Thomas Frank on How the Harris-Walz Ticket Can Win Red State Voters 

Political and cultural critic Thomas Frank joins host Whitney Terrell to discuss how Democrats and Republicans courted voters from the Midwest and South at their respective conventions. Frank gives reports from the floors of both the Republican and Democratic national conventions, which he attended. He analyzes the efforts that the Trump-Vance and Harris-Walz tickets have made to attract union and working class, “red state” votes. He also reads a passage from his famed 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas on the origin of the terms “red state” and “blue state” and discusses the surprising staying power, and fundamental absurdity, of these categories.

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This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

From the episode

Whitney Terrell: You went to the Republican National Convention, as you said, and I watched Hulk Hogan’s speech, and it was very masculine… I feel like they’re still doing this red state performative value thing. Is that true?

Tom Frank: Well, it is. Of course,that’s true. I mean, J.D. Vance, right? But there’s a huge problem with it now, which is their leader. I mean, Donald Trump probably could pick out a Cabernet with aftertones of licorice. He was like, one of the only guys there who probably could do that. Yes, but actually, I take that back, Donald Trump doesn’t drink, but you know, he’s a fancy man, right? He’s a guy that likes luxury, he likes showing off. He’s Donald Trump. He is a man of, by most people’s standards, pretty exalted taste.

WT: You know, that’s the dissonance that I don’t understand.

TF: And also, his values are, like… I wrote an essay… I write all these essays that just get thrown in the trash; I don’t publish them, they don’t appear anywhere… But the word I use to describe his values is “Neronian,” right? I mean, this guy is like, he’s right out of the Roman Empire. It’s like Caligula or something. Who is the worst Roman Emperor? What was his name? But that’s Donald Trump, right? And he’s from New York. He’s from New York City, for Pete’s sake.

WT: He himself is more than commonly large. He has to be the center of everything. He does like to show off.

TF: Oh, my God. His name in huge letters. Can I tell you about the Republican convention? I mean, it was fascinating in all sorts of ways, and I hope we’ll go into this in some detail, but it was exclusively organized around one person, and that one person was the presidential candidate, Donald J. Trump.

So, you know, I’ve been going to major party conventions since 1996, that was my first one. And ordinarily, the presidential candidate doesn’t show up until the final night. Sometimes they make a cameo appearance at the beginning just to say hi to everyone, but then they don’t come out on stage until the last night. At the Republican convention this year, Trump came out every single day, and he would generally interrupt a speaker, right? Someone would be up on the stage, you know, talking about whatever, and then the announcer would come on, just interrupt the speaker and say, “Ladies and gentlemen, Donald Trump!”

And the Jumbotron overhead would show him walking out into the arena, and then he would take this special seat. He had this very special chair that he would sit in, and all the speeches would be addressed to him. It was, as that phrase that people used to use to describe him, “the audience of one,” and that’s exactly what it was.

He would sit in this very special chair, and every speech was addressed to him, and every speaker went out of their way to flatter and praise him. And when they would do this, when they would praise Trump — remember this was right after his near assassination, right, and his ear was bandaged. He had been shot by, you know, some guy in Pennsylvania and he was wounded. Most of the flattery had to do with that and, you know, “thank God that you’re still with us” and, you know, “it’s so great” and everything. And then the cameras would go to Trump, and you could see Trump mouth the words “thank you.” And so you would be watching the speaker on the stage, and then you’d also be watching Trump on the Jumbotron accepting the praise.

So you see the speaker lavishing praise on Trump, you know, sitting in his special chair, then Trump accepting the praise. And this was the ritual. And it went on night after night after night and, I mean, that’s all it was. It was a convention about one guy and how awesome he is. And you mentioned Hulk Hogan, and I was on the floor on that final night when Hulk Hogan spoke and Tucker Carlson, but the one that really got me was Kid Rock. I don’t know if you saw this. He sang his song, “American Badass,” with all of these new verses about Donald Trump, right?

