Politicians pander to the 'folksy' midwest - but ignore the region's radical history

It happens every presidential election. The candidates will get all folksy. They will eat a corn dog, they will start sentences with, “Folks …” They will play up any connection to the heartland they can dig up and they will use the word heartland a lot.

Related: Sanders faces mounting attacks from anxious moderates as Iowa vote nears

Maybe this is all because the primary season begins with the Iowa caucus, but this act plays well across the country. The midwestern common folk routine works because it is still a dominant American fantasy about what a good life is: close to the land, close to God, and in the warm embrace of a heteronormative nuclear family. We don’t need no fancy learnin’ to figure out the problems we face, just good common sense. Which, for some reason, we assume midwesterners have a ton of.

Amy Klobuchar has been playing up her Minnesota origins in every single debate, insisting, “It’s not flyover country to me!” and proposing vague things like “heartland economics”. At her campaign events she has been serving up “hot plate”, which, as every midwesterner knows, is a disgusting mix of whatever meat is in the freezer mixed up with whatever Campbell’s cream soup is in the pantry, probably a canned vegetable of some kind, and whatever ready-made frozen starchy thing might be available, from leftover noodles to frozen tater tots, slopped together and made with bitter resentment by a parent when they are filled with exhaustion and despair but still feel obliged to perform familial duties like neighborhood potluck or Sunday dinner. You bake it at 350 degrees.

Elizabeth Warren is also emphasizing her childhood in Oklahoma over her career in Massachusetts, talking about how her father was just a janitor (or a “maintenance man”, depending which version of the story you hear). But no one has been working quite so hard to play the role of the common midwesterner as Pete Buttigieg.

He keeps rolling up his shirtsleeves, he keeps making speeches in cornfields. He keeps talking about cornfields. He recently announced at a campaign stop in Pella, Iowa: “It might not be a bad idea to send in somebody to Washington, rather than from Washington, maybe somebody who can actually walk from his house to the nearest cornfield.”

Everyone loves to be pandered to. Why do you think the literati squeal with delight every time Barack Obama releases his reading list for the year? “So great to have a president who reads,” they exclaim, by which they mean “reads the same books as us”, because if he was toting around Tom Clancy it is doubtful they would get quite so excited.

But Buttigieg’s act is perhaps the least convincing. He doesn’t have small-town wisdom; he has a corporate sneer. He grew up in the wealthy suburbs, raised by leftwing academics. After attending Harvard and Oxford, he decided he wanted to get some experience “in the real world”, as he put it in his memoir, so he went to work at McKinsey & Company, a management consultancy, the kind of place that bears some responsibility for why midwestern lives are so difficult right now.

If anything, Buttigieg is trying to lay claim to an identity and a history of a region he fundamentally misunderstands, like all Democrats seem to do. The invention of the idea of the “red state” during the 2000 election managed to homogenize and stereotype an entire region, reducing it to an entirely white, rural and conservative region, a land of “simple folk” (by which is meant uneducated and uncultured), and to create the impression it was always that way.

But the history of midwestern radicalism is long and deep. From the battles of Kansas abolitionists, to the socialist rebellion of farmers in Oklahoma, to the communist and anarchist parties in every midwestern state, to the labor movements in Kansas City, Chicago and Detroit, the midwest has long been a place of organization and revolution. Kansas was the center of a communist publishing center, sending literature about women’s rights, civil rights and socialism across the nation. Of course, this is not something they even teach you in midwestern high schools – they prefer to leave it out, alongside the genocide of the native people. But that rebellious spirit is as much a part of the region as its love of indefensibly bad casseroles.

Embedded in politicians’ folksy act is a lack of interest in the real problems facing the midwest. Few of the candidates have talked about the spiking suicide rate among farmers. It is not just a lack of available and affordable mental health services, although that, alongside closing medical facilities in rural regions, is a serious problem that few of the candidates have comprehensive plans to address. Because suicide epidemics aren’t stopped only with prescription drugs. They are stopped by material support. We need to address the corporate takeover of farms, which has left farmers in debt to companies such as Monsanto and Tyson. Now when trouble comes, like a failed crop or a trade war waged by a president that closes markets for American farmers, there is no one to turn to, and depression can set in. The union busting and communist scapegoating destroyed the solidarity of the region’s farmers.

But of course, the problems of the midwest are not only rural problems. The gun violence and teachers’ strikes and systemic poverty of urban areas like Minneapolis, Chicago and Detroit are also midwestern issues, but no one pretends they can solve those issues with a go-get-’em attitude and bags of “common sense”.

Related: Bernie Sanders' real obstacle is not Trump. It's the Democratic establishment | Hamilton Nolan

The problems of the midwest can perhaps best be solved through a time-honored midwestern tradition: organization and rebellion. Because the act is no longer working, and those playing hardest at being the typical midwesterner are seeing their polling numbers slip in the midwest.

Maybe next time when we think about the “typical midwesterner”, we should picture people like the Chicago anarchists who gave us lasting labor reform, or the Kansas abolitionists who fought for the end of slavery, or even the housing activists getting tenants’ rights protection legislation passed in Kansas City. Our “conservative” history is a shallow aberration. If the candidates want to continue to pander to the midwest, they will have to do better than just corn dogs and cornfields.

• Jessa Crispin is the host of the Public Intellectual podcast