The Frontlines of Democracy - Part II: Exurbia Now with David Masciotra 53:01

Hey everyone, it's Reed.

Before we get started, this is a quick two-part miniseries on where the front lines of democracy really are in those rural and ex-urban areas. Those places you always see reporters go to and talk to people in diners. What's really driving the folks out there? In the ex-urbs, what's really going on in those places where those who once lived in cities or even suburbs have now fled? I hope you enjoy it. I hope you learn as much as I did by interviewing these folks.

And now, on with the show. Welcome back to The Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Reid Galen. Today, I'm joined by author, journalist, and political analyst, David Maciotro. David's written for numerous publications about politics, including The New Republic, Salon, Progressive, Washington Monthly, and Counterpunch. He's also written an array of books, including his newly released title, Exerbianel, The Battleground of American Democracy, which is available wherever fine books are sold.

Today, David is coming to us from an exurb himself just outside Chicago. I think I might be in one too, where he has watched the political and cultural transformation that has taken place over the years. David, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. We're looking forward to it. I want to start small and I want to move big in my first question. So I think we can all probably imagine what an exurb is and you lay it out very well.

Lots of four or eight lane roads, no sidewalks, mini-mart shopping malls everywhere, lots of chain stores.

sort of devoid of local character or culture and probably local characters as well. It's this sort of anonymous place where people have fled because, as you write, perhaps that's exactly what they're looking for. Yeah, that's a very good summary. So most people want to know the difference between a suburb and an exurb.

And the easiest way to differentiate is to talk about distance and density. So an exurb has greater distance from the metro area than a suburb, but less population density. And exurbia began to flourish about 20 years ago.

As the later stage of white flight and the later stage of a politics and culture of escapism, escapism from secular culture, escapism from progressive culture, escapism from paranoid delusions regarding big government and

previously excluded groups exercising the franchise and gaining more prominence and power. So it should come as no surprise to your audience and to anyone who might read the book that exurbia is now the staging and breeding ground for the radical right-wing insurgency that so threatens our democracy. It's where Donald Trump's electoral results in 2020 and 2016 were highest and

And it's where the most psychotic members of Congress, lovable characters like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan and Lauren Boebert, represent. Their districts are predominantly exurban. Right. And you mentioned white flight and...

So much of this I found, David, and I read a lot of books and I talk to a lot of authors who have done incredible work like you have on this is there is always the through line of race. I think culture is certainly there, too, but it appears to be and maybe they're one in the same in some regards. But it seems to be, you know, you lived.

in the city, right? My forebears lived in New York City. They lived in Brooklyn. Then they lived in New Hyde Park on Long Island. And then they lived in Livingston, New Jersey, right? All within probably 20 years, right? And so it's just, you know, you want some more space. You want the idea of safety. You want better schools. You know, to one excerpt that you discuss where parents will actually move into a much smaller condo or apartment just to be able to get their kids into the school systems.

So if you took it just from the, well, I want a bigger house and I want better schools, that in and of itself doesn't sound all that bad. I think there's a lot of escapism that's gone on for generations. But

Take us a little bit why the excerpts are the breeding grounds of the Marjorie Taylor Greene. It's not just because there's better schools there. Clearly, that would be antithetical or counterfactual to the idea that you'd produce a Marjorie Taylor Greene. Yeah, I'm glad you make that distinction because I myself enjoy living in a small town and

And there are many pleasurable aspects to it. And the book is full of stories that aren't only telegraphing this hellscape of a potential MAGA future, but I hope it's full of stories that offer some of the charm to readers of small-town living, some of the communal benefits of it. But what we've seen happen throughout the 20th century and now the 21st century in American life

is escapism manifesting into exclusion. So when the cities became more diverse, the cities became more progressive. In later years, when the cities became more secular, people who were opposed to those changes and opposed to any type of power-sharing arrangement fled to the suburbs, hence white flight. And

In the past 20 to 30 years, those same people or people with the same mentality have fled into exurbia. And I saw this happen where I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. So I grew up in a town called Lansing, Illinois. When I entered the public high school of Lansing, Illinois, my freshman class was something like 80 to 90% white. The freshman class when I graduated was only 50% white.