And then it’s four days of buildup. “Donald Trump, you are the best; you’re the awesomest; you’re sitting there in your special chair, I know you can hear me.” And Ted Cruz comes out there just like heaping praise on him, right? Whereas four years ago, or, I’m sorry, eight years ago, in 2016, Ted Cruz refused to endorse Trump and was booed off the stage at the Republican Convention. But this time, he’s like “Donald Trump, you are the greatest thing in the world.” Anyhow, four days of this, and then Trump comes out to give the great speech, right? Here he comes. Here’s this guy we’ve been praising for four days, and I am here to tell you, Whitney, it was boring.

WT: Yeah.

TF: It was an hour and a half, and people were just like, “what the hell?” You know? “Would he please stop?” “Could he please stop?”

WT: Anyhow, I mean, this is what I’m trying to get at here —

TF: The self is large. That self is large.

WT: I know. So, like, they’re building this idea about themselves in their literature and everywhere else, right? And everyone knows the red state, blue state thing, and everyone vaguely understands this sort of weird collection of values that are said to be raised in the red states, which aren’t really real. They’re an invention, partly of liberals, right? Or not liberals, but of conservative blue states.

TF: Yeah, well, it’s like something you would have read in the Reader’s Digest. I mean, you could write a whole cultural history of this stuff, and people have.

What’s fascinating about it is that this all comes out of the 1960s when the Republicans started identifying the Democrats… What was the phrase that Nixon used to use? “Acid, amnesty and abortion.” The Democrats were supposed to be crazy, they were supposed to have embraced these sort of lunatic values. And it wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t true.

I always think of McGovern’s campaign in retrospect, now that I’m an old man. I look back and George McGovern seems like a really good guy in retrospect. And his campaign slogan, I’ve always loved it. His campaign slogan was, “Come home America,” you know? And it was, like all good campaign slogans, a double entendre. He meant, come home from Vietnam, but also come home to your real values, meaning the values of the New Deal, the values of liberalism. You know, not this Nixonian George Wallace kind of hatred and anger. And man, did he get his ass kicked for standing up for American values.

WT: I have one question, and then I want to shift gears. So what it brings up is like what you’re describing, the leader being spoken to, giving long, boring speeches and everything being about one person. Those are the hallmarks of strongmen or fascism. Many, many people have accused Trump of wanting that, and I think he does. Does that mean that the red states really want fascism, not actually to wire their own homes and do this type of stuff? Has fascism always been a red state value? I don’t feel like midwesterners or southerners want fascism. So why is that appealing?

TF: You know, it’s funny, long speeches, I don’t associate with fascism. I associate with Castro.

WT: Well, authoritarian leaders.

TF: Captive audiences, yeah.

WT: You know what? I should say in general, totalitarian.

TF: Well, a strongman is the right word. That’s a word that I actually would associate with Trump. So I generally don’t use the word fascism because it, you know… Gosh, I’m such a literalist about these things.

WT: Fascism would be a lot more organized than any Trump administration.

TF: Fascism implies competence, and he doesn’t have that. Fascism is also this militarization of society. And one of the, actually, refreshing things about Trump is that he claims to be very critical of the military and very critical of the endless wars.

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Thomas Frank

The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-populism • What’s the Matter With Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America • Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? • The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism

Others:

Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut • Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 3, episode 22: “The Unpopular Tale of Populism: Thomas Frank on the Real History of an American Mass Movement” • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 5, episode 31: “What Do Dems Do Now? Thomas Frank on How the Left Can Counter a Rogue Supreme Court” • David Brooks • John Podhoretz • Blake Hurst • Hulk Hogan • Kid Rock • Ted Cruz • Tucker Carlson • “Acid, amnesty — and abortion: 1972 and all that” by Michael Cross | Law Society Gazette | May 4, 2022 • George McGovern • George Wallace • The New Deal • Robert Reich

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Vianna O’Hara. Photograph of Tom Frank by Wendy Edelberg.