Season 1 Episode 5
Ben Binversie:
Kathryn Lofton and Katherine Cramer. Two Katherines, two convocation speakers, two very different talks.
(singing)
[00:00:30] This is All Things 51²è¹İapp. I'm your host, Ben Binversie. On this week's show, we'll talk with Kathryn Lofton, professor of religious studies at Yale University about pop culture and religion, including a deep dive into the religion of Kanye West and Bob Dylan. And Kathy Cramer, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, about the politics of resentment among rural voters in Wisconsin. This week's show is coming up next after work from 51²è¹İapp College.
[00:01:00] The information and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the individuals involved and do not represent the views of 51²è¹İapp College. Kathryn Lofton studies pop culture from the lens of religion. She believes that even in a purportedly secular society, there are religious elements to many of our behaviors, especially relating to the decisions we make about what to consume. [00:01:30] Her latest book is titled Consuming Religion. I was curious about her own upbringing and religious influence.
Kathryn Lofton:
My work leads me to answer that question in an intense way. And everyone listening wants a simple answer, a genealogical answer, a denominational answer. And so the simplest way I can answer that is my parents were both members of the Democratic Socialists of America, the chapter in Milwaukee. And as you maybe know, Milwaukee has a pretty prominent socialist history. [00:02:00] And my parents were pretty passionate political thinkers and actors. They ultimately withdrew from regular participation and presence in that world, and now do not participate in that party or in those local politics. But when I was a kid, that defined everything that we thought and did. So I could tell you what my parents would think about the wood that this table is made out of, that art on the wall, the outfit that I'm wearing, what I ate today, how I got to the airport, [00:02:30] that I used a plane so that there was this really intense materialist critique of everything.
My sister once bought a bunch of clothes when she was in middle school 'cause she babysat. And the clothes were covered with this brand named Swatch, which was very hip in the early nineties. Whenever she bought these. She brought them home and my father cut out the word Swatch from this entire jotter outfit and, making the abbot totally unwearable, but it was a statement about our relationship to brand.
So what I said later on when was in graduate school [00:03:00] is that I was raised in a secular orthodoxy, meaning that there was ideas about the good, but they are precisely written against denominational and church oriented religion. But I would argue, and indeed a lot of my work has been about how much of secular life has a lot of rules, has a lot of social groups, has a lot of distinctions they like to make. Even people who don't belong to the chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Ben Binversie:
Right. Yeah. It sounds like a pretty all encompassing religion if you don't want to call it that, growing up in that. Wow, that's crazy. [00:03:30] I remember one time my mom threw away one of my t-shirts, but it was just because it was old and ratty.
Kathryn Lofton:
That's its own discernment so that in my house you would keep the rattiness to try to prove your relationship to poverty. But another family maybe with a different relationship to wealth or a different relationship to class would say, "We want you to look a certain upright." And I'm really interested in those decisions, because it doesn't necessarily assume that one family does or doesn't have money. It's what you want to represent [00:04:00] about health, wealth, formality, civility. And so it was very important to my parents that we don't look above the working class. And they were themselves born to poor families, but even once they no longer were that poor, they still want it to seem of the proletariat. And that's an aesthetic I think we see a lot of pop stars trying to play around with and rock stars, where they want to act as if they still look to be of the people, even though we know they live in Beverly Hills. So yeah, that aesthetic of the civility became a big part of what I've been interested in the study of religion.
Ben Binversie:
[00:04:30] Yeah. So I guess some of us grow up with a more narrow definition of religion. Whether it's strictly worshiping a god or whatever. But when did you start to think of religion as more than just that more than worshiping gods and more about these other things, that these are rules that maybe are secular but govern how we live our lives?
Kathryn Lofton:
There are two things that demonstrate my own relationship, to what you said was absolutely [00:05:00] true that most people think of religion as a description of our relationship between human being and God. And one thing is the study of religion that I'm a part of, and that there's a great department of religious studies here at 51²è¹İapp and there's a scholar here, Tyler Roberts has written incredible book about this very question about the study of religion and how much that very definition of a religion, about an idea of God is a historical idea. Throughout history we've had a lot of different ideas about what organize people [00:05:30] around different rituals and activities and identities. And that the idea of a singular God and your belief in that God is actually in his language a post reformation idea of religion. But even if I wasn't interested as I deeply in that nerdy, when does that word get that idea?
