Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
I write at time when we are in the grip of Democracy’s Despair, at the national level as well, heading towards the necessity of impeachment. Win or lose, that process must proceed as a matter of national honor, although it threatens further damage to the stalled goals of the Green New Deal, via neglect and distraction, when that proto-type “national plan” is being attacked from the left, right and center, including inside the Democratic Party.
I’ve witnessed, first hand, a similar trajectory inside the Western Maryland Green New Deal “coalition,” with local and prosaic projects displacing the more distant, but crucial regional and national vision — and potential funding sources. The local conservative pressure exerted on any dissenting ideas, ably described in the article below, means that any serious reform measures get bent towards the voluntary and the charitable. It also means that the only form of political economy which exists in people’s minds is Neoliberal Austerity, with local, personal self-achievement, self-sufficiency blending, even in reformer hands, with the anti-government, anti-tax, anti-regulatory thrust of the past 30 years or more, from the Republican and Libertarian Right.
What caught my attention here was an opinion piece in Friday’s (October 4th) New York Times about Van Buren County in Arkansas by an author previously unknown to me, Monica Potts. Her findings, grim ones for Democrats and Kossacks, lean towards acknowledging the unshakable alliance between rural Americans, white ones at least, and the Trump venture. Her portrait of the region so closely matches my findings here in Allegany and Garrett counties in Western Mountain Maryland that I just had to write a comment for the Times, which they accepted quickly, within fifteen minutes of submitting it online.
First, here is the link to the article: www.nytimes.com/… the title being, appropriately, “In the Land of Self-Defeat.”
And here is the essence of Potts’ case on why ambitious Democratic policy proposals will not win over white rural voters:
“Economic appeals are not going to sway any Trump voters, who view anyone who is trying to increase government spending, especially to help other people, with disdain, even if it ultimately helps them, too. And Trump voters are carrying the day here in Van Buren County. They see Mr. Trump’s slashing of the national safety net and withdrawal from the international stage as necessities — these things reflect their own impulse writ large.
They believe every tax dollar spent now is wasteful and foolish and they will have to pay for it later. It is as if there will be a nationwide scramble to cover the shortfall just as there was here with the library. As long as Democrats make promises to make their lives better with free college and Medicare for all sound like they include government spending, these voters will turn to Trump again — and it won’t matter how many scandals he’s been tarnished by.”
And now my agreement, and dissent from Potts seemingly iron clad pessimism, what I have found from my own first hand experience to be absent from her analysis: the missing infrastructure for dissent and therefore genuine democracy:
This article is detailed and grim - - accurate, especially on the politics looking towards 2020. Monica, you cannot know how eerily your findings track the realities out here in "Mountain" Maryland, the two most Western counties, Allegany and Garrett. Here, "government" is the enemy, despite the fact that the region is heavily dependent, even for business start up capital, on the 13 state Appalachian Regional Commission, on state and federal supported prisons, colleges and medical programs. Citizens have the departure of major international manufacturing companies in the 1970's and 1980's permanently stamped on their memories, the demarcation between decent economic times and the realities you describe. I've lived in Frostburg, MD for five years, and I am in the process of writing a poor man's version of de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America," but translated through the darker vision of the Late Sheldon Wolin's "Democracy, Inc.” I might call it "Democracy's Despair."
There is great promise in the Green New Deal, including for rural America, but the missing debates and sources of alternative economics, like MMT, mean that Limbaugh and Hannity's economics are the only ones that citizens hear. How to pay for it is crucial, and the fact that in 1945 the defense budget was 35-40% of the GDP ought to tell us that Sanders' GND proposal at 8-10% per year is doable, if we want it. Without debate and dissent though, it is not possible to win converts. The infrastructure of democracy is MIA.
Is Monica Potts’ accurate take on Red Rural American hostility towards anything new and “big” coming from government — ironically, in her home county even a library is fair game — immune to all efforts at change and persuasion? Efforts which, I never tire of pointing out, don’t have any institutional means of support out here — not even from the local University, Frostburg State, which is seriously debate adverse. In surveying its programs for the public — you would never know what the true state of American decay is - or Nature’s for that matter. In that it resembles the worldview of the conservative Republican Governor Larry Hogan’s administration. National and international declines in insects, birds, oceans, global warming getting worse, with dire implications? Well, in Maryland we don’t want to know about that “here” unless it’s about the Chesapeake Bay, which is always in trouble and is going to be drowned by sea level rise in any event...
Let me be clear, I have a problem, a serious problem as a citizen in a faltering democratic republic, with institutions of higher learning that have leaned too far towards becoming vocational schools dominated by business and “IT” majors. At a time when our two parties declare the nation can no longer do anything big, just tinker around the edges of our major problems, like economic regional inequality, among many types, and the increasingly consequential, if not disastrous unequal standing of Nature in our American economic dreams, public colleges need to assure their area citizens that all sides are being heard. And that the vital issues of the day, no matter how divisive, get a thorough hearing from able partisans — and the middle, if there is a “middle ground” any longer. The college itself doesn’t have to take sides. It can, for example, surely find faculty members to argue for or against the Green New Deal, or impeachment, in a well advertised public debate. Unrealistic? Really? With political science, sociology, ecology, ethno-botany, history and economics departments, the college can’t locate dissenting views on the vital questions of the day? Or to link it even more directly to Potts article on “The Land of Self-Defeat,” the vital question of “Can We Afford It?” or “The role of Government in a Modern Economy.” Heaven forbid if the history department held a public debate on the relevance of the New Deal for our times and troubles: unemployment and drugs — my, doesn’t that call for a new CCC? If a professor in the University of Maryland’s Extension Service can offer a sole viewpoint on the alleged alarming state of the national debt, which I protested this summer, cannot a college economics department sponsor a debate on Modern Monetary Theory, the lead challenger to the Neoliberal austerity premises which claim “we can’t afford it” ?
