Midwestern Politico

I was chatting with my wife the other night, about pop culture and politics and TikToks and the baby growing inside of her and the dog and whatever else happened that day (marriages, especially good marriages, involve a lot of talking). We were talking about whatever political topic was dominating the news that day – or whatever hellscape absurdity passes for politics anymore – we started talking about the Obama-era liberal punditry who are still out there waving their Hope flags and talking about civility. (If you must know, it was specifically the Pod Save America guys. If ever a group of people needed a splash of cold water in the face, it’s them). Both of us agreed. We were (and are) SO tired of establishment liberals trying to tell us that we need to just come together to the moderate middle, that we need to keep taking the high road, that 00s-era respectability politics were still a viable option. We thought back to the election last fall, the hateful attacks on Tim Walz and his son for committing the unforgivable affront to masculinity that was crying, the “Vote, and tell them Ruth (Bader-Ginsburg) sent you!” signs in our neighbor’s yard. How absolutely exhausted we were (and are) at watching incompetent morons continue to commit the same unforced errors over and over again while screaming at us for suggesting that perhaps, after stepping on the rake and getting hit in their face for the 5th time, maybe someone else should lead.

We are just so, so tired.

I remember the moment when I fully stopped trusting the legacy liberal-ish media as a viable news source. Back in the summer, I think, I was listening to a Politico podcast. It was right after the momentous and still not 100% understood decision by President Biden to announce he was ending his campaign. I was looking for some coverage of the historic announcement. In the frenetic scramble to rally around Vice President Kamala Harris, the ostensibly professional analysts at Politico began talking about Harris’ ability to win key voters in the 2024 election, votes she obviously did not get. Predictably, the conversation turned to winning the ever-important “Rust Belt” states. With their numerous electoral votes, closed factories, high school football stars, and historic downtowns, the Rust Belt is the predictable election-cycle darling that gets trotted out every few years only to be forgotten right after. You can set your Stonehenge to it.

Hosts and gets alike were making what I suspect they thought were highly observant and deeply funny jokes about what the Rust Belt is, about [then Senator Sherrod] “Brown getting mad at [us],” and the typical laundry list of trope-y ignorance that passes for commentary from people who’ve never actually been to the middle portion of the country.

They ultimately got stuck on two different names during their conversation: The Great Lake States and the Midwest. For reasons passing understanding, they continued their conversation with the confidence that is only ever reserved for people with absolutely no clue what they’re talking about.

Politico is such a good name for that company. Meaning “a politician or person with strong political views” it’s a name that specifically leaves out any sense of expertise or qualification. “Strong political opinions.” Shit. By that definition, my media-illiterate uncle who thinks that teachers are making kids trans is a politico. Or my other uncle who has said the n-wrd with a hard “r” multiple times and once said that he “loves black people and thinks everyone should own one or two” is a politico. Because what is transphobia and racism if not politics in contemporary America? Positions on the political spectrum aside, the only differences between them and the people and the podcast were access to microphones, a “fancy liberal university degree,” and proximity to powerful and influential people.

I’m from the Midwest, the Great Lakes part specifically. (As a side note, there are two Midwests. Essentially you have your Lakes and you’ve got your Plains. The Lakes areas tend to have larger cities and more diversity, with some exceptions, of course. Northern Ohio, the Mitten of Michigan, Northern Indiana and Illinois, most of Wisconsin and Minnesota; basically, start with Cleveland to the East, then all the way to Chicago and then up to Minneapolis. That’s the Lakes. The Plains are your Dakotas, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, the southern half of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri. Think Cincinnati, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Wichita I lived the first 25 years of my life in the Midwest and have been to a great deal of it. I’m a fanatical Big ten football guy and I’m writing a book on Toledo, your quintessential Midwestern city. I am by no means uniquely qualified to speak on this topic  – despite what Politico and its peers would have you believe, not only are there a lot of people from this area, but a lot of us are pretty reasonably intelligent, too – but I am probably one of the most annoyed ones with time to write about it. Annoyed at the continued ignorance, mischaracterization, and most importantly, political exploitation and fetishization of the place where so much of our food is grown, so much of your shit was/is built, where so many elections are won or lost, and where 70 million people live lives of purpose and significance.

I mentioned before that I have the luxury of being able to sit around and think about things.  I do and I don’t. I’m married to someone who makes a much better living than I do or ever will. But I am also currently semi-employed myself. I was working full time for the government as a historian. But for reasons that can probably be gleaned, I took what was essentially the equivalent of a buyout, getting paid through the fiscal year not to work so that next year they can get rid of my position. It made sense at the time and does still. My wife and I plan to move at the end of the year, so there was likely not going to be a future for me in that line of work anyway. Right now, I spend my days reading and writing, a throwback to my days as a graduate student,. where sitting around and thinking about stuff was the order of teh day. The word, both written and spoken, has always been my passion, so it’s fitting that it’s how I spend my days now. Writing this, right now, is technically, kind of, maybe, work; how great is that?

There’s another element to this intellectual lounging about. Without a steady job in line and with future employment at best precarious, I need to start thinking about the future.

What is the future for me? Or specifically, where? For a variety of reasons, I think it’s going to be New England. I want to be clear. I don’t hate New England. I do hate New England professional sports, and I think a lot of the “we’re brash but actually nice” stuff gets way overplayed by people from there. Being an asshole is still being an asshole even if your heart is good. But I can respect the “take-no-shit” ethos that they have. The endemic aversion to rhoticity notwithstanding, it’s a place full of good weather, history, and a nice place to live. There are actually a lot of things about New England that remind me of the Midwest. (It also happens to be the place where my wife is from, so that’s not an insignificant factor).

What really is the draw – beyond the wife of it all – is that it’s one of the few places that we can actually be. It’s an annoying reality of a halfway decent person – what gets called a leftist nowadays – that there are just not that many places where you can live and feel safe. Substantial parts of the Midwest are simply not tenable places to live anymore. GOP-led policies have made it unsafe to be a queer person, a woman, a person of color. Basic human decency has been outlawed in most places. The Midwest that I know, the one I lived in and the one I study, is not the one that exists now. Maybe one day we can get it back, but for now, it’s not tenable.

There’s another reason the Midwest is off the table. There’s no work for me there. I know what you’re thinking; “Brad, that’s a perfectly fine reason not to move somewhere. Why mention it like that’s problematic or something?” Well. There are a few things there (you’re probably sensing a trend with me; nothing is ever easy or as it seems). It’s not just that there is no place where I can find a job as a professor – if we’re being honest, the Midwest is probably one of the few places where I can find professor positions, in part because no one wants to teach History in a state that denies the role of slavery in the American Civil War – it’s that the environment is not one that lends itself to creative [delete every back to “places where we can actually be.”

I think there are worst things in the world than being an eccentric writer in New England, wearing cable knit sweaters in a cozy study that borders on stuffy, dark wood paneling lining the walls. As much as the Midwest speaks to my heart, it’s not the place it was when I was young. Definitely not the place that I study. The Midwest of the past, of radical unions, or strikes and walkouts, of growth and pain and hard work and community and sports, is gone or maybe just a vestige of itself. I’m not sure if I can find a way to get it back.

 I have a lot of ideas on how we can get the  Midwest of my youth back [rewrite].  So in the same noble vein as fine a political periodical, I, a newly-minted East Coast elitist with too much education, am going to weigh in on some solutions for getting the Midwest back.

Comprehensive Student Loan Debt Forgiveness.
It doesn’t seem like an obvious solution to fixing the Midwest but hear me out. One of the things that most people think of when they think of the Midwest, especially if you’re from (t)here, is Big Ten football. For most of the conference’s history, it’s been a Midwestern conference. Headlined by large state schools like Michigan, Ohio State, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Illinois (to name just a few) and the Harvard of the Midwest, Northwestern, the Midwest houses some of the best universities in the country. When you add in the hundreds of other state schools and liberal arts colleges, the Midwest’s academic bones are strong. It’s perplexing, then, that us Midwesterners would be so hell-bent on making attendance at these schools so cost prohibitive.

The outrage over student loan forgiveness is fake nonsense. Congress should pass a much more comprehensive student loan forgiveness package. Anyone they anger in doing so were likely not going to support future initiatives anyway. Student loan forgiveness would immediately flood the economy with money, in particular the still not totally recovered Midwestern states, as loan holders would no longer be shunting substantial amounts of money into paying of loan interest. It would also probably keep people in the Midwest, something that residents of the thousands of smaller towns and cities across the region complain about at length – and for good reasons. If the political will does not exist to cancel all student loan debt, then at the very least they should cancel all interest and 50% of all debt for all borrowers.

Raise the National Minimum Wage.
In real dollars the minimum wage is the lowest it’s been in over 30 years. Even the Fight for $15 movement is outdated at this point. $15/hr is only $31,200. Show me where in the country that is a livable wage. I’ll give you a hint; not most places in the Midwest. The Midwest has long had a reputation for being a cheap place to live. It’s what happens when you have the best farmland in the world, 21% of the world’s non-frozen fresh water, sits inside the 4th biggest river basin in the world, and has four clear and robust seasons. Sorry not sorry.

It’s still a fairly cheap place to leave, don’t get me wrong. But it’s getting more expensive, and fast. I went to the University of Cincinnati for my Master’s. Cincinnati is partially Midwest partially Southern (you can argue that it’s the first Southern city and I won’t say you’re wrong). My apartment near campus was about $500/mo I think. It was by no means palatial living, but it was 483 sq feet, had a private patio, a pool, in-building laundry, and was 5 minutes to campus and to the Gaslight District, perhaps Cincinnati’s best business district. That same unit now, with literally no changes, is now over $995/mo. It’s clearly an apartment catered to students, so there’s an assumed “get what you pay for” reality there. But student apartments, by definition, need to be affordable to students. A $12,000 a year apartment is hardly affordable for a student. Shit, it’s hardly even affordable for non-students (let’s be honest; apartments catering to student often have a lot of non-students because this country manufacturers a lot of poverty and people need cheap places to live).

With more and more people in this country living below the poverty line, with the cost of living skyrocketing, and with a minimum wage that is stagnant as a cesspool (of the 12 Midwestern states, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Missouri have minimum wages over $10/hr while the rest are the national minimum). Even in the relatively affordable Midwest, it’s getting harder and harder to get ahead. As long as people stay in this cycle of week-to-week existence, we’ll never escape this malaise.

Heartland Visas
The decline of America’s industrial manufacturing economy is perhaps the great collective memory experience of being from the Midwest. Every city, every town, every unincorporated community, has lost its largest industry from 50 years ago or at least seen it diminish. Steel, auto, coal, ships, glass, washing machines, tractors, doesn’t matter. No region of the country has dealt with more social, political, and economic turmoil as a result of America’s neoconservative and neoliberal slide since 1980 as the Midwest. From 1940 to 1970, the Midwest had 4 of the top 10 cities for population in the country (Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis). By 1980 it was just Chicago and Detroit. In 2025 it’s just the Second City. The booming cities and towns the American Manufacturing Belt have been replaced by the emptiness of the Rust Belt. The severity of the depression is often overstated (see: the Politico piece referenced above) and it definitely does exist (the Midwest is the beating heart of both heartland rock and emo music, two genres of rock music expressing the same frustration, one just has more eyeliner). Every Midwestern has had the experience of driving around town point at things that used to be there (9/10 times it’s a Dollar General or a vape shop now).

Heartland visas are a potentially contentious idea, but the premise is simple. Incentivize immigrants to move to economically depressed areas and stay there. The way it works is that the immigration process would be streamlined, not fast-tracked or rubberstamped, for folks who are willing to move to economically depressed areas. Moving assistance is provided, and the family promises (in writing) to stay in that city or town for (I think?) 5 years. The rationale is that after 5 years, they will have established roots and not want to move. Whether it’s blue collar jobs or highly educated professionals – in the original legislative plan I saw for this, the ideal implementation of this idea would be both – the reduced communities of the Midwest are desperate for people. Since I was born, the population of my hometown of Canton, Ohio, has dropped from around 84,000 to 69,000. From its peak of 116,000 in 1950, around the time my grandparents got married, to now, it’s population has dropped by 41%. And that’s not even at the high end of Midwestern population decline. Gary, Indiana, one of the placeholders for the “former industrial town” trope, has gone from 178,000 in 1960 to 67,000 now. I know that racism in the heartland has always been an issue, more so in the current political era than any point in the last 100 years. But the reality is that few places in the Midwest are seeing population growth, and anything that can reverse that trend needs to be taken seriously.

Embolden Unions
Perhaps no “solution” to the Midwest is as obvious as this one. The unions in this country are a shell of themselves. Partially this is because industrial union leadership in the last 30 years has largely been timid and feckless and I am absolutely being kind in that assessment. Mostly though it is because of neoliberal attacks on unions starting back in 1981 when Reagan broke the PATCO strike. A lot of it is general political bamboozlement and a carefully crafted propaganda campaign by the right wing over the last 40ish years. Regardless of the reasons (and they are many and well-documented), union membership and union power has been on the decline ever since. With its powerful manufacturing economies, the Midwest at the center of American unionism for a long time. We need a powerful public and private union sector in this country again if workers are to ever have a chance at improving their positions and their lives.

Medicare for All.
Medical debt is the number one cause of bankruptcy in this country. How we are OK with this reality is a testament to how much Americans love capitalism and how easily we are swayed by political scare tactics. Such a thing should not exist. Having universal healthcare would not only ensure that no one would ever go into debt for healthcare again but would also relieve the pressure to stay in a bad job simply for the insurance. Tying healthcare to work is a form of control that keeps people in bad working environments and from unionizing. (I thought about tying this to the union category because they are definitely linked. Somewhat puzzlingly, unions have been some of the most ardent opponents of M4A. This is likely because health insurance has long been one of the few things that unions have been able to secure. More likely, it’s because employers have been willing to capitulate on that in favor of keeping wages lower, deemphasizing seniority, and supporting right-to-work legislation. Union leadership is afraid of M4A because if their workers suddenly had free-ish and better quality health care without needing a job, their largest accomplishment and placebo would be gone).

The(A) Green New Deal
The climate crisis is the greatest existential threat to the world. The future, if we have one, needs to be one of wind, solar, hydroelectric, and nuclear energy. We need to divest from fossil fuels. Want to immediately create jobs? Marry technological innovation with an infrastructural overhaul. Something like the Green New Deal (except more comprehensive and urgent) would be a good start. We talked about the Midwest and it’s large number of premier universities. Many of them, most famously the University of Nebraska, have strong agricultural science programs. Universities like Case Western and Purdue have world-class engineering while Northwestern has one of the best physics departments in the world. There is NO reason why the Midwest cannot and is not a leader in the Green Revolution, building wind turbines, improving hydroelectric power, developing industry-leading electric cars, and pioneering sustainable agriculture. The Green New Deal will never really work if we can’t sell it to the Midwest and mobilize it there. I probably don’t need to go into detail about the jobs it would create. Speaking of jobs…

After Automation
At this point, it’s pretty clear that we have no intention of stopping the inexorable automating of the economy. It’s not just blue-collar jobs either. Automation is encroaching on all aspects of our economy as technocrats seem hell-bent on destroying the world simply because they can. Short of moderating this potential employment cataclysm, the government needs to start looking forward to what this post-automation landscapes. Many Midwestern communities saw their jobs moved to the South, West, and eventually overseas. The jobs that are left, particularly in the service industries, are increasingly under threat to be stolen by AI (along with all of the fresh water that it takes to cool those fucking AI servers). AI is fundamentally at odds with the best interests of the Midwest (really all of humanity, but we’re keeping a tighter perspective here).