The Year of McDonald’s

 

McDonald’s is central to American life, both physically and culturally. The last few months have provided two massive news stories that have emphasized this. At the end of October, there was the viral, and controversial, Trump campaign stop, where he “worked” for 30 minutes at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania. Then, this week, there was the news that Luigi Mangione, the alleged assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was caught in a McDonald’s—also, coincidentally, in Pennsylvania—because he was spotted by a group of morning regulars and employees.

The reaction to both stories in certain parts of the media has proved that a lot of commentators don’t understand what McDonald’s means to ordinary Americans—which basically means that they don’t understand ordinary Americans, period.

Let’s start with the most recent. After Mangione was arrested, I saw two questions raised. The first was: Why would someone “so careful” as Mangione go into a McDonald’s? The second was: How in the world was he noticed—given that it is a soulless franchise where you should be able to easily blend in, since each is the same bland, and heavily trafficked space?

I can answer both questions. I’ve spent over a decade sitting in McDonald’s all over the United States—I believe I’ve visited over 500 franchises. Roughly half the conversations I had for my 2019 book Dignity took place in a McDonald’s—in fact, my working title was, Everything You Want to Know About America Can Be Learned in a McDonald’s, because I sincerely believe this. Nowadays, I keep a Substack about walking around the world, and all my pieces about the U.S. have pictures and stories from McDonald’s. As a walker, I use them for the same reason everyone else does—they are welcoming, social, inexpensive, and have Wi-Fi, good food, great coffee, and clean bathrooms. They are also a great way to learn about a place from the bottom up.

Over the years, I’ve come to understand the role McDonald’s plays in the day-to-day life of Americans, especially those toward the bottom, and those suffering from mental illness. That’s why I could have scripted the chain of events that led to Mangione’s capture, down to the appearance of the regulars who first noticed him (like the white-haired man with a chain round his neck who seemed friendly but not entirely at ease speaking into a CNN mic.)

I’m going to go out on a limb here, despite it being too early to do so, and say that the theory I find most convincing is that Mangione could be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. I’ve met a lot of people like this in McDonald’s, because the franchise is often one of—if not the only—place in the “real world” where they can go, grab a cup out of the garbage can, sit at their corner table, and fit in, at least for an hour or two, without encountering too many dangers. It becomes, for many deeply troubled people, their only lifeline to normal society.

It’s a role McDonald’s, to its credit, has accepted. Or some of its staff have, at least. I’ve witnessed many occasions when employees and morning regulars have gone out of their way to help those who are suffering. I’ve seen people offer free food and calls for assistance, and I once heard a female customer call her husband, tell him to come to the parking lot, and repair a broken-down car, free of charge.

Which is why the fact that Mangione was noticed isn’t surprising at all. Each McDonald’s is a community.

I’m writing this from the McDonald’s in my town in upstate New York, where I do most of my writing when at home, and I “know” almost all the two dozen or so oddballs who come in, like me, sit in a corner, and either stare at the wall, rant into a cup, or work on their beat-up laptop. I know the morning regulars—the evolving group of five or so guys who are at the door when it opens at 5:30 a.m.—as well as the afternoon regulars. All the employees also “know” these oddballs, and should a new one come in, sit in a corner, and start acting a bit off, they’ll notice. That almost always leads them to offering help, or in this rare case of Luigi Mangione, calling the police.

The larger question here is, how is it that McDonald’s, a business founded and designed to make eating as quick and transactional as possible, has become America’s default community center?

The answer: It’s happened because people are fundamentally wired to make meaning, and because having a community you feel you belong to is foundational to who we are. If you provide people with a landscape of banal franchises, they will form communities and make meaning in a banal franchise.

But to the educated elites—what I call the front-row—this kind of community is seen as embarrassing and a bit backward. Which brings us back to the first news story that proves McDonald’s is central to American life: Trump’s photo op. Here is a great illustration of what many in the front-row still miss about his appeal.

A couple plays dominoes at a McDonald’s in Gary, Indiana.

Trump’s superpower has long been signaling to working stiffs that he’s “just like you,” despite being on the surface nothing like them. His love of McDonald’s, which I believe is as genuine a feeling as any politician can ever have, is one of those signals. In fact, it may be his most effective, because it goads his critics into signaling that they are not “just like you.”

McDonald’s is wildly popular with every group of Americans—urban, rural, male, female, middle or working class; it unites every demographic in the U.S., with a single exception: the highly educated, especially academics. They alone, as a group, seem to have moral issues with McDonald’s, and while they might use it, they do so grudgingly, usually to appease crying kids or for a rest stop on a long trip.

So Trump’s embrace of McDonald’s becomes a political twofer. It shows he’s one of you: He is a back-row guy at heart. But it also shows that while he should be a member of the front-row, given his education and wealth, he’s not, because such people despise him for many of the same reasons they look down on you: for what he eats, how he talks, for what he believes in, and for how he arrives at those beliefs, which isn’t by spending years reading through approved syllabi, but having gone out into the world and learned from it, one mistake after the next.

A father and son dine at a McDonald’s in Bakersfield, California.

The press, and his opponents, used the McDonald’s photo op to point out all the obvious absurdities. “The former president, before cosplaying as a successful businessman, was the quintessential elitist,” bleated MSNBC. “So what are MAGA die-hards and faux-centrist Trump apologists talking about when they praise his drive-through stint as ‘amazing and hilarious’?” Obviously, the article didn’t actually pose this question to any normal American, and instead just started quoting statistics.

Criticism like this fell flat because Trump also recognized the absurdities of his stunt, and didn’t care. And anyone who did could be seen, by him and his supporters, as the same old pedantic scolds—people who are so absorbed in their books that they can’t see the real and bigger truths of the world, including the idea that cosplaying as a McDonald’s employee for an hour, especially working the drive-through, is simply fun.

This is the thing about the front-row: Their framework doesn’t fully understand what makes the average American tick. By focusing on what can be measured, they often miss what is meaningful. In their eyes, systematically imposing ideas from the top down is the route to building the best society, and a human is a transactional, rational, economic thing. They congratulate themselves with the increase in America’s wealth, and ignore our declining life expectancy due to drug overdoses, suicides, and reckless diets—which is all evidence of a nihilistic despair, as is a growing and desperate loneliness.

That communities exist in almost every McDonald’s should be all the evidence one needs to understand that people need to feel part of a society larger than themselves, especially “spontaneous” ones, built organically from the bottom up. These communities are the flowers growing between the cracks of the cement parking lot: a reminder that life survives, and often thrives, in the harshest environments, such as the modern world—which, though impressively built on the back of science, and despite being very wealthy, is still a pretty harsh, cold, and despondent place.

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