And I watched as a teenager, the for sale signs go up all over the neighborhood where I lived, all over the town itself. And many of those people moved over the border into Northwest Indiana. Now that tracks with some very fascinating and also disturbing research that I make sure to highlight in my book. For example,

What specialists who've looked at it have found is that the most predominant characteristic of people who participated in the January 6th insurrection

is living in a county where the non-white population is growing and where the black-white poverty gap is shrinking. We've also found that in those congressional districts, such as the ones belonging to Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, there is a distinct fear of

of growing Latino, Asian, and Black populations. So, so much of this manifests locally in the election of people like that, in the exclusionary measures of reducing budgets for public transit, making sure neighborhoods don't have sidewalks, but then it manifests nationally in a fight-or-flight instinct as applied to politics. Once flight is no longer possible,

These people start to fight the very mechanisms that achieved diversity and help us approach equality, namely constitutional democracy. And in doing so, they've created an autocratic personality cult surrounding Donald Trump.

And you note towards the end of the book, Steve Bannon, who I think is crazy and evil but not stupid, he is really the spigot from which so many of the things that you're talking about really flow. You see it with Moms for Liberty, you at the Insanity at school board meetings, with the Insanity at city council or county council meetings. And I think there were a couple of times in here that I highlighted Insanity.

She resigned. He resigned. Right. I mean, look, I live in a relatively small town, too, David, as you know, like, OK, yeah, national politics really matters. But there's nothing harder on a daily basis than local politics because you actually affect people's lives in a school board. You know how your kids getting educated, the librarian, what books are there, mayors and city councils to the potholes get fixed and.

The downstream effect of all of this is you're getting these really noxious and ugly messages from the top from someone like a Bannon that are reinforced with all of the radio and all of the Fox News and everything else, because so many of these folks have created themselves not only a geographic bubble, but an information bubble that goes along with it.

that now it's like, well, you know, David, you might be, you know, somebody who was on a planning commission or a water board or something and like city council's next for you. And you're like, you know what, to hell with it. Like, and so the best people also don't want to get involved because it's not worth the trouble. Yeah. One of the stories that our national media is neglecting, despite some of the good reporting that's gotten out there, is that by any stretch of the imagination, we live in an era of political terrorism.

The United States Army defines terrorism as the use or threat of violence to achieve a political objective. So when someone like Steve Bannon, as he often does, puts out his marching orders to his increasingly rabid followers, and they start issuing threats to library trustees and school board members and election workers, and those people resign, that, according to the United States Army—

so this isn't some radical left-wing delusion, is an act of terrorism and more to the point, a successful act of terrorism. So one of the points that I try to drive home in this book is the necessity to participate despite that threat at the local level.

When I go to the town council in my hometown, for example, one of the people who dominates those meetings is this far-right, strange character who wants to bring his father's

firearm into the meeting who thought that an environmental sustainability commission would mean that someone from the local government was going to control the amount of ground beef he can eat per week, whether or not it could turn on his gas stove. Right. Exactly. Exactly.

But that guy gets a lot of airplay at these meetings and he has a lot of influence because he participates. He not only votes, he goes to the meetings, he donates to political candidates, whereas it's often the case that young or youngish couples...

who are just starting families, and of course they have all kinds of responsibilities, neglect politics at the local level. So you have towns such as mine that consistently vote Democratic in national elections, but consistently go Republican at the local level.

And as the Bannon types are turning what used to be conservative politics, I don't use that word anymore, into a radically anti-democratic authoritarian form of hate-based politics, that goes from the top down and begins to pollute local communities in all kinds of ways, some of which you just mentioned. So I want to take...

Right.

Right. If you needed something, they would show up. But they're also Trump voters. So how do you separate the individual from the mindset or the the environment? Maybe that's tough. And that's kind of the vexing thing with which we all have to live is that we all know Trump supporters.

whose beliefs and often statements horrify us. And yet in their own individuated private lives, they behave with kindness and generosity to not only their families, but their neighbors and the people around them. I think that here we have to discuss not only the environment, but the informational ecosystem in which they live. Because

One thing that's happened in exurbia and parts of suburbia is the disappearance of local media. So there is very little or sometimes nothing giving a local on-the-ground perspective that might add some clarity and create some balance with the politics of paranoia and prejudice that thrive on Fox News, on Breitbart.

on the right-wing podcast sphere. So these people who are otherwise kind and friendly and hospitable and they make great companions for drinking beers and watching football or basketball games,

are injecting this poison into their veins on a daily basis. And it ends up brainwashing them to fear immigrants, to fear liberal women, to fear secular people, to fear LGBTQ people. And it's very hard to reason with them. So it's almost as if psychosis is contagious.

