Regardless of your politics, you have to agree that Donald Trump remembered the “forgotten man” and woman. Yet that particular class of American still seems forgotten, frankly – or deliberately overlooked. And that doesn’t bode well for Flyover Country no matter what happened in the election.
Shelve the fact that the coast-based media have rediscovered the importance of “battleground states” of Wisconsin, Michigan, and even Minnesota to presidential politics and electoral-college calculi, parachuting into the heartland during the weeks before Election Day to try to discern what we’re all about out here.
They also did that four years ago, which was when they discovered the forgotten man. And on the basis of a Trump victory four years ago that stunned the far-flung cognoscenti, they vowed never to forget us again, if only because the key to victory for a president every four years seemed to have shifted from the highly predictable coasts.
“There was a post-2016 awakening among those who realized they had ignored a big part of the country – the one that lives far from the corridors of power and the bright lights of cable television studios,” wrote Jason De Sena Trennert, an investment strategist, recently in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal. “For a while, everyone seemed to understand the hidden pain of those in the so-called Rust Belt of the American Midwest who had paid the highest price for 50 years of social engineering at home and abroad.”
And, as Trennert recounted, “For a while the coastal elites made some attempt to empathize” with us.
But this attempt didn’t last long. Soon after the 2016 election and the wake-up call to the coasts that we issued out in Flyover Country, all the oxygen in the newsroom became sucked up with gases emanating from the swamp in Washington, D.C. Out here in the middle of the country, we became ignored once again, even as we were doing the manufacturing, building, harvesting and exporting that took the U.S. economy to new heights by early this year.
Here’s all you need to remember about how they’ve continued to ignore the forgotten man: Even Fox News, which by all logic would have been the first East Coast-based TV network to understand Flyover Country, has paid us no more account during the last four years than the previous four years. For “diversity” of perspective throughout its broadcast day, Fox News still simply leaves network parapets in D.C. and New York, electronically flies over the heartland, and taps into news anchors based in … Los Angeles!
Read the rest of this piece at Flyover Coalition.
Dale Buss is founder and executive director of The Flyover Coalition, a not-for-profit organization aimed at helping revitalize and promote the economy, companies and people of the region between the Appalachians and Rockies, the Gulf Coast and the Great Lakes. He is a long-time author, journalist, and magazine and newspaper editor, and contributor to Chief Executive, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and many other publications. Buss is a Wisconsin native who lives in Michigan and has also lived in Texas, Pennsylvania and Florida.
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