The Strange Career of Middle America

• In Event: Exploring Democratic Mobilizations Against Right-Wing Populism: Tapping, Historical, Contemporary and Global Reservoirs of Opposition Mini-Conference: Racializing Populist Subjectivity

Abstract

In this paper I trace the development of a political notion, Middle America, and its impact on U.S. politics over the last half century. At once a rhetorical strategy and electoral demographic, Middle America draws on a populist depiction of white working and middle-class Americans as an aggrieved majority that is beleagured by elites above and dependents below. As the black freedom, feminist and anti-war movements pressed against the New Deal political order, a right-wing populist politics emerged claimed to speak on behalf of law-abiding, tax-paying middle. Drawing from elements on both the right and left in U.S. politics, it has been a crucial trope ever since. At its inception, Middle America was claimed as a broad majoritarian, even centrist political identity. Today, as both the white majority and the middle class are in long term decline, Middle America has come to represent a hard right, often openly racist authoritarianism.
While Middle America is generally associated with right-wing appeals, the idea of “middleness” is deeply imbedded in small ‘r’ republican traditions since the Jacksonian era, and with white racial identity more generally. The discursive link between whiteness and independence can be traced to over time in contrast to those seen as parasitic on the body politic, marking off the white (particularly male) citizen as the bearer of republican virtue.
Middle America is a decidely populist notion, evincing the contradictions of that term. Scholars alternately depict populism as intolerant, atavistic, and provincial; or as participatory, democratic and aimed at corporate power. Across its half-century long career Middle America has encompassed both. And under conditions of percieved powerlessness in a society that is at once dramatically economically stratified and undergoing racially demographic transformation in terms of racial demographics, a democratic wish is thus yoked to racism and xenophobia for many white Americans. I follow the trajectory of Middle America – as a populist formation in and outside the party system - from its origins as a political response to the black freedom and feminist movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s through its re-emergence as a nativist and anti-trade insurrection in Pat Buchanan’s campaigns in the 1990s to its critical role in the election of Donald Trump in 2016. I demonstrate the ways in which Middle America as a distorted vision of populist egalitarianism has now pushed US politics toward an increasingly authoritarian and racially divided future.

Author

• Joseph E. Lowndes, University of Oregon