Visiting a Diner in Trump Country (Road Trip 2024)

While I returned from my big summer road trip about a month ago, I've been doing my fair share of local rambling. Last weekend I ventured with my kids to Central Pennsylvania to visit a dear friend who normally hangs his hat in Pittsburgh but has a lake house up in the hills. My kids and I cherish these visits, which we make as often as we can. They also provide an opportunity for armchair political science, since the surrounding area is about as Trumpy as it gets.

In an election year the tension I sometimes feel is more intense. On our drive out we stopped for lunch at a McDonald's in Danville, Pennsylvania. It was a clean, efficient, and well-appointed Mickey Ds, a real top of the line franchise. My enthusiasm was tempered by seeing a guy sitting at a table with his arms crossed and anger on his face wearing a Trump cap. He didn't seem like he was there to eat. In fact, he went over to the family at the next table over and engaged them in a political conversation saying that "she" (I knew who that was) was "scary" and a "socialist." This of course was a day after Harris gave a speech noteworthy for its emphasis on law and order and that did not contain any sweeping new progressive goals like universal child care (which this guy surely thinks is socialism.) A woman talking to him replied that Harris was not really leading in the polls, but that "they" were just saying that. 

It was an interesting thing to see. This guy was acting like an evangelist, but he wasn't selling Jesus, he was selling Trump. This struck me because on my trip out to Nebraska this summer I noted how support for Trump seemed to be dimming among the base. Perhaps this was the sign of desperation, or that my earlier observation was just plain wrong. 

Apart from hearing the usual dumb Boomer joke about "global warming" when someone said the lake water was cold, I did not get much sense of the political temperature until we went out for breakfast at a diner in a nearby small town. I knew from our last visit that this diner had a giant "BACK THE BLUE" sign on the outside and lots of Christian nationalist iconography on the inside and fake money with Trump on it pinned to the wall behind the register. Last time we were there I also had to hear a table of old white guy fogies hold forth on their hatred of liberals. The thing is, there is nothing in this world that I can resist less than a breakfast at a really good greasy spoon diner. Living in cities and college towns in my 20s and early 30s these places were my favorite haunts. When I moved to Jersey, the Valhalla of diners, I was elated. I'll be damned if someone else's lousy politics are going to keep me from enjoying a "hungry man" breakfast. I also grew up in a very conservative rural place and was less intimidated than most people from a progressive New Jersey suburb would have been in these environs. 

The diner in question is really small and there was only one waitress working. We remained patient and appreciated how hard she was having to work. This time around there were no Trumpy conversations to listen to, but I did notice something strange in the air. My friend guessed that some of the patrons thought he and I were a couple, since there weren't any adult women with us and proper menfolk in that region did not take their children out to diners by themselves with another man. Maybe that was the case, maybe not. I still had myself a delicious breakfast and my kids left happy. 

Driving down the road back home I started to think, and something did not sit right with me. I may live in New Jersey now and have a PhD and taught at an independent school in New York City for 13 years, but I am still the same person who grew up in rural Nebraska who has always loved diners. The diner I went to had all kinds of stuff hanging up to let me know that I wasn't welcome because of my politics. My background and upbringing, however, were pretty much the same as the other people in there. The political candidate they love, Trump, is a billionaire's son from New York who wouldn't be caught dead in a place like this. 

Instead of making the usual accusations about this discrepancy, I want to think a little deeper. Trump has an electoral advantage in that he could do pretty much anything, including being convicted of 34 felonies and inciting an attack on the Capitol, and still keep well over 40% of the electorate in his pocket. What I have come to realize in my interactions with Trump voters is that they don't really care about anything he does. I know that sounds obvious, but the reason isn't. They don't care not because they are hypocrites (a tired accusation) but because they believe in what he SYMBOLIZES, not who he actually is. 

