Daniel Kleve and the Problem With the Heartland

The photo that made Daniel Kleve infamous. Click to enlarge.

The University of Nebraska at Lincoln has had significant free-speech issues recently. First it scrambled to reverse itself after trying to confine an undergraduate to a “free-speech zone” because she attempted to recruit for conservative group Talking Points USA. Then it demoted a graduate assistant for staging a rude and vulgar, but nonviolent, counter-protest of that undergraduate. But neither had the far-reaching consequences of the university ignoring Daniel Kleve.

For those playing the home game, Daniel Kleve, a UNL junior from Norfolk, Nebraska, was caught on camera at the 2017 Charlottesville, Virginia, “Unite the Right” rally, violently beating a counter-protester with a flashlight. Surrounded by other self-proclaimed white nationalists who remain unidentified, Kleve has the counter-protester doubled over, slamming the flashlight into his back, while other deliver kicks to his abdomen. Kleve has no discernable expression on his face.

Recently, video emerged online of Kleve boasting of his racist credentials, ginning up support among other white nationalists, and promising future violence against, well, somebody. Kleve claims the video has been deceptively edited. Nevertheless, enough video bites, screen grabs, and accusations from fellow students exist to indicate that Kleve actively opposes Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, homosexuals, women, and the kitchen sink. This guy is, by any definition, a Nazi.

The real pearl-clutching has arisen, not over Kleve’s statements, but the university’s decision to do nothing. Citing free speech, the university has elected to take no disciplinary action for deliberately inflammatory statements Kleve has made in the past, and threats he has made regarding the future. Massive protests have precipitated around Daniel Kleve and his statements, which have partly disabled portions of UNL. Yet both sides are fundamentally misguided.

I suggest the Daniel Kleve problem isn’t that he holds these opinions, nor that he voices them in deliberately confrontational ways. Rather, Daniel Kleve has successfully drawn attention to a portion of America that we’ve attempted to stifle. This portion is physically, economically, and socially isolated from the parts we lovingly display to the world. And it forces us to acknowledge that America’s deeply divided past didn’t go anywhere.

When I moved to Nebraska in 1992, it was an overwhelmingly white state. The town I moved into had one Black family, two Hispanic families, and one Japanese family, in a town of over five thousand. In land and layout, the town wasn’t particularly different from many California suburbs I’d previously lived in. But it differed in degree of isolation: not only was the population racially homogenous, but the town was an hour away from the nearest commercial airport.

A flyer about Daniel Kleve, distributed
around UNL. Click to enlarge.

This distance from up-to-date amenities had snowball effects. We had some limited amounts of light industry creating jobs, but nothing enough to connect us to the larger, globalizing economy. Three hours from Denver by interstate, five hours from Omaha, we were too distant from large cities to get involved in their economic or cultural spheres. Corporations wouldn’t invest in our town because we were too physically distant from markets.

In such an environment, there was nothing drawing new people into town. Nobody who didn’t already have roots in the community had no reason to move in. Thus the community became ingrown, attitudes became immobile, and I was astounded, moving into town, to discover that people openly dropped N-bombs in casual conversation. Even in the 1990s, racism wasn’t concealed. Nobody used dog-whistle language. Fuck you, this town said, we’re bigots.

Since then, I’ve noticed a distinct cultural divide in Nebraska. Physically and economically isolated towns don’t disguise their racism. Neither do people who perceive themselves as disconnected from the economy: since I slipped backward on society’s economic ladder, I’ve worked in a factory and I’ve worked construction. In both fields, I’ve observed people willing to use racial language and express their bigotry undisguisedly, even right beside people of other races.

Lincoln likes to believe itself a cosmopolitan center. Omaha is Nebraska’s financial and industrial center, home to Warren Buffett and Union Pacific Railroad, but with the University and its surrounding arts community, Lincoln is Nebraska’s cultural capital. It tries to market itself as aggressively diverse. Permitting somebody like Daniel Kleve into town undermines Lincoln’s ideas, not only about itself, but about Nebraska’s place in a changing and diverse world.

Yet Kleve isn’t an outlier. He represents much of Nebraska outside the Lincoln-to-Omaha corridor, a state comprised of geographically isolated towns, disconnected from the national and global economy. This state only makes national news when snows block Interstate 80. People in Manhattan and California call this “Flyover Country.” When you hear about the “White Working Class” that supported Donald Trump, here it is.

Daniel Kleve represents a Nebraska that Lincoln and Omaha are happy to ignore. He represents a Middle America that coastal residents openly despise. By entering the centers of power in Nebraska, he forces a confrontation the self-anointed want to believe is already resolved. Unfortunately, he isn’t a mistake or a throwback. This is the heartland which our centers of power have tried to silence and ignore. If we don’t confront this soon, it will occur elsewhere, too.