And if the college feels that such a sponsorship between dissenting faculty members would be too disruptive, they can always structure such a debate by inviting competing outside parties to their campus for the purposes of public enlightenment.
And forgive me readers, for being “old-fashioned,” for defending the premise that the role of a liberal arts college, public or private, is in part making sure that serious contesting ideas, even those well in the minority, are presented in an honorable and respectful way. It isn’t being done enough, the responsible face-to-face clash of ideas and policies, despite this being the so-called “Information Age.”
I see the absence of such debates, and formal forums to hold them, as part of the vast and very destructive process of “depolitization” in rural America, what happens when dissent evaporates or can’t find a solid footing.
Conservatives should remember what that felt like. Forgive me for going down memory lane, as with the old conservative show, William F. Buckley Jr’s Firing Line, which went live nationally in 1971 thanks to South Carolina public TV’s pressure. That is, conservative political pressure from the hotbed of radical right revolt, the old secessionist state of the “Firebrands” which helped lead to the Civil War. Buckley’s show received public tax support back when conservatives were an “endangered species.” I watched it on New York commercial channels (WOR-TV, Channel 9) well before that, watched Buckley’s intense manner: a philosophically, historically and oh yes, very theologically driven grilling of liberal guests. It always reminded me of what I might have missed during the Catholic Inquisition. But one learned from Buckley how shaky were the foundational “stones” of modern liberalism, since he had the advantage not only of the best education money could buy at private prep schools and then Yale, he had the advantage of a systematic world view. He was polite, but very aggressive with anyone on the left. Still, somehow he managed to hit it off with someone well to his left, the late John Kenneth Galbraith and they became good friends in private life. Perhaps the last grand time conservative and liberal “elites” could bear to be in each other’s presence. Buckley didn’t do as well when he squared off on public TV with Gore Vidal during the Democratic Convention in the turbulent Chicago of 1968.
Some saw it coming, it being the turn of the workers to the right, with rural Americans not having to execute as much course correcting, the old Democratic South having gone Right and Republican starting with Goldwater, then Wallace and Nixon in 1964 and 1968 (with earlier premonitions, of course, in 1948.)
Here then, is what one prescient progressive thinker saw coming, which Potts did not mention, but which I feel is crucial to understanding the devolution of American politics, and the alienation of rural America which she so ably sketched out for us.
Who was that, you ask? Well, it was philosopher Richard Rorty, in his 1998 book Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. I’m going to supply two full paragraphs from pages 89-90; readers may be familiar with the second one, the famous one, often quoted after Trump’s election, but I want to add its predecessor paragraph for extra context, forebodings about America’s future. It isn’t addressed specifically to rural America, but to the rise of populism as working class America realizes how they are being left out — and who it is that is doing the “leaving”:
Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak, for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point of his book “The Endangered American Dream” is that members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers- themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesman, and postmodern professors will no longer be calling the shots. For once such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen.
There is one other haunting presence hanging over, but not mentioned in Potts’ portrait of rural America, as glimpsed in one Arkansas county. And that is the patron saint of the back-to-the-land movement, alternative agriculture, the bane of globalization, high tech and the coastal elites, and the supporter if not the godfather of all that is good and encompassed by the word “local,” including democracy. The Appalachian festival held annually at Frostburg State University featured a documentary about him, “Look and See,” in September of 2017 as part of a festival themed around “Sustaining Community and Community Wealth Building.” Now I respect the work of Wendell Berry, and have written about it extensively in earlier essays, published when I still lived in Montgomery County Maryland, near the heart of the proverbial beltway beast. Washington used to be the location of the House of Representatives, the house of the people, rightly understood with the Founder’s qualifiers, but it has undergone many changes under its new owners, so that even old staunch Republicans, like the now silent Kevin Phillips proclaimed it as the Arrogant Capital, subtitled Washington, Wall Street and the Frustration of American Politics (1994).
I praised Wendell Berry for his moving and for him, “passionate” speech delivered as the Jefferson Lecture for 2012, the nation’s highest honor in the humanities, and given at the Kennedy Center. It was a ringing denunciation of our capitalism as currently practiced, and gently titled “It All Turns Upon Affection,” even though this, in relative terms, was an angry and prophetic Berry, condemning the Duke tobacco patriarch’s harsh settlement terms for his grandfather, a foreshadowing of how global capital would treat his beloved local rural citizens. These are the good people, who embrace the needs of their land, Nature, and don’t try to squeeze every possible penny out of it, unlike the short run considerations of many modern corporate farmers, Trumping the fate of future generations. Here it is, well worth your time: www.neh.gov/…
You will look in vain, though, for any major media coverage of the speech. Besides my writing about it (a long essay called “The Costs of Creative Destruction”), some academic religious conservