Andrew Foltz-Morrison

It’s as if presidential campaigns and their pursuing tagcloud of media pundits are actually a kind of landscape detection society – a rival Center for Land Use Interpretation – seeking out obsolete spatial versions of the United States, outdated geographies most of us no longer live within or encounter.

They find small towns that, by definition, are under-populated and thus unrepresentative of the United States as a whole; they find ‘old-fashioned’ restaurants that seem on the verge of closing for lack of interested customers; they tour ‘Main Streets’ that lost their inhabitants and their businesses long ago. All along they pretend that these landscapes are politically relevant.

My point here is not that we should just swap landscapes in order to be in touch with the majority of the American population – going to this city instead of to that town, visiting this urban football team instead of that rural hockey league, stopping by this popular Asian restaurant instead of that pie-filled diner (though I would be very interested to explore this hypothesis). I simply want to point out that political campaigning in the United States seems almost deliberately to take place in a landscape that no longer has genuine relevance to the majority of U.S. citizens.

The idea that ‘an old-fashioned soda shop’ might give someone access to the mind of the United States seems so absurd as to be almost impossible to ridicule thoroughly.

Geoff Manaugh, “Minor Landscapes and the Geography of American Political Campaigns.”