Trump and his MAGA slogan symbolize the maintenance of all kinds of hierarchies. His name on a sign means support for men in charge, white people in charge, LGBTQ people in the closet, Christianity assumed, and immigrants deported. While not all Trump supporters fit all of these categories, each has at least of one these hierarchies in mind when it comes to their support. Trump could indeed shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose support because what he does is literally meaningless. All of his meaning is symbolic. 

What makes me sad is that so many people prefer this symbolic ecstasy and its attendant hatreds over human relationships. This is why I sometimes never feel lonelier than when I visit the types of rural places that made me and the kinds of humble diners I love more than the fanciest restaurant. 

Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff as "Reagan Dawn" Artifact

First off, I want to acknowledge that I have not been writing in this space. I have been focusing my efforts on my Substack (where I tend to do more political stuff) and on a couple of research projects. Come autumn I am planning on doing one of my patented "listen throughs" on Richard Thompson. In the meantime, I am re-reading a book that has me thinking again about what I call the "Reagan Dawn."

This is my name for the pop cultural moment lasting roughly from 1979 to 1981 that coincided with Ronald Reagan's election. The culture in this moment both reflected and drove the conservative political turn. I first wrote about it back in 2015 (!) and if I had the time, tools, and talent I'd write a book about it. Some of these pop cultural artifacts are pretty obvious, like Disco Demolition Night. Others are not.

That hit me while re-reading Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff. I'd read an interesting piece on him for The New Republic by Osita Nwanevu that made me want to revisit this book, and one of my daughters had also recently gotten obsessed with NASA. I first read it in 1999, before I had really started digging into the history and culture of the 70s in a serious way, and so did not contexualize the book as a product of the Reagan Dawn back then.

From the outset, Wolfe has embarked on a project of reclamation. In heaping praise upon military test pilots and the Mercury astronauts picked from them, he is intentionally elevating the kinds of men and qualities poo-pooed by the counterculture. In a foreword he wrote in 1983 he explicitly states that his point was to elevate military officers, who he felt had been denigrated in books about war going back to key Great War works like All Quiet on the Western Front. The men he profiles -military, white, traditionally masculine, Protestant, family patriarchs, lovers of hot rods, disdainful of NASA scientists- are exactly the kind disdained by the counterculture. In the context of post-Vietnam War America this reclamation project is freighted with deeper meanings and symbols.

Wolfe makes clear that the men he profiles love their country above all else, which is the reason why they are willing to face death and make widows and orphans of their families. These men themselves stand for a "real America," one that Reagan promised to revive. Writing in the late 70s after the big cultural and political breaks of the 1960s, Wolfe offers a tantalizing nostalgia for the Mercury program, with its origins in the Eisenhower years and the first orbits before that fateful day in Dallas in 1963. Wolfe's book came out in the era of the Iran Hostage Crisis and a general yearning for national renewal, exactly the thing Reagan promised. Nor for nothing, Reagan's campaign slogan in 1980 was "Let's Make America Great Again." Then under Reagan and now under Trump the "great" era is located before 1965. 

The thing with Wolfe is that he is such an engaging prose writer (in non-fiction, at least), that I am happy to go for the ride even if I can tell where he is slipping in his own ideological commitments. The test pilots and astronauts are indeed impressive people and their accomplishments are worthy of praise. What's funny reading the book today is just how much his side won. You can't go to a baseball game without there being a moment or two of military worship, for example. I have also been struck by how much conservatism has degenerated in the past four decades. As much as I disagree with many of Wolfe's assumptions, he's a good writer and a person that I am inclined to take seriously. I was trying to find the equivalent today of a conservative kind of writing meant not to be polemical but entertaining and all I could come up with was The Babylon Bee. That pretty much says it all. 

This got me thinking even more whether Reagan's long shadow has finally passed. While supply side tax cuts are a zombie idea that won't die, Trump's economic policies are hardly the kind of thing that would have pleased The Gipper. Democrats are also now far less likely to be cowed by charges of "socialism." I used to think of Reagan Dawn as the moment that our current political economy came into being. Now I am not so sure.