FLYOVER COUNTRY

I am a city boy, born and bred, and I have never lived on a farm. I don’t know any farmers and know nothing concrete about farming, except that everything I eat starts out on a farm, and that farmers buy everything retail, sell everything wholesale, and pay freight both ways. Farming is practiced in rural America, where if they are not farming they are mining, or extracting, or making things in factories, or doing other rural stuff. I am pretty ignorant about all that too. What I do know about the rural comes from movies, fiction, and country music. The tone of all these is largely one of complaint: these people work hard, harder than what the city people do, and are largely unappreciated by them, although urban life is made possible by that labor.  Oftentimes I detect also a certain contempt for those who live softer, more secure lives. I don’t know whether actual rural folks feel like that.

I’ve been thinking about farmers lately because my country is now ruled by people largely elected by farmers, or at least rural communities dominated by farming and extractive industry.  The famous map that rightists are always exhibiting, the sea of red that shows Trump winning all but 200 or so US counties in 2016, demonstrates this, and also the rural advantage built into the US Constitution.  Most people were from farming communities back in 1789, and the Framers reflected that majority; and even back them, there was a sense that farmers got a raw deal, and were taken advantage of by those who knew how to grow money instead of wheat. A 1787 rebellion in rural Massachusetts was one of the scary events that led to the adoption of the Constitution. The first rebellion under the Constitution was also by rural people, these protesting the federal tax on whiskey. 

Nor has the tradition of rebellion in the hinterland ever vanished. One reason banking reform in the Great Depression was so urgent was that farmers were appearing armed at foreclosure auctions and threatening people who bid on the indebted properties. Rural dudes armed with machine guns were robbing banks.  And despite all the New Deal programs and subsidies, rural America is still pissed off, it seems. 

Oddly, at least to me, the ire seems to be directed against Washington and government bureaucrats and people who live in big coastal cities, and not against the corporate interests who most affect their lives. This was not always the case. Rural people were radicalized from the 1890s through the 1930s—they saw the banks, the railroads and Wall Street as their natural opponents. Now they’re all Republicans.  This confuses me.  Do they think that the party that has historically represented business and banking has developed a soft spot for family farmers and industrial workers?  Or maybe it’s the social issues. Abortion and unfamiliar sexual activity are more bad than economic survival or a better deal for rural America are good?  

I have no answers, but I would bet someone does have an idea for how to make this all come out right for rural people. Any such plan must include exposing the center of the country to the new economic realities.  The fossil fuel and extractive industries have to be set on a course to extinction, and the burdens of this transformation can’t be borne by the workers in those industries and their families. Big plant manufacturing isn’t coming back, except via robots. Can we even conceive of how to create a livable, prosperous city where the main ‘employer’ has no actual employees? We’ll have to.

Farmers have to be responsible for the ecological impact of their pesticides and the run-off from their farms and their over-use of aquifers, and these changes can’t be paid for exclusively by farmers. The whole monocultural-industrial form of agriculture doesn’t seem sustainable in the long run. It’s not good for the land, nor for the people who eat the kind of American diet that sort of agriculture makes almost requisite. Big changes have to come, and it’s liberal America who’s going to pay for them, because we got the money. Those 200 counties Trump didn’t win account for a third to a half of national income. Ever notice that the blue states are richer than the red states (except Texas)?  Right now, some woman in a Boston office is paying for the treatment of a Kentucky miner, and this transfer is going have to become even larger. That’s right libs—every day you’re saving the lives of people who hate you. Get used to it.

Obviously, it’s much easier to pander to the folks in the middle of the country, to tell them that yesterday will return (although they were pissed off yesterday too!) and that we can keep cranking out fossil fuels and cheap meat forever. But, the creative destruction at the heart of capitalism doesn’t work if those destroyed are not made whole in a creative way. It would be better if America were an actual democracy, because in a democracy, sooner or later, the nation moves in a way that makes the people better off, and not just materially.

And it’s possible that democracy will come to America one day, after, perhaps, some very dark times. These will fall most heavily on the people in the middle of our country, who have already been battered so much, and who still vote reliably for their own destruction.  L. Cohen wrote a song on the subject with a line in it that I’ve always liked. He wrote of democracy…

      It’s coming to America first.

      The cradle of the best and the worst.

      It’s here they’ve got the range,

And the machinery for change

And it’s here they got he spiritual thirst.

I hope we still have the range and that the machinery still works. I have seen enormous changes in my own lifetime and I have little doubt that even greater ones are coming that I won’t see.  Yet the study of history suggests that there was never a flourishing cosmopolis that did not rest on a flourishing hinterland. If we don’t fix the center, then the delightful coasts will wither and their politics will be be  crushed by the rage of flyover country.