And Fox News and the right-wing media world are spreading that contagion throughout exurbia, throughout suburbia, and sometimes even throughout urban areas. Well, and the part of this too is that you're talking about injecting something into a vein. There's a level of, I'll call it tolerance for lack of a better way to put it. And I'm sure there's a psychologist or psychiatrist who studied this more than I have. And so the crazier has to go further and further into insanity because-

I mean, think about it. Do we hear about critical race theory anymore? No, because it ran its course and then they had to come up with some new insanity, right? Like people like you could bring up critical race theory, get people like, oh, didn't we deal with that already? Because it just sort of moves on. And that's the other part about this information ecosystem, as you call it, which is it is willing, ready and able to provide the next thing, the next outrage. Let me talk about the fear, though, because if you've moved to the excerpts,

intentionally. And I want you to answer this on the back end. Where is the line between the exurbs and rural? And where's the line between suburban and exurban? But, you know, you talked about these people are armed up significantly, right? You go through the fact that, you know, before 9-11, before the assault weapons ban expired, right? You know, as you even said, like gun companies are like assault rifles aren't our thing, right? The AR-15 is not our thing. It's not. You want to pass it fine. Like we don't sell them anyway.

Or not that many of them anyway. Now it's like this symbol. And you even say like sand, you know, that sandy color, you know, because we had two wars and, you know, desert environs. And now there's like, what, 20,000 of them, some outrageous amount.

out but you know you see the pictures and again I'm trying to thread the needle David between the reality and the caricature of the guy at the subway sandwich shop with like two nine millimeters on his thighs a small pistol in the small of his back and like an AR-15 slung over his shoulder I always sort of think to myself like you're making quite the statement but also if somebody just wanted to sort of push you over you're carrying about 40 pounds of gear you wouldn't be able to stand up anyway well you

You mentioned kind of the race to the bottom of insanity with right-wing media. Just today, I saw Glenn Beck praising Alex Jones on his program. So Alex Jones has gone from a pariah, even in the right-wing media world, to now something of a folk hero. And that speaks to that level of tolerance that you mentioned. And one reason why that becomes so dangerous in exurbia is that exurbanites are...

more or less pretty isolated. So if you have Alex Jones or Tucker Carlson telling you that your enemy and the source of all of your problems is a Latino migrant or a gay or transgender teenager, chances are in exurbia you haven't met anyone that resembles that profile.

So it's much easier for you to believe that these people do constitute a threat. This is Robert Putnam's bowling alone enhanced to a very politically volatile and flammable degree.

Now, you ask about gun violence and the proliferation of guns in Exurbia. First of all, what we find, the research shows that people fear and despise immigrants more who live in counties without any immigrants. So they've hallucinated something into existence with the aid of right-wing media that doesn't exist. And what researchers have found is that

The fetishization of firearms, the people who collect them and view them as part of their personal identity, not the concerned father who keeps a pistol tucked away in a drawer or the avid outdoorsman, but the guy who buys the AR-15, has an apocalyptic vision of the world, and it starts out very small and intimate. Someone's going to break into my home and murder my family.

And then it gets larger and larger and larger. So now you see yourself as an agent of defense against the encroachment upon your freedom and the violation of the American way of life.

by increasingly hostile and anti-American forces. And what's very interesting is that it becomes very warlike in mindset and action. So one thing that I found in researching for Exurbia now is that gun industry insiders would refer to their marketing targets as couch commandos.

that these are guys who sit on the couch, but they want to feel like commandos. They wanted to feel as if they were part of SEAL Team 6. But ultimately, they're not.

but owning the firearm allows them to feel that they are, and then they're in this perpetual war-like mentality, and that endangers people at schools, at grocery stores, at nightclubs, and it also creates a pervasive politics of menace because people feel as if

they might suffer some physical consequence for exercising their First Amendment rights. And we see that with the Proud Boys and various other organized hate groups that the Republican Party is tacitly encouraging. Support for the Lincoln Project podcast comes from Odoo. If you feel like you're wasting time and money with your current business software or just want to know what you could be missing, then you need to join the millions of other users who've switched to Odoo.

