful for President Trump: Thanksgiving with Stop the Steal
This piece was originally published on November 29, 2020 and is one of a series of Trump-related articles we’re republishing.
On Thanksgiving morning supporters of President Trump’s doomed reelection effort descended on the Loop neighborhood of Chicago to raise the battle cry “Stop the Steal!” The “steal” in this tortured locution is the purported Democratic Party theft of the November presidential election, chronicled in a convoluted conspiracy theory that one conservative federal judge recently compared to “Frankenstein’s Monster,” as it is “haphazardly stitched together.”
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From the Archives
The Black and White of It
One of my neighbors living three buildings down had his leg amputated several months ago. At first, the doctors thought it was a Brown Recluse spider bite but later figured out it was a circulation problem. Much of the lower leg turned black before the VA amputated it in Birmingham. I kept wondering when they …
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“I don’t think Tyson’s gives two shits about their workers.”
It was the workers and their kids who shut down Tyson’s Waterloo, Iowa meatpacking plant on April 22, 2020. Not the governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, who seemed to show more concern for the hogs who weren’t being slaughtered than for the thousands of workers who were being daily exposed to COVID-19 by showing up …
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