Because I study religion in America. That was my historical and geographic interest. We have to acknowledge that the sociology of religion has changed so much that A, the question of whether or not Americans we're going to churches [00:06:00] has been actually a really disputed one historically. We know now that Americans are less and less saying, "I'm a Lutheran. I'm a conservative Jew." There are likely to say, "I'm a Christian, I'm Jewish." But people are moving away from various denominational identity that they associate with a particular church or synagogue attendance. That doesn't mean that people have less identities or things that they aren't committed to. But as we move away from a church-bound idea of what religious practice like, I started getting interested more and more in the [00:06:30] things that people are really invested in, the things they keep doing repeatedly. And the moments when they say, "I agree with another group that I'm with those people and not those people."
I'm giving this talk on Thursday about Kanye West. Kanye talks all the live long day about what he is and isn't. And as he does that, he raises names of groups. Sometimes he says that he should be seen as white. Sometimes he says he should be seen as black. Sometimes he says he's a Christian. Sometimes he says he's a free thinker who's an atheist. But he's constantly invoking groups to talk [00:07:00] about how in his mind we wrongly organize ourselves through social identity. I'm interested in all of it. I mention those social identities he's talking about, the groups of Black Lives Matter and placards over their heads. And Kanye West standing back saying, "No, not me." And all the people at his concert throwing their hands in the air when he's singing Famous. So that's the forms of sociability where people gather to agree on something and then they dissolve saying, "I'm alone." To me, that's the study of American religion.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah. I guess I don't have any statistics about people identifying [00:07:30] with a certain religion and how strongly historically in America they have. But it seems like as they fade away from identifying as a particular domination, then the void has been filled with some of these pop culture things. That's interesting.
Kathryn Lofton:
Yeah. I mean it's a good question. People who are listening can ask themselves if they're not going to something called church and they don't have something in their life that's a social identity that's outside of themselves, how is their time [00:08:00] spent? So some people are listening to say, "I don't have any of that. I'm a free person." But then I would just want to clear record of how you're spending your day is, and I might see in your Angry Birds relationship, some aspects of your commitments. They might not be ones you feel great about is moral choices, but that might tell us a lot about what your social life is like.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah. So you mentioned Tyler Roberts, who I actually had as a professor when I was here. I was going to talk about him already, so it's just convenient that you brought him up. So one of my favorite classes here at 51²è¹İapp was one that he taught. It [00:08:30] was called Religion: Philosophy and the Good Life. And we talked about in one of the first classes, the claim, I believe it was from David Foster Wallace's famous commencement speech this is water, that everyone worships something. Whether it's a god money or success, we all worship something. Does that idea resonate with you?
Kathryn Lofton:
Oh, absolutely resonates. And I love that commencement address. This is something I'm really very interested in right now is. I was a huge David Foster Wallace [00:09:00] personally in college and I think if you looked at the way my life was being practice, you might say one of the things I've worshiped with David Foster Wallace. Hanged out with the people who really liked him, who liked those voluminous footnotes, who liked the absurd and her monologue that drives so much of his fiction. Now we live in a time where his own story is getting zoomed and talked about again. I think we all probably thought it wasn't the greatest guy, but he was so brilliant and said things that made you really think about your own loneliness and your sense of isolation. And [00:09:30] now in this era of MeToo, we're asking what does that mean that you also might have been, and given that I think Mary Karr is a fairly believable speaker, definitely was an abusive person.
That's where I think the study of religion gives us so many resources to talk about how the good and the bad are always commingled in moments of worship, and that the very acts of worship sometimes dissolve somebody's humanity so that I flattened him. I maybe also didn't read his work as well as I should have. But I thought in that commencement address [00:10:00] in a stunning moment, he talks about being at the checkout line and the checkout person. The various strong feelings you have as you're standing in that checkout line. And it's such a poignant moment that depicts him in a moment of great, one could say vulnerability and depravity. The ways in which one has strong, ugly feelings at a checkout line. That I think if we did a better job talking about those feelings, which his work allowed. But we often spend our time, or I spent my time worshiping him rather than thinking about the moral questions has [00:10:30] worked offered. So I'm thrilled to know that the work is being taught in this moral context because then you can start asking these robust questions about what was the good life? Given how hard he experienced life to be.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah. And what do we choose to worship?
Kathryn Lofton:
Yes.
Ben Binversie:
So your talk tonight is titled Consuming Religion, How ivory soap, Kim Kardashian, and Goldman Sachs explain this modern age.
Kathryn Lofton:
I laugh at my own title.
Ben Binversie:
I must say we get a lot of talks coming [00:11:00] through here. But your two talks, the titles for them stood out to me very strongly as wow, immediately I'm going to those talks. So both of your talks here on campus will discuss the world of pop culture, which can be a crazy, scary place sometimes. At least for me. And when I see entertainment weekly come on tonight after the local news, my response is usually to shut off the TV before I lose my faith in humanity.
Kathryn Lofton:
[00:11:30] Look right there a practice that exhumes your values Ben. That's so great, yes. Keep doing that. Commit to that.
Ben Binversie:
But you do just the opposite. You look at them square in the eye and you analyze them. Why, how?
Kathryn Lofton:
Well I can tell the autobiographical answer, which goes back to being that nervous white girl who came from a very peculiar childhood and went to college and felt very overwhelmed by the students I was surrounded by. And I don't know [00:12:00] if students here can relate to this, but I went to a large public high school in a Midwestern town. My relationship to elite ideas of reading and, just all the habits that I discovered when I went to college. Other kids had been cultivated, I just arrived wide eyed wearing my overalls, confused, I wasn't a rube, but I wasn't elite in my own sense of myself. And then to discover these various hierarchies. [00:12:30] So I would have and do all these performances during the day of trying to act like a smart hipster kid.
But then I'd go back to my room and I'd just desperately watch the Oprah show or I watched the Simpsons or I binged on Entertainment Tonight and its various casts because it felt like some kind of safety. It felt like a link back to other kinds of friendships and relationships I had where reading People Magazine and gossiping about celebrities was something I did with my girlfriends in high school. Or being obsessed about a particularly not cool thing was actually seeing also as [00:13:00] cool in the world I grew up in. So it was my way of doing a counterculture to this emerging world of mixed weenies and the form of metal literature that was very predominant, alongside the emergence of alt rock and the Seattle sound, which were all things that I also could genuinely loved sonic youth. But Sonic Youth didn't make me feel cozy at night. It made me feel like I am just like Kim at the edge of my madness and I needed things that also just made me chill out.
And the chill out part increasingly became something that when I got to graduate school, [00:13:30] I realized that that very soothing could also fall into this language of the opioid, where does the rest end then evasion begin? And I got really interested in as I was reading theories of mass culture and cultural organization and just thinking about what are the things that organize us into putting our hands in the air.
Ben Binversie:
And so why do the Kanye Wests and Kim Kardashians of the world merit your attention as a scholar of religious studies in particular?
Kathryn Lofton:
Well when I first started working on [00:14:00] the Kardashians, a very dear friend of mine at Yale said that I was working on the cooler Duggars, rather than looking at this very extreme, poor Christian family, I was looking ... Because one thing to say is the Kardashians are very overtly Christian. Their evangelical Christianity is an essential part of their concept of family. Their own claims to moral piety. And a lot of my work begins with an observation of something that we think [00:14:30] should be like this, is also like this. So the case of the Kardashians, how could they think of themselves as espousing family values, which they powerfully do, in a world where everyone hated them for being exploited as materialistic? So I was interested in that confluence of the world's resentment and hatred and judgment, the moral judgment alongside this claim to family values which does have a Christian story. But I very quickly moved away from that Christian story and just got very interested in their own language.
If you follow the show, [00:15:00] you know they talk a lot about family, family togetherness. That's the ultimate value. What does that mean in this particular era? And Kanye too, Kanye as someone who as everyone knows who consumes him, is pretty possessed with his own deification. Thinking of himself as a supreme God and also has a strong relationship to a literal story of Christianity. But I obviously have interested in the way he makes himself his, our icon of this day. And thinks we should be seeing him as a figure equal to Jesus. And he also by the way, puts Steve Jobs equal to [00:15:30] Jesus. So he has an interesting iconography that I'm drawn to.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah, the religion of Kanye. What does our worship of celebrity reveal about us as a culture right now, I guess with the celebrities that you study and look at?
Kathryn Lofton:
That's such a deep question Ben, and I don't have a fast answer for it. It is to me the question of why are particular stories once we can't stop getting more [00:16:00] about. A part of the Kardashians story is that when I about 10 years ago became a step parent and one of the ways I bonded with my daughter was by watching the Kardashians with her. And today I was just telling her about how I was going to talk about Kanye. And she said, "Oh my God, Kanye is so uncool. The Kardashians are so uncool. It's boring." So she's 17 years old, she's done with it. There was an era where that was the most interesting thing imaginable. But when I asked her, "Well tell me why the show is bad now." And she's like, "Well nothing happens in the show."
Now the show does have less [00:16:30] viewership than it did five years ago, but it still is millions of people watching it, and she's absolutely right. Very little happens, and yet people are watching them eat their salads and get their nails done and have another photo shoot and have some weird skirmish about whether a Scott Court Kardashian's baby daddy is there is not a good person at that photo shoot. So it's the smallness that we can't turn away from that I tend to think tells us something about what we think should be attended to in our own lives. And I am interested in this historic moment, why celebrity smallness. Celebrities [00:17:00] are just like us, is something we're drawn to. What do you buy at Walgreens? What do you buy at the grocery store? How do you get over the weird awkwardness with the baby daddy? These are not big metaphysical questions, and yet they seem to consume a great deal of reality TV and pop culture.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah. I often have this feeling about people whether it's the Kardashians or Donald Trump, just because they're famous or in this case, the president of the United States. Does that mean that every little word that he says really [00:17:30] merits our discussion or every little choice that Kanye makes about wearing this kind of shoe or a XXXL white t shirt that looks really stupid on him. Should we follow suit and copy him? Why do we give so much credence to the little decisions that they make? And is it possible to rein that in and stop that kind of momentum?
Kathryn Lofton:
There are historians, I have a colleague at Yale called Joe [Roach 00:17:57] wrote a beautiful book called It, and it's about the history of charisma and [00:18:00] talent. There's other historians as well, but he does a beautiful job of doing the genealogy of where do human beings put their attentions to see the incarnation of power on earth. And he links the end of monarchic rule in the West to the emergence of theatrical and charismatic leaders in entertainment culture. Now why do human beings seemed to life to turn towards certain incarnations of power? Well I lean into this guy Durkheim [00:18:30] who talks a lot about how we need to make rules about what we can and can't do, or else we will cause a lot of trouble with each other. And in order to get people excited about following that rules, you end up making fun rituals that people can do together.
Celebrities create a lot of virtualization in order to be famous. Depending on the celebrity, it's either a show or an album, or a concert going. If you think about it. If you're a fan of beyond say, there are a lot of ways of organizing your life in order to continue to be attentive to her. [00:19:00] If we think about how our figures of governance, so many people don't even know the senators from the state that they live in. We don't seem to have the same practices around the acknowledgement and seeing of our democracy. I think as many other people have said, if Donald Trump has done one good thing, it's led a lot of people to know the names of their senators, know how to call them, know how to think about what their relationship to legislative power analysis works and how juridical processes work.
That attention is something that a lot of democratic theorists have been worried we haven't had enough of. That's one of the reasons why populous dictatorships [00:19:30] are so on the rise, that we're less interested in how the system works, which is really what got us psyched about democracy and more interested in these charismatic figures that organize our enthusiasms and distract us from our every day.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah. Yeah. I was reading something about how a lot of people complain about this new generation because they don't have the attention span for things that we deem to be important.
Kathryn Lofton:
That's exactly it.
Ben Binversie:
They can spend five hours playing Fortnite, but they're not going to spend five seconds to [00:20:00] look up who their senator is and give them a call because they care about this issue or that issue.
Kathryn Lofton:
There's so much interesting media ethnography about teenagers' relationship to Instagram and Snapchat. Some version of some adult establishment anxious about the amount of time spent on social media. But if you turn it again, these are all about relational management and impression management, and inserting yourself in the social sphere. All that time, doing what everyone does on Instagram. Liking and making comments becomes a very different practice. It's more like leaving cards on a silver tray and coming back for a visit, albeit in this very [00:20:30] highly mediated, incredibly fast way. Now is that good or bad? I think those are really questions we should be talking about a lot more.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah. What else outside of celebrity do we worship in this country?
Kathryn Lofton:
My colleague Skip Stout wrote a book about the 19th century obsession with risk and gambling, and how many American fortunes were tied to land speculation. And that's actually a lot of Iowa is settled by a series of people getting really excited about [00:21:00] buying land and then selling it again to settlers. The settlers as we all know, were the first people who organize the topography of this land. So who were those early surveyors, what were they doing, what were their relation to native Americans?
That's all fascinating history, but there's no doubt that a concept of property, land ownership, and speculation is really I think at the root of a lot of American, both anxiety, excitement, interest. I think that's one of the many ways we can talk about our president is his [00:21:30] own relationship to land speculation and real estate speculation that's just another version of that. And what was the risk of trying to guess, where will people want to be? Where can I sell at a higher price than I bought in order to know that I've organized a little bit of where the bodies are in this very democratic republic?
I think that there's a lot about American society that's also pretty wrapped up in believing that choice is something to maximize, and maximizing choice is I think something that a lot [00:22:00] of sociologists have observed, has become an interesting if dangerous proposition whether you compare the number of ketchup brands that there were 30 years ago to now, or salad dressings in the grocery store to the rise of the Common App and the number of students who apply now to 10 or 12 places versus when I would to college, it would seem if you applied to four or five.
So that maximization, I don't want to lose any opportunity. I'm going to be a part of seven clubs, not one. What is it to foreclose and to pursue a [00:22:30] monogamy of interest. That seems so terrifying I think. So I'm interested in the right that the choice is that particular object of obsession.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah. That is a supremely interesting theme to me as well. When I go into the grocery store and I'm looking for taco shells. And I'm sitting there and there don't need to be 50 different types. I just want one.
Kathryn Lofton:
Tell me the one. Well it's always a hard time, right? Because on the one hand, the democratization of choice usually also means the democratization [00:23:00] of person. So all those taco shells, there's probably a gluten free one, maybe there's a kosher one, maybe there's one that's in a flavor that a certain culture seems to like more than other culture.
So on the one hand, there's a population that's interested and maybe that means more people are a part of the consumer process. But as sociologists and psychologists have pointed out, choice is also really paralyzing. And the question of how we start getting nervous. But should I have done that? What if I'd done that? And then the question of what kind of lies emerge from anxiety that the right decision wasn't made? [00:23:30] And this is where people who've written on the history of caprice and the belief in fate, where are Americans now? We're really in a place where you think you can operationalize and strategically manage your life, and if you make the right choices starting in kindergarten, you'll have a maximal adulthood. There's a lot of American history that would think that was absolutely insanity to believe that. They thought life was much more capricious and it was much harder to predict, whether or not your actions had anything to do with the way things ended up. Not to mention there's a lot of religious systems who think that that's an extreme narcissism and insanity. So it's a particular place [00:24:00] we live in.
Ben Binversie:
A boy. It's a topic of much thought in my brain at least. What do you worship outside of I guess, so it sounds like you have maybe strayed a little bit from your childhood in terms of your parents' religion, if we want to call it that. So what things in your life do you see yourself as worshiping?
Kathryn Lofton:
Well I worry that if you did a study of my life, [00:24:30] that there would be a brutal reading of maintaining the status of my job through an infinite number of emails and managing committees, and organizing the micro-practices of university life. So I think if you looked at the time chart of my day, sometimes I think, "Is this really how I want to embody what I believe in?"
Which looks like it's a lot of meetings, a lot of people try to structure the university I can believe in, but also one I feel good in. [00:25:00] But I think when I'm not being self loathing and self deprecating on the question, it's also the hope to really try to democratize these very elite forms of life, and that the greatest joys in my life have come in being in spaces of democratic learning opportunity. Whether it was a public high school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Or at this very elite university I get to sit now. What's exciting isn't just merely the magic incantation that I experienced [00:25:30] when I'm reading a book with a group of people. But also that that group of people is as weird as possible.
So how to make weird establishment institutions is a pretty strong commitment of mine, and that manifested in the friendships that I have and the goals that I pursue at the university I work at. But also the things that I write that I am purposely trying to ask whether departments in the humanities are asking the most salient questions to get the widest array of people to join the work of the humanities. I think the humanities can often be a very [00:26:00] elite practice where you need to know a lot of obscure languages and have relationship to textual traditions, that I want to say I think are incredibly important to know and learn about, but feel very foreclosing to some students who don't come with that language preparation or that relationship to the literary traditions that we love so much. So how to make points of access to nerdiness. I guess that's the thing I feel the most committed to.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah, I can get behind that. Let's keep it weird. I know you're currently working on a study of the religions of Bob Dylan. [00:26:30] I know it's in the works, but what can you tell me about that?
Kathryn Lofton:
Yeah, that's a hard project. I can't decide if I'm going to come to an end with it whether or not. The talks that I've given about it rotate around to features of his personality I'm pretty interested in. One, the ascription to him of prophecy, literary genius. Just the extreme accolade that has poured upon him. Nobel Prize, one of the climactic instances.
But on the [00:27:00] other side, my own impression and surely his own not insignificant labor to tell us, "I'm kind of an un-not nice guy." Obama famously said about Kanye that he thought Kanye was a genius, but that he was a jackass. I am very interested in that figure. And because there's a lot I think about charismatic religious leadership in which they are beloved and admired. I think Brigham Young was not a jackass. I do think Joseph Smith is somebody who upon human biographical telling, was [00:27:30] an obnoxious guy to be that the founder of the LDS church. So I think in order to be a founder of a thing, you often are difficult and not easy for everyone. You might be really appealing.
So Bob Dylan by all accounts, not the nicest human person, difficult to go on, weird with his family. But someone we can't stop talking about the way his work gives us this powerful feeling. So I have a chapter about the way in which I am unconvinced that he was born again as a Christian. I think he actually was just really psyched about Gospel [00:28:00] music and felt it was a performance that the world would be interested in. I have a piece about the lies he told when he moved to Greenwich Village about his own origin. He said he had multiple different kinds of father, different sorts of origin stories. I have another piece I'm working on about a group of guys who are passionate about Kabbalah, who studied his lyrics to find the truth of the ages. And how they do that in part to try to understand their own moral relationship to his work. So I mentioned audience response. I'm interested in his acts of clever, how should [00:28:30] I say? Humbug.
Ben Binversie:
I'll look forward to potentially reading about that. You're also working on something, the religious history of American happiness. What's that about? Just briefly.
Kathryn Lofton:
I'm very interested in the insatiability of fighting for our happiness, thinking about it. And how many religions that we see as native to the US or at least as having insurgent traditions really focus a lot of their theology about the good life, [00:29:00] cheerful life, rich life, better life. But that how much of that portray is just the difficulty and suffering of a lot of American experience. So it's my ironic Howard's End move to say the religious history of American happiness is the history of unhappiness.
Ben Binversie:
Nice. Cool. Well, thank you so much for talking with me and coming to 51²è¹İapp, and making sense of this crazy world that we live in.
Kathryn Lofton:
Thanks a lot Ben.
Ben Binversie:
Kathryn Lofton is a professor of religious studies at Yale University. [00:29:30] Her most recent book is called Consuming Religion. Links to that in her other works are available on our website, grinnell.edu/podcast. Switching gears from up with the Kardashians to keeping up with Wisconsin politics, Kathy Cramer spent 10 years traveling around Wisconsin talking, but mostly listening to people in the more rural parts of the state. Her research brought her to understand and appreciate the value of really listening to people and their concerns. I sat down to talk and listen [00:30:00] to Cathy about her book, the politics of resentment and how her research began.
Kathy Cramer:
When I started out. I was really interested in social class identity, just how people sense of where they are and the pecking order of things, how it affects the way they think about and talk about politics. So I wasn't even looking for a rural versus urban divide. I wanted to invite myself into conversations in a variety of places. Because at that point in my career, I knew if I'm interested in how people interpret politics, [00:30:30] a really good way to get at that is to listen to them talk to people that they know in the places that they normally hang out in. So what I did was the sample several dozen communities across Wisconsin thinking that if I sample a well to do Milwaukee suburb in a small town, lower income place, that likely I'm going to get different conversations with respect to social class. So it had nothing to do with Walker, nothing to do with Trump, nothing to do with the rural versus urban divide. Yeah.
Ben Binversie:
One of [00:31:00] the big themes that emerged from the book was this urban, rural divide. This resentment stemming from these geographical identities. Can you paint a picture of what that resentment looked like in the communities where you spent your time?
Kathy Cramer:
Yeah, sure. So I would be inviting myself into the conversations in gas stations and diners and such. And here I am, this social scientist driving out from Madison in my Volkswagen. I drive a Prius now, but at the start I was driving a Volkswagen. I would ask people, " [00:31:30] What are your big concerns around here?" And it became pretty clear that in the smaller towns and the rural places, people were basically saying to me, "We don't get our fair share. We don't get our fair share of attention from you all down in Madison and Milwaukee." We don't get our fair share of resources. Meaning there was a perception that all the taxpayer money went to Madison or Milwaukee and they didn't see it in return, even though they felt like they were paying in a ton. And they also felt like they weren't getting their fair [00:32:00] share of respect.
So they'd say things like, "You all think we're a bunch of country bumpkins, and we're not educated and we don't know what's what." Part of my painting a picture should be that while they're telling me all this, they're often telling me through jokes and they're joking with me, kidding me. They were super welcoming to me. But my presence brought pretty quickly to the surface this sense that [00:32:30] Madison thinks it knows at all. "You all come out here tell us what to do, and you don't listen to us in return." So generally that's what it sounded like. It was a little different every place I went, but that was a very common theme. Really surprised me. I naively growing up in the Milwaukee suburbs or just beyond, didn't really know that existed.
Ben Binversie:
Why do you think this rural political consciousness and resentment of the liberal elite was ignored as an [00:33:00] important trend for so long? I know obviously you in writing this book were not ignoring it. And I know some journalists like Sarah Kendzior who wrote Flyover Country have also been talking about these trends for awhile. So why are we seemingly ignoring it's importance until now?
Kathy Cramer:
Yeah. Great question. Well on one hand you might say there's always been a rural versus urban divide. Ever since human beings were creating things called cities, right? There are people in and there's people out. But, there's something different about it now and we can [00:33:30] come back to that later if you want to. But I think in general, the rural versus urban divide is why it's been ignored for so long. Right? Because we do live such segregated lives. If you're an urban person primarily growing up in a urban suburban place, you probably spend time in rural areas, but as a tourist. You drive through, you appreciate their beauty. You go for vacation. That's so different than actually living with people and knowing what their challenges are and hearing [00:34:00] what their concerns are. So that's part of it. Just basic residential segregation in the way we live our lives.
But I think also, the media industry has a lot to do with it too. That so much of our popular culture and news media is produced in cities, especially on the coast. Right? And that too is a segregation where sure there are reporters who go to small towns and rural places to see what's going on and report out what's going on. But I [00:34:30] don't know this for sure, but I would say a whole heck of a lot more of that has gone on since the 2016 presidential election than before. And you don't notice what you don't see. Right? So there just weren't people on the ground in these places, not many, actually paying attention to what's going on.
Ben Binversie:
So you spent years writing this book. Was the resentment growing as you researched? and what were some of the factors if so, that caused it to build up?
Kathy Cramer:
[00:35:00] Yeah. I don't know if it increased. Maybe. But when I first started going around in 2007, even then there was lots of resentment towards public employees in particular. And so again, my presence ... They didn't create these attitudes when I walked in the door. The way they started talking about things, it was clear this was a common theme that came up in their coffee klatches. But my presence as a employee of the flagship public university in the state [00:35:30] brought to the surface pretty quickly, "So Kathy, tell us about your healthcare, or your pension, or how many classes do you teach?" And pretty quickly the theme came out that public employees generally, this is a general perception. Are these people who sit behind desks all day. Or if they're professors, they're in the classroom maybe a couple hours a week. I don't know what they do the rest of the time. Right?
[00:36:00] And there was this perception that public employees are lazy. They don't work very hard. They're certainly not working hard like we do, people who work with their bodies all day. And by the time we can retire if we can retire, our bodies are so broken down, we can hardly enjoy it. And so those themes were around when I started. But then when Scott Walker got elected and when he became governor in early 2011, one of the first few things he did was to propose this budget [00:36:30] repair bill that now we call Act 10, which basically undercut the ability of most public employee unions to do collective bargaining. And that really generated a lot of talk about whether they were in favor of public employees or against public employees. And in particular the divisions within families because a lot of times you had people who were, say the wife was a public school teacher [00:37:00] and the husband was not in favor of all the money going into public employees. And so I don't know if the resentment actually grew, but I think there was more conversation around it when act 10 arose. Yeah.
Ben Binversie:
I was watching an interview with you from just before the 2016 election, having just published your book. And with the intimate research that you had been doing, it seems like you probably had a pulse on some feelings that a lot of other [00:37:30] people were unaware of. Did you have a sense of what was to come in that election?
Kathy Cramer:
I would like to say I was so smart that I knew Donald Trump would win. But I didn't. I was watching the polls like most people interested in public opinion. Right? And I really thought even going into election night, the Hillary Clinton was gonna win. But I do have to say that at my election eve party with a bunch of my friends when it was pretty clear what [00:38:00] the result was going to be, I think I was someone in the room that was not surprised in a way. I was surprised because it wasn't what I expected, but my reaction was like, "Oh, right."
Ben Binversie:
You weren't baffled. You had something concrete to grab on to. Whereas some people I know here at least people were just bewildered and were, "What just happened?"
Kathy Cramer:
Yeah. And one of the stories I tell is [00:38:30] my daughter and I were at this election party and just watching on computers and televisions what was going on. And as it became clear and really the thing that sticks in my mind is when the New York Times had that graph with the two lines showing the probability Clinton was gonna win, the probability that Trump was gonna win. And when those lines crossed and it was clear it's Trump, I said, "We should go home. I need a good night's rest." And lo and behold, the New York Times [00:39:00] sent me an email at 10:12 that evening saying, "This is turning out to be a shocking election. Would you be interested in writing an opinion piece?" So anyway, that's a long winded answer to I didn't see it coming. But yeah, it made sense.
Ben Binversie:
People kind of grabbed onto your book and you had to say because it was definitely explanatory. But I don't want to just focus on the election of Trump. [00:39:30] I'm sure you get asked a lot about that. I'm just wondering what other implications you think come from your findings in terms of just maybe our society, our democracy, and how that urban rural divide and resentment. Are there any other consequences for that?
Kathy Cramer:
Yeah, and I would say they're general things. One of the things that I feel as though I've really learned from doing that work was just the extent to which our [00:40:00] democratic fiber if you will, is broken. Meaning there's so little listening going on across divides. We're more aware of divisions in our culture than in the recent past.
We're so tuned out from one another and so defensive. And people don't feel listened to by their government, by the media, and by other people. So I think one of the implications [00:40:30] from my work is that we have to find a better way of communicating with one another. The whole ball wax from people to the government, people amongst each other and people with their media system. That's a huge set of issues. But people to now because they don't see relevance to their own lives.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah. How has Wisconsin's governor Scott Walker succeeded in exploiting that resentment [00:41:00] as governor?
Kathy Cramer:
Yeah. Well, if you're a supporter of Scott Walker, you might say he's finally a candidate who resonates with our concerns. Right? And if you're not, you say-
Ben Binversie:
What I just said.
Kathy Cramer:
He's exploited it. And so either way, whether it's strategic or it is genuine from his own perspective of the world, he has said things or [00:41:30] tapped into that feeling of real Wisconsinites are folks who live in this broad geographic area in the state outside of Madison and Milwaukee. And there's all these places in the state that have been overlooked and not talked to. And so one way that he tapped into this initially was with a debate that was going on when he first ran for governor over a high speed train line [00:42:00] between Madison and Milwaukee. So Jim Doyle the incumbent. A Democrat. I shouldn't say incumbent, but he was this sitting governor who was not running again, had accepted $810 million from the federal government to build this rail line.
And Scott Walker from the primaries through the general election said, "If I'm elected, I'm not going to take that money because that money is basically money that's going to serve those two areas. It's not going to fix roads in the rest of the state, and that's hard [00:42:30] earned taxpayer money that isn't actually going to help the people of the state of Wisconsin." So he has pitted Milwaukee/Madison against the rest of the state. And then you might say, "But he was county executive of Milwaukee County at the time." He used that to his advantage too by saying, "I am Milwaukee County executive, so I know how to take on the Milwaukee machine. I've done it. I can do it as governor."
Ben Binversie:
With [00:43:00] the election coming up in Wisconsin. Tony Evers and, and Scott Walker. I won't ask for your predictions as necessarily for the election. But since you published the book, do you think there's been any change in Wisconsin that might affect the outcome of this election?
Kathy Cramer:
Yeah, a little bit. I would say one is, Scott Walker was not a Trump supporter during the campaign, during the presidential campaign. But he's been pretty supportive since President [00:43:30] Trump has become president. And there's a lot of disenchantment with Trump. Even among many people who voted for Donald Trump. I think there's a sense that many people feel they wish he were more presidential. So some of that may be rubbing off on Scott Walker, but the other thing that has happened too is people, they don't necessarily make a [00:44:00] direct connection between campaign pledges and then what happens when someone's an office. But there is a lot of talk about the quality of roads in small town, rural Wisconsin because roads are a big deal when you have to drive a lot for everything, for work, for go to school, to get your kids' school, to go do shopping. And people notice the quality of the roads.
They also notice that jobs haven't come to their community. There's a lot of talk about a big Foxconn deal in the southeast corner of the state which is supposedly gonna bring in a lot of jobs. But not to the parts of the state that I was visiting. The parts beyond Madison and Milwaukee. So there's a little bit of a sense I think of, "This administration is not necessarily working out great for me. Maybe it's time for a change."
And if varies depending on who you're talking to. But when I'm saying all this, I primarily have in mind the folks in the small towns that I spend [00:45:00] time with.
Ben Binversie:
Thank you Kathy, for coming on the show-
Kathy Cramer:
My pleasure, thank you.
Ben Binversie:
I'm looking forward to your talk today.
Kathy Cramer:
Thanks a lot. Thanks for inviting me.
Ben Binversie:
Kathy Cramer is a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her most recent book is “The Politics of Resentment.†She has increasingly become known as the woman who writes about resentment. She’s also working on a new project. It’s called the local Voices Network, and it seeks to bridge the very divides she writes about. Learn more about that project, along with her other work on our website, grinnell.edu/podcast.
And with that, we'll wrap up this week's episode. On the next show, we're talking sustainability. [00:45:30] We'll have a story about the 51²è¹İapp College Garden which is in its second year in its new location, where it is produced over 1,000 pounds of produce in back to back years, most of which goes to 51²è¹İapp's very own dining hall.
We'll also talk with Heather Swan, a poet and lecturer from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, about honeybees and the threats facing them, which carry important consequences for food production. Until then, be good 51²è¹İappians. Music for today's show comes from Brett Newski and audio blocks. [00:46:00] If you'd like to contact the show, email us at podcast@grinnell.edu. Find us on twitter with #AllThings51²è¹İapp. Or check out our website, grinnell.edu/podcast for more information about the guests from today's show. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen. I'm your host, Ben Binversie. Stay weird 51²è¹İappians