Odoo is the affordable, all-in-one management software with a library of fully integrated business applications that help you get more done in less time for a fraction of the price. To learn more, visit odoo.com slash Lincoln. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash Lincoln. Odoo. Modern management made simple. I was thinking about, as you were talking about what I'm going to call like the road rage, like the

perpetual road rage, right? I was thinking about if you ever read The Godfather, the novel that Mario Puzo wrote that the movie was based on. And there's a section, a passage about Luca Brazzi, who's, you know, Vito's hitman. And that Luca was one of those guys who like, he watched other people. He wasn't one of the guys who, you know, when there was a car accident, he got out and raged, right? He was much slower. He was much more methodical. He watched, he watched, he watched.

But he knew those people and he always knew those were the ones who were going to end up dead first because they just let that rage sort of split open. But now, OK, so you have a couch commando who's heavily armed, you know, being, you know, his adrenal gland is just being poked all day long. He drives a big truck with a Punisher sticker on it or he hangs a black flag, right? The no quarter flag, which I had read before, you know, that you mentioned in your book. I mean, so where do you take all this pent up anger and frustrations?

Yeah, that's the real source of concern. And there are a couple of volatile ingredients mixing in this toxic stew. One is individualism on steroids.

So you mentioned the big trucks. I mean, this is, if you drive around here, you just constantly see these heavy duty, massive pickup trucks, you know, that turns going to the dentist office into a potential, you know, demolition Derby or monster truck show. And everybody wants to back in. They all want to back into parking spots. Right. And many of them have, as you mentioned, you know, bizarre extreme bumper stickers. Well,

Well, what researchers find is, to no one's surprise, these trucks are very dangerous. And you're likelier to die in a collision with one of these trucks than any other kind of vehicle. But they've become the most popular vehicle in the United States of America, just as the AR-15 is now the most popular firearm in the United States of America. So it's this steady violation of the social compact and of some social cohesion and concern for the public good.

in the name of serving some individual whim, either a whim of toughness or a whim of posing as a heroic warrior against the deep state. But to your question, when you have a moment of political confrontation, that confrontation could much more easily turn violent. I tell a story in the beginning of Exurbia Now,

Crown Point, Indiana. Very charming town. I've had a lot of great times in Crown Point, Indiana. Up until recently, they had a bar with a Bob Seger theme called the Silver Bullet, which was one of my favorites. But when there was a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Crown Point, Indiana, just a peaceful march around the courthouse square, actually organized by high school and college students. So some of the principal participants in it were minors.

They found themselves flanked the perimeter of the march by intimidating-looking white guys with Osama bin Laden beards holding assault rifles. Now, luckily, nothing happened. The police were there. They maintained civility. At an event in Idaho, a Turning Point USA event, some lunatic asked Charlie Kirk,

When can we start using our guns? When can we start killing these people? Because they keep stealing elections. They keep invading our schools. They're poisoning our children. You know, the whole paranoia politics 101. Kirk says, don't do that. He doesn't say, don't do that because killing people is wrong. Like, that would be woke. He says, don't do that because it would play into their hands. So the question you're asking is,

is very frightening because what happens when leaders such as Kirk change their mind and they don't outwardly disapprove of violence? We've already seen the consequence of that on January 6th. We already saw the consequence of that in the attempt to abduct and assassinate Governor Gretchen Whitmer. And we're seeing this dangerous culture form around the right wing celebrating the likes of Kyle Rittenhouse.

That's creating a potential army of insurgents in exurbia among couch commandos who are armed to the teeth and are just waiting on their orders from someone like Charlie Kirk, Steve Bannon, or most especially Donald Trump. You know, I want to go back to something you said, because I think it gives a sense of how far everything has moved. You talk about a bunch of young people marching peacefully down the street in Crown Point

in support of Black Lives Matter, there are armed men forming a cordon. And you said, quote, everything stays civil. But think about, David, how far we've fallen from the definition of the word civil, where because they didn't shoot somebody, right, it was a civil demonstration. That's a great point. And I should edit myself. It wasn't entirely civil because, of course, there were ugly words exchanged. There was the shouting of racial slurs.

But yes, that's, as you know, that's something that would have been unimaginable just, you know, 20 years ago. But it's having a very clear effect because it may risk driving down political participation. I write about one violent, Proud Boy-led violent protest of a drag queen story hour in a small excerpt in Ohio.

And there were some LGBTQ organizations planning a counter-protest. Well, the leadership of those organizations said, stay home because the likelihood of violence is too high. And all of this is happening intentionally, and all of it is happening with the knowledge and often the approval and encouragement of Republican Party leadership.

There are several members of the Proud Boys, to name one example, on the Republican Party Committee in Miami-Dade, the most populous county of Florida.

Several Republican members of Congress have enlisted Oath Keepers and Three Percenters as personal private security. A lot of churches in the South now have those same guys. Yeah, exactly. So this has led many national security experts. And again, these aren't people who typically have a Marxist background to declare that the United States has now entered into the category of states

that may experience a reduction in its democracy due to political violence. Let me ask about this, because you talk about, you know, the guys dressed up, you know, with the beards and the guns.

you brought up something I had read about this previous, I hadn't thought about it in a long time. And it was Ray Oldenburg's idea of the quote, third place, someplace that isn't home and isn't work and quote, enables people to relax in public, enjoy the camaraderie of familiar faces and form new friendships. The third place is a home away from home with a playful mood and unspoken ethics of equal acceptance. For me as a kid,

In Northern Virginia, right? Falls Church, McLean, Northern Virginia, right outside Washington, D.C. That place for me was McLean Little League, right? That's where I couldn't tell you, David, where most of the kids that I ran around with lived. I'd probably never been to their homes. Almost all of them were better ballplayers than I was.

But that was a place of profound joy for me. Right. That was a place that it wasn't home. It wasn't school. But you could go whether you had a game or two or you didn't. Right. You knew that the guys you like to run around, the buddies you want to run around with who, again, maybe you didn't go to school with were going to be there. And I feel like you mentioned one of the little coffee houses where it's quite a diverse crowd, you know, and everybody's doing their thing.

But I feel like, you know, maybe it was a bowling alley in the old days. Church, right? But not the evangelical church that we're seeing now, but church. And I think you noted that the most important time at church was before and after the service, right? Which I certainly understand at the Methodist church that we used to go to in California. You know, and so many of those places either A, don't exist, or B, have become so hyper politicized in themselves that there's really no break from it.

Yeah. And de Tocqueville talked about the necessity of voluntary associations. And there is so much research on the importance of social capital in the maintenance of a healthy community and a healthy democracy. I grew up just like you did. I grew up in a small town. I was part of the Park District Basketball League. And

And I'm very careful to differentiate between the type of church in which I was born and raised, a small corner Lutheran church, and the mega churches that essentially now act as citadels of Christian nationalism. I gained so much sustenance and support and love and charity and community from the church in which I was born and raised, the town in which I was born and raised.

But what we've seen in the United States over the past couple of decades, and this is a much broader problem and therefore a much harder one to solve, is a collapse of communal institutions, a collapse of community participation. In fact, according to one poll, only 27% of Americans now say becoming active and involved in your community is important. That's down from 43% just 10 or 15 years ago.

And also, so a collapse in communal institutions, a collapse in community involvement, and also a collapse in what you're calling these third places. The neighborhood bar is an endangered species, even in large cities like Chicago and Buffalo and Philadelphia. And coffee shops, like the one that I describe in the book, Sip Coffee Shop in Highland, Indiana, those are becoming rarer and rarer.

As corporate consolidation and corporate chains come to dominate the commercial landscape, so does digital communication and smartphone addiction come to dominate the communicative landscape.

And people not going to work even. So we don't even have a second place in many cases, right? Yeah, very good point. So you have more and more people feeling isolated and living lives of isolation. And what social science consistently finds is when people are suffering from social isolation,

They are easy marks for the politics of extremism. And it's not necessarily just right wing extremism. That happens to be our greatest threat right now. But all kinds of extremism can take hold in the isolated mind. Well, and the algorithms, right, as Kara Swisher, who I had on the show a couple of weeks ago, said, enragement equals engagement. Right. So whatever your recipe for anger is, the algorithm, whatever it is, is happy to serve it up to you.

Yeah, I write about when I was a columnist for the Herald News in Joliet, Illinois, a mid-sized city. And I'd write this weekly column. I got paid 20 bucks a week. And I was actually the big shot because I later found out all the other columnists were making 10 bucks a week. And I would have people talk to me about the column that I wrote in the neighborhood bar that I frequented.

in the grocery store. One time I was waiting in line at a Starbucks and somebody said, hey, are you the one who writes for the Herald News? And many of the people who had discussion with me disagreed with what I wrote. But we were all part of a shared community. We were all part of the shared informational ecosystem. And we all felt like we had a stake in something together. And that's how democracy thrives. And that's how a healthy political culture develops.

But when our entire lives are on machines by ourselves and perhaps in an exurban town without a local newspaper, without a third place neighborhood bar or coffee shop, and you have this lunatic like Steve Bannon or Tucker Carlson convincing you that Latino people are out to get you and your kids or gay people are out to get you or your kids or

Black Lives Matter is really an anti-white hate movement, and there's a great replacement where those frightening Jews are organizing against you. It's very easy, again, to fall into extremism, perhaps be persuaded into acts of violence and militancy, and it puts our entire political culture on a tinderbox.

So we moved to a small town about nine years ago. And one of the first people we met here said, if you're going to move here, be part of the community, right?

Go out, find a way to get involved, meet people, do stuff. He wasn't suggesting running for office, although a lot of people we know are office holders of one sort or another or serve on the boards of nonprofits or the local radio station, whatever it might be. But what I think you see too, and this goes a little bit towards the end of the book too, is that

There are the excerpts of people who are fleeing because they don't like something. And then there's the excerpts like I live in where people are fleeing because they just don't want to be where they are anymore. Right. Like, you know, they're happy to come to a mountain town or where we used to live, a beach town. But they have no interest whatsoever in doing anything other than occupying space, for lack of a better word. Look, and it's every American's God given right to do as much or as little as they want to.

But it seems like, okay, well, I live here now. And here's the other part, too, is I live here now. I can do whatever I want because, quote unquote, I'm a local, but I have no responsibility or accountability to be a good citizen or to be a good community member.

Yeah. And the problem with that is we are suffocating our democracy through inaction and through passivity because the people who are not passive, the people who are not inactive are the moms for liberty types. And the heroes of the book, Exurbia Now, are people like Robert Cotton. So I write about

A lovely excerpt of Valparaiso, Indiana. I obtained my master's degree from Valparaiso University. The Cottons were the first black family to move to Valparaiso. And when they did so, Valparaiso was a sundown town.

I'm sure most of your audience is familiar with that term, but it's a town where after the sun goes down, if you're black, you're going to be arrested or beat or at a minimum threatened until you leave town. So that was the environment in which the Cottons moved. And now Robert Cotton, he was just a little boy when that family moved to Valparaiso, was on the city council.

So he's part of the movement to transform that town into something much more hospitable and something much more conducive to joy and healthy and happy living for people who want to get involved or people who don't want to get involved.

So one of the takeaways from the book that I hope people consider is the need for local involvement. We have a tendency to reduce the political discussion to whatever is happening nationally. But as we've learned in the past couple of years, especially with all of these book bans happening at the local level, what happens locally is

especially if it's happening with coordination from national right-wingers, will eventually enlarge into something quite frightening and quite damaging at the state and national level.

So I don't know how to talk people into getting involved if they're just committed to staying out of politics. But that old expression rings true. You know, you may not care about politics, but politics cares about you. And we've had dozens of examples of that playing out over the past few years. Well, and you also talk about and you reference one of my all-time favorite songs by the band, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, which is the sort of just loss of everything, right?

And you note that Robbie Roberts writes it. He'd leave on helm, sings it. He's a Southerner. But Joan Baez picks it up too, right? It's not a normal thing. I thought of Jason Isbell's and the drive-by truckers, their song outfit about a guy talking to his son, you know, look,

I thought I was going to go do this. I thought I was going to go do this. Now I'm painting for my old man again. Right. And so there is a loss of status, too, that, you know, you talk about Gary, Indiana being a steel town. So many of these Midwestern cities I mentioned on the last episode, the town I was born in, Marietta, Ohio, has consistently had a population of 13000 people, you know, for the last hundred years. But it's also the kind of town that was a coal town, right, had a power plant.

But it also now hands out naloxone over the counter, you know, at the pharmacy because they have so many potential overdoses. So I don't want us in the conversation necessarily on a down note, but I also do want to make sure that we explore a little bit, David, the idea that the economic hollowing out has very much led to a political and in many ways a personal hollowing out of people's lives, their opinion of themselves, their opinion of their place and their opinion of the country.

Part of what I do with Exurbia now is do a big pushback against people, especially people on the left, who try to reduce MAGA to class and act as if the typical Trump supporter is the reincarnation of Tom Joad. And that is wrong for so many reasons, one of which is a misperception regarding working class values.

The mainstream media had the asinine idea to define working class as someone without a college degree. So we live in this weird world where an elementary school teacher making 33 grand a year is not working class, but a construction crew foreman working or supervisor working or making 90 grand a year is. But I also, I don't want to dismiss the economics because it's so important.

And there was an entire culture of community that surrounded, for example, these manufacturing towns. People, mostly men, who worked in industry.

And surrounding the mill or surrounding the quarry, towns would spring up and real communities would exist there. But at first it happened to farmers. So family farmers started going out of business. Then the factory started to automate and offshore. And then small businesses started to close and shutter and declare bankruptcy. So now you have these towns across the United States and especially the Midwest where I live.

that are just hollow shells of communities that once existed. And it's created a feeling of loss,

It's led to a dangerous form of nostalgia. Nostalgia is always dangerous when injected into politics. And now we're in a nostalgia trap, nostalgia for the smokestacks, make America great again. But it's also created what a Polish sociologist, who I refer to in the book, refers to as liquid modernity.

We went from cultures of solidity in which we had solid connections. We understood how people earned their living. We understood communal networks and institutions, and our families felt connected to each other. And growing up, I could walk to the nearby record store. I knew the owner. I could walk to a nearby store.

ice cream parlor. I went to school with the daughter of the owners. And now we live in this liquid modernity in which nothing really feels real, and therefore nothing feels tangible, and therefore nothing feels dependable. So it allows people to turn against their society and resort to forms of behavior that will ironically accelerate

their society's downfall. And one thing I do want to bring up because it just happened to me yesterday, I was talking with a woman, fairly liberal person, and I got asked the question that you bring up in the book, why are these people voting against their economic interests? And I'm like, you have to understand that's not how they see the world, right? This is not a rational discussion. You are asking people to your point. If you're a foreman making 90 grand,

then your economic interest might be fine, right? That's not to say everybody's are, right? But if you're an ex-urban retiree with a pretty healthy 401k or an IRA, economics isn't your issue.

And so the idea of, well, you know, they're voting against their own interests, I think, you know, eludes the same kind of thing you talk about, which is like every four years we go to the diner in Iowa or we go to the diner in New Hampshire and like a sociological experiment. Why do you support Donald Trump? He's strong. He's for America. He's going to bring us back. None of those things are economics. Maybe there's economic sprinkled in there, but it's by accident or by coincidence.

And so I think that's the other part, too, is understanding. And David, just understand, like, the reason I asked my earlier question is because I think there is also another trap, to use your word, of impugning and by definition just looking down on someone, A, that is different from you, which is what we're talking about the danger is here, but two, that

disagree with your worldview and all that. Now, I do believe that the loss of quote unquote polite society or civil society has been a massive thing. And I do, I lay a lot of that at the foot of Trump, which is he allowed everybody to be their worst selves and to be as big an asshole as they wanted to be. That doesn't mean you have to take him up on it either. Yeah. I have a friend, a good friend. His name's Chris. He's probably going to watch this. So I'll send him a shout out. But he said that Trump's entire appeal is just

allowing people to behave like assholes. So you're speaking his language when you say that. But yeah, the class issue is so complex and much more nuanced than people presented. And first of all, we have to be suspicious when people say that they're voting for Trump, for example, because they want a strong economy.

I write about how none of the people that I witnessed engage in white flight and leave

the town that they claim to love because some blacks and Latinos were moving next door said so because they didn't like black people or they didn't like Latino people. They said they were worried about property values. They were worried about the real estate market. So sometimes economics acts as a cover for something much darker and much more insidious. Right. It goes back to the whole Lee Atwater thing, right? First, you know, in the 50s, we could say inward, inward, inward. Then in the 60s, we couldn't say that anymore.

Yeah. And I use that quote in my book to illustrate that point. Exactly. But to your point about what is the economic interest, well, here again is why it was such a critical error to act as if working class economics define MAGA. The people who did that, especially the leftists,

They're looking for some rational explanation, you know, because they're trying to engage with it rationally. So why would someone support for the office of Lincoln and Kennedy, a bigot who wandered out of a television studio after declaring bankruptcy multiple times? Oh, it must be because NAFTA didn't go as well as expected.

No, economics is in the background here, but what the research indicates and what living in a town like this would demonstrate is the main drivers are cultural and surrounding identity. And politics is downstream of both of those things. Yes, and they perceive their interest...

As maintaining cultural domination and authority, if they are a white Christian conservative American, one of Sarah Palin's real Americans, and when they turn on the television and they see.

from 2008 to 2016, a black president, or they see the diversification of America, majority minority cities, they feel that their interests are under threat. Right. And to your point, the research you were referencing earlier in the show, Bob Pape from the University of Chicago did so much incredible work. And I've mentioned him before is that a lot of the people that stormed the Capitol on January 6th, these were not guys who drug themselves out of the hollow of Eastern Kentucky.

These were guys, mostly guys, but some women who had means to get there. Some of them were wearing thousands of dollars worth of gear. Many of them were quote unquote professionals, as we were talking about. Right. What's the definition of that? Some were working class. Some weren't. Some were cops. Some were for military. Some were teachers. Some were engineers. It sort of cut across the spectrum. And I think proves your point that it wasn't economics, but culture.

That drove those people to the Capitol that day. And research shows that the median household income in exurbia, again, where Trump's support is highest.

is significantly higher than median household more broadly across the United States. So something beyond economics is happening there. Also, let's just exercise a little bit of common sense and logic. I mean, I know those are probably going out of style now. Come on, David. But Trump ran for president in 2016, declaring that the American dream is dead.

And he ran for reelection in 2020. And this is a verbatim quote claiming that he created the greatest economy in the history of money. So I don't think that he revolutionized the entire country in four years. In fact, despite all of his boasting, many of the economic indicators went the wrong way during his presidency. So the fact that that didn't cost him anything

Crucial support, those different economic assessments tells us that something far beyond economics is going on here. It's cultural. And most of his voters believed him the first time and then believed him the second time. In fact, millions more did.

Yeah, because that's how cults work and that's how paranoid politics work. Well, and to your point, let me just close on this note about the idea of trying to find a rational reason for any of this. If a man who is hundreds of millions of dollars in the hole, despite whatever stock thing he pulled off, right, is standing there selling you a Bible, a book he has never read.

for 60 and he will sell many of them i think it's probably time for us to say there's not a real rationality going on here because the same person is going to buy the bibles the same person who bought the tennis shoes who bought the baseball cards who bought the nfts which is literally nothing it's just air right who bought trump steaks or trump water whatever the case might be so like

Take yourself out of the analytical, you know, get your humanities working a little bit more. Right. And trying to understand the nature of this, which is, again, to your point, David, there's all nature of things, but it really ultimately comes down to culture and place in a time of great dynamic change that is likely only to accelerate.

not slow down because, and not to be too trite here, but like time only runs in one direction, no matter what anybody thinks. All right, David, before we let you go, where can everybody find your work and where can we find you online?

Yeah, so the book is Exurbia Now, The Battleground of American Democracy. You get that wherever you prefer to buy books. I'm at davidmasiotra.com, and I write regularly for Salon, The Washington Monthly, various other websites. You can also find me on Instagram if social media is your thing. But yeah, I'm a little bit all over the place. I'm a promiscuous writer.

Well, amen to that. And aren't we all? And let me just say before anything else, you know, David, I think that the thing that your book provided, and it's really easy to pack a book with

and figures and survey data and everything else is, I think that your ability to weave your own story and the story of your region, you know, that Southern Illinois, Northwestern Indiana, Kentuckiana, as I think you called it with John Mellencamp, makes it, I think, it really brings it to life, if that makes sense. And I think that does a great service to the reader because otherwise, you know, it could be, it would be too hard to understand. ♪

exactly what it is you're talking about without those sort of humanizing points you put on it. So I thought that was really great. That was my number one goal with the book. So I really appreciate you saying that. Absolutely. As always, gang, you can find me on Twitter and TikTok as long as either of those things are still available at Reed Galen on Instagram and threads at Reed underscore Galen underscore LP and over at Substack at the home front. I hope you will sign up. David Maciotra, thank you for coming. Thank you. And everybody else, we'll see you next time.

Thanks again to everyone for listening. Be sure to follow and subscribe to The Lincoln Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, or however you listen. Don't forget to leave a five-star review. To connect with us, follow us on Twitter, at Project Lincoln. And for more information on our movement, to join our mailing list, subscribe to our newsletter, or make a contribution to our efforts, visit lincolnproject.us.

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