A cheesehead’s view of the world

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Wisconsin seemed perfectly normal. People in Boston or New Orleans had regional accents. We did not. We weren’t even a “region” at all. Just a generic state, with no distinguishing characteristics. When I was young, I could see the world clearly through transparent glass, without my view being filtered by a regional bias. At least that’s how it seemed to me.

Tyler Cowen would say that I was in denial, that I’m a regional thinker like anyone else. In this post I’ll try to figure out what that means. Does the place of my birth influence my political views? Does it influence my taste in art? In both cases, I am going to reluctantly suggest that the answer is yes.

In this post, it will be useful to avoid thinking in terms of the usual left-right distinctions in politics. Wisconsin is currently a purple state, arguably the most purple state in the entire nation. In that sense it is fairly normal. But in a deeper sense Wisconsin is an outlier. It has an unusually egalitarian ethic, and this was even more true back when I lived in the state (from 1957 to 1977).

In other posts, I’ve argued that the distinguishing feature of utilitarianism is the idea that every person’s welfare is equally important. By that criterion, you could argue that Milton Friedman was a utilitarian. But you could say the same about the “sewer socialists” that governed Milwaukee during the early decades of the 20th century. This isn’t one of those left/right issues—it’s beyond traditional ideology.

As with many on the left, I have a visceral dislike for the arrogant rich, for people who think they deserve special treatment because of their wealth or talent. As with many on the right, I have no sympathy for the argument that people on the bottom of society should be excused for bad behavior.

I’ve never been to Scandinavia, but of the countries that I have visited, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the Netherlands seem most similar to Wisconsin in a cultural sense. Lots of Germans settled there after the failed 1848 revolutions (the same year that Wisconsin achieved statehood). There were also lots of immigrats from Scandinavia. I presume these migrants brought some of the egalitarian instincts that defined Wisconsin culture.

When I travel around America, most regions seem more class conscious than Wisconsin, at least compared to Madison, Wisconsin back in the 1960s. Like almost everyone there, I went to public schools. I never even knew whether the other students came from a family of doctors, lawyers or janitors. When I got to Boston, I was surprised by the fact that you could tell a lot about a person’s class by their accent. I was shocked to find that some towns reserved their beaches for residents only. Or that there were gated communities. (Today, I live in a gated community and I still hate the idea.)

I taught a semester in London in 1986 and then a semester in Australia in 1991. In a standard political sense, Britain seems more left wing than Australia. The British government certainly spends more on social programs. But Australia seems to have a more egalitarian culture. I’d make a similar comparison between Wisconsin and Massachusetts.

Because of the egalitarianism I imbibed growing up, I am very averse to any form of tribalism. I dislike right wingers that demonize various races and gender preferences, but I also dislike left wingers that demonize the rich or straight white males. Indeed I’d favor the French approach of not even having the government collect data on ethnicity, and I’d copy the Swedes by having the government treat everyone as a single person for taxation purposes. I’m a radical individualist egalitarian utilitarian. America’s president is a public servant—I view him no differently from a butler or chauffeur. He works for me.

In my paper entitled The Great Danes, I argued that utilitarians adopted left wing views on economics at times when those views seemed “progressive” and right wing views on economics when free markets seemed more progressive. Here is AI Overview:

On January 28, 1932, [Wisconsin] Governor Philip La Follette signed the nation's first state unemployment insurance legislation.

and

Wisconsin revolutionized U.S. social policy by replacing traditional cash entitlement programs with strict, work-based welfare systems that served as a blueprint for the 1996 federal welfare reform.

Socialism seemed progressive in the 1930s and neoliberalism seemed progressive in the 1990s. Both policy changes were small-p “progressive”, but only the first was progressive in the left-wing sense of the term. The key to understanding places like Wisconsin (or Sweden) is to look past the outdated left/right approach to political ideology. Progressive utilitarians follow the zeitgeist.

Part 2: Am I a regional art appreciator?

I am very resistant to the idea that my taste in art is in some sense “regional”. I tend to prefer literature from Europe and the visual arts from both Europe and East Asia. On the other hand, if I were to list my six favorite American artists, it would look something like this:

1. Bob Dylan
2. Frank Lloyd Wright
3. Stanley Kubrick
4. Herman Melville
5. David Lynch
6. Orson Welles

Half of those artists were either born in Wisconsin, or along the state line in (Duluth) Minnesota. Too small a sample size to be statistically significant, but worth thinking about. Do Dylan, Wright and Welles have anything in common?

In an excellent book discussing Wright’s residential commissions, the author quotes from Wright’s biography:

Human scale was true building scale. Why not, then, the scale fixing the proportions of all buildings whatsoever? What other scale could I use? This was not a canon taught me by anyone. So I accommodated heights in the new buildings to no exaggerated established order nor to impress the beholder (I hated grandomania then as much as I hate it now) but only to comfort the human being.

and then adds the following observation:

Prairie house plans were based on a tartan plaid of main spaces and secondary spaces, of public rooms and circulation spaces. Their decentralized asymmetry did not follow the Beaux Arts insistence on a primary, often dominating, focal point—a vestige of its roots as a symbolic architecture for the divine-right royalty, following Wright’s philosophy. Prairie design was emphatically democratic and non-hierarchical.

I suspect that Wright is under-appreciated because architectural critics prefer urbanism to Wright’s suburban approach. Even though I love visiting New York, deep down I have I have a suburban sensibility from growing up in Madison.

Orson Welles seemed to share Wright’s democratic spirit. Of all his films, it is the character Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight that is closest to Welles. Falstaff’s heart is broken when the dream of democratic camaraderie dies at the end. That is sort of how I feel when I see Wisconsin’s traditional political culture get destroyed by the forces currently sweeping national politics. Maybe that sort of egalitarian world is an impractical dream, but it is still sad to see it disappear.

A whole book could be written about Dylan’s views, which are almost endlessly multifaceted and hard to pin down. One obvious theme is his distaste for the arrogance of the rich and powerful, as seen in songs like The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll. But Dylan was never a reliable left winger, indeed he was once a fan of Barry Goldwater. The song It’s Alright Mama, contains jabs at both the right:

Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn't talk, it swears

and the left:

Bent out of shape from society's pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole that he's in

I like to think that I form my own views, and don’t let others tell me what to believe. But given the large share of my life devoted to listening to Dylan songs, I’m probably in denial about my autonomy. Many of his lyrics are in my bloodstream.

Maybe I should stop resisting the notion that I’m provincial. After all, free will doesn’t really exist—does it?

Another post could be written on how people are not just regional thinkers, they are also generational thinkers. Does the fact that I grew up without air conditioning or color TV influence the way I think about current issues of poverty?

PS. Much later in life, I discovered that Wisconsin people actually do have an accent, which you can hear in films like Fargo. I was fooled by the fact that when I was growing up, many national newscasters were midwesterners.

PPS. David Lynch grew up in Montana. That’s far from Wisconsin but perhaps shares some of the same “north central America” culture. The Straight Story is about an old man journeying to Wisconsin and is a film that affected me deeply.

PPPS. That same Dylan song quoted from above also contains many other gems, including, “he not busy being born is busy dying”. Even 60 years later, he seems like an almost insanely good lyricist.

PPPPS. I tried to get ChatGPT to generate a version of that famous New Yorker cover. The first two attempts were pathetic—big cities on islands. After a few nudges I improved the image to merely bad:

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