When Slotkin Says “Middle of the Country” She Means “White People”

Many Ds are uncomfortable as the party of multi-racial democracy

This week, Michigan Senator and would-be presidential contender Elissa Slotkin gave a speech to the Idaho Democratic party in which she laid out her centrist vision for Ds going forward.

I have a theory: my theory is, what works in the middle of the country will work on the coasts, but not in reverse. That’s why we need to hear from people in places like Michigan, Idaho, and Kansas City. Because I’m in the business of winning elections. And we’re all seeing what happens when Democrats lose focus on the middle class.

In this statement, (excerpted on Facebook) the senator frames Idaho, Michigan, and Kansas City as the middle of the country, and therefore as middle class. The coasts, in contrast, are the redoubts of those who are removed from the real life of the country—they are the homes of elitists, presumably, or at least of people who are more powerful and influential.

These are dog whistles. It is the nature of dog whistles that they are deniable and that even the people who are emitting them may not fully understand what they are saying or why they are saying it. But the message is nonetheless clear enough: some people matter, others don’t.

And who is it that matters? Well, this being America, you won’t be surprised to learn that the answer is primarily “white people.”

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What is the middle?

Slotkin is speaking in Idaho and she is from Michigan. Her comments suggest that there is some uniformity of experience for those in the Midwest and mountain west. That experience is framed as “middle”—average, characteristic, exemplary—and as opposed to the experiences of people on the coasts

But if you think about this for even a moment, it falls apart. I live in Chicago—a big city in the middle of the country which has a lot more in common with, say, New York City than it does with Idaho Falls. Similarly, are the current pressing concerns of Somali immigrants living in Minneapolis (not a coastal city!) so divorced from the concerns of Hispanic people living in coastal New York? And what about people living in, say, coastal North Carolina or Georgia? And that’s before we get to the fact that very wealthy people live in the middle of the country (the Walton family is in Arkansas) and lots of working people live on the coasts—some of them doing things like unloading shipping.

Slotkin’s coastal elites vs. middle America framing just obviously, on its face, doesn’t make sense. And that’s because it’s not really supposed to make sense. The division is a thumbnail deflection which allows Slotkin to denigrate certain people and uplift others—to align herself with the heartland and exile everyone else as not of the heartland.

And again, the people she’s exiling are exactly who you’d expect.. When you talk about those on the coasts who don’t understand the concerns of real middle Americans, you’re usually talking about Jewish people, LGBT people, immigrants, and (especially) Black people, all of whom, supposedly, are out of touch and disconnected from the ethnonationalist volk. “Middle America” stands in for “middle-class” stands in for “cishet white Christian.”

What Slotkin is saying, then, is not, “what works in New York won’t work in Chicago, but what works in Chicago won’t work in New York”—which is silly on its face. Instead, what she’s saying is, “what works for cishet white Christians works for everyone.” Which is also false, but in a way that has a much heavier historical footprint.

Democrats for (white) unity

The narrative that a divided nation must unify against nefarious outsiders has a long and ugly legacy in American history. One of the most famous statements of the thesis is the racist propaganda film The Birth of a Nation, released in 1915. The movie is set in the Reconstruction era and frames the Civil War as a tragic conflict between white brother and white brother engineered by corrupt Black rapists. The KKK are the heroes of the movie; masked, robed men rush in to murder the Black other, uniting the nation again in a single white genocidal mass. Wounds are healed, unity is restored, and the middle of the nation is stitched together in a single seamless garment of hate.

Slotkin is obviously not calling for rule by the KKK. On the contrary, in her speech she argues that Trump takes advantage of economic anxiety and frustration to scapegoat those who are different. She’s explicitly rejecting hate even as she uses racist dogwhistles. She seems, in short, confused.

That’s because she, like many a Democratic leader, is confused. That argument from anxiety is a tell; it’s been thoroughly debunked. Yet Democrats—and not just centrist Democrats—keep returning to it with a kind of obsessive monomania that defies evidence. It’s a matter of faith for them that as Slotkin says the true “existential issue” facing our country is the threat to the middle-class—even though it’s pretty obvious that the real threat to our democracy is a rabid racist who has launched vicious attacks on immigrants, brown people, Black people, trans people, and women in the name of Christofascist supremacy and dominance.

Watching Slotkin’s speech, it’s remarkable how she speaks about the danger of Trumpism and authoritarianism and the assault on democracy without ever specifically referring to his attacks on marginalized people and without calling for solidarity with any of the groups he has targeted. She talks about the assault on democracy in Minneapolis without saying “immigrants” or “racism”. She talks about McCarthyism without mentioning that Black radicals were a chief target. She discusses Trump’s corruption and his attack on her and other Senators’ free speech rights, but she doesn’t talk about abortion rights or trans rights, or the efforts to resegregate the federal government and the public sphere under the guise of attacking DEI. She repeatedly mentions Idaho, but doesn’t talk about its rapidly growing Hispanic population, or what Trumpism means for them. She insists that Democrats must fight, but the people they are fighting for become a blurred, homogenous and notably pale mass.

Who are we?

This careful elision of the very people who are most at risk—Black people, brown people, LGBT people, immigrants, women—may be in some sense unintentional, but it isn’t an accident. These marginalized people, after all, make up the majority of the Democratic party and the majority of the resistance to Trump and Trumpism. They are the ones most affected; they are the ones who are most passionate about fighting back. They are the people the Democratic party relies on. And they are the people the Democratic party is nervous about acknowledging.

That nervousness is in part structural. Idaho—with a vast white majority—has a population of 2 million but it has as many votes in the Senate as majority-minority California with 20 times the number of voters. That means that Senators, like Slotkin, and everyone else in politics, have a powerful incentive to center the concerns of white voters who have a massively disproportionate voice in government.

The erasure of everyone who isn’t cishet white guys is also, though, simply a function of the same prejudice which has blighted American life, and which gave us Trump to begin with. Democrats are the party of multi-racial democracy because Black people, Hispanic people, LGBT people, Jewish people, Muslim people, and on and on, vote D in disproportionate numbers.

But Democrats like Slotkin still feel, and still say, that these voters are not the real voters, not the middle voters, not the middle-class voters, not the white voters who must be elevated and centered. That’s why Democratic presidential candidates tout middle-class tax cuts as their exciting innovative proposals but shy away from, Delia Ramirez’s call for reparations for ICE’s victims. And it’s why Slotkin can talk about all the evils Trump has done, but not about the people who he has done them to.