It is a common trope that liberals have disproportionate cultural power. This is manifest in a number of ways. Liberals’ sensibilities shape cultural production in Hollywood, on television and in the entertainment world more broadly. Liberals’ and progressives’ beliefs about diversity, equity and inclusion, despite not being very popular, have become the default language of corporate America in recent years and, for much longer, on college campuses. The endless discussion about “cancel culture” reflects the basic assumption that liberal/progressive language norms dominate and constrain what can and can’t be safely expressed on sensitive and controversial topics in much of the United States.
There is plenty of truth in that trope, though I’ve commented before on what’s missing from the above account, including a lack of a sense of proper proportion about the nature and sources of political power in the United States. But I was recently reminded anew about how much our elite commentariat regards as a truism the idea that, outside of churches, there are no meaningful levers of cultural influence to be wielded if you attend a non elite university or live in small town/rural America.
The reminder came in the form of an episode of Yascha Mounk’s Persuasion podcast, which featured the author Richard Reeves (which I found thanks to the NC State Poli Sci Professor Steve Greene’s great Fully Myelinated blog). The part of the conversation that interests us here was a discussion of Reeves’ 2017 book, the Dream Hoarders, about how America’s most affluent twenty percent - highly educated professionals, concentrated in cities - have helped rig the game to benefit themselves and their children, at the expense of everyone else. Many of these twenty-percenters are themselves liberal, but their professed fealty to equity ultimately takes a backseat to their self-interest in leveraging housing markets and educational opportunities to perpetuate their own advantages, ultimately to the detriment of the less well off. Reeves did concede, at one point, that there were twenty percenters in less densely populated parts of the country. Here’s how he described them to Mounk:
“In a small town, for example, there are going to be a bunch of people who are in the top 20% of the national income distribution - a lawyer, a guy who owns the second hand car dealership, the plumber who’s done very well for himself. They’re high income, but they’re not concentrated in parts of the country where everyone else around them is high income. And so their cultural power is much less (my emphasis).”
To be clear, Reeves’ conception of cultural power extends fundamentally to influence over public policy, life opportunities and politics broadly. We’re not just talking about who shapes tastes in art. And what popped into my head as soon as Reeves pooh-poohed the possibility of small-town cultural influence in this broader sense, was Deer Hunting with Jesus, Joe Bageant’s great 2007 book about the transformation of his old hometown of Winchester, Virginia. Bageant had left Winchester in the late 1960s to pursue a career as a writer. He returned three decades later to a depressed, hollowed out version of the vibrant place he’d grown up in. By the turn of the new century, Winchester had become something of a company town, dominated by a Rubber Maid factory that was the primary local employer. Addiction had already become a manifest problem. The decline of unions had left workers more vulnerable to their bosses, and their bosses had turned rabidly Republican.
Here’s Bageant on how much local elites dominate the life of places like Winchester, especially its most downtrodden areas, where Bageant spent his time:
Why are my people so impervious to information? Despite how it appears, our mamas did not drop us on our heads. The lives and intellectual cultures of these, the hardest-working people, are not just stunted by the smallness of the society into which they were born. They are purposefully held in bondage by a local network of moneyed families, bankers, developers, lawyers, and businesspeople in whose interests it is to have a cheap, unquestioning, and compliant labor force paying high rents and big medical bills….Places such as Winchester are, as they say, “investment paradise.” That means low taxes, few or no local regulations, no unions, and a chamber of commerce [welcoming] big contractors, realtors, lawyers. Everybody gets a slice, except the poorly educated nonunion mooks who will be employed at the local plant at discount rates.
At the same time, and more important, this business cartel controls most elected offices and municipal boards. It also dominates local development and the direction future employment will take.
Bageant expounds on the informational context all this is associated with (it’s 2007, so we’re not yet talking about ‘disinformation,’ but FOX is there, of course, and you can see where all the new innovations in conspiratorial thinking would be incubated):
The working class has no time to listen to anything but Rush Limbaugh, Gordon Liddy, Michael Reagan and other right-wing talk jocks at work. This is their main source of knowledge about anything political. Most don’t subscribe to a newspaper, and if they do find time to watch TV news, listen to Fox.
In Winchester and other towns, the Republicans’ everyday lives are woven into the fabric of the community in a way that the everyday lives of the left have not been since the Great Depression and social justice movements of the 60s. Despite the class system, many rich Republicans still meet the small business and working class on their own turf, and working-class people encounter then at churches, fund-raisers, local small businesses, fraternal organizations like the Elks Club, and at the local bar where they hang out.
They often know these wealthy republicans from childhood, and greatly admire them, and hope to become wealthy like them some day, so they hang on their every word in case they say something useful. One of their wealthier friends who shows up at the bar is a landlord who spends a lot of her time at city hall fighting tenant’s rights and proper taxes. At the bar she badmouths progressive politics and anything related to the Democratic Party. No one questions her veracity – being wealthy is proof of God’s love. The Democrats in Winchester simply don’t interact at the grassroots level to spread another perspective on the world, nor do they have radio shows to counter the hate-talk right wing radio stations people listen to at work all day.
If this is not cultural power on steroids, I don’t know what is. Now, I can't *prove* that this happens all over America, but it is surely *very* commonplace. A 2018 book by the Columbia Professor Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Politics at Work: How Companies Turn their Workers into Lobbyists catalogues how workplaces become cites for intensive and often coercive political lobbying of employees, which adds to the picture Bageant has painted. From a review in The Guardian:
Hertel-Fernandez calls this phenomenon employee mobilization. And the examples continue: a company pressuring employees to give money to the corporate Pac and calling out workers who didn’t attend political events. Companies stuffing their employees’ paycheck envelopes with political messages. A curriculum for employers to educate their employees, including arguments that the “rich pay more than their fair share” and “taxation, regulation and legislation can all … make it more difficult for a business to make a profit [and] will, in the end, negatively affect you and me.”
Because of the inherent power imbalance between managers and workers, these practices look more like coercion than simple free speech. Hertel-Fernandez…reports that one-third of workers in one of his studies worried about retaliation if they didn’t follow corporate wishes. And unsurprisingly given their precarious financial situation, lower-income workers were more susceptible. When corporations monitor whether employees engage in political activities (and Hertel-Fernandez says that some do), employees are also more likely to respond to managers’ wishes.
Another interesting finding is that corporate managers think these practices are extremely useful. Managers ranked employee mobilization efforts as more effective for influencing policy than any other activity except lobbying – more than donating to candidates and more than buying political advertising.
We all, every one of us live in bubbles. Indeed, it’s silly to use the term without acknowledging their ubiquity. In another time and place, we’d just be calling them social networks. But it’s a premise of so much of our discourse that people in “flyover” country, whatever their beliefs and prejudices, come to them of their own accord, because of their own presumably sui generis ignorance, resentments, or whatever.
The idea, therefore, that they are subject to intense social and economic pressures in their communities and at work, and that the people applying that pressure themselves exert tremendous power falls outside of our understanding of America’s “culture wars.” And that omission - a meaningful attempt to understand the context in which people in right-wing bubbles live their lives (again, excepting churches, to some degree) - undermines our ability to understand American politics today. It dehumanizes the folks who live under such constraints, by assuming that they think what they do because, as Bageant said, their mamas must have just dropped them on their heads when they were infants. And it ignores the extraordinary power that elites like those of Bageant’s hometown actually possess. Indeed, one of those small town success stories Reeves mentions surely has greater influence over the lives and thinking of those around him than do the myriad run-of-the-mill, harried professionals in Park Slope, Brooklyn (among whom I count some of my closest friends).
To repeat, it’s not wrong to question and criticize how highly educated professionals in liberal urban enclaves pursue their self-interests in ways that might contradict their beliefs. Nor is it off-base to argue about how progressive norms and ideas have come to dominate important arenas of American life. But to *completely* ignore those small towns, where many millions of Americans still live, and to dismiss with a hand wave the very idea that *their* elites might have the means, opportunity and motive to bend the world to *their* preferred vision of it, results in a profoundly blinkered view of the complexity of our country’s political-cultural landscape.
This is frighteningly true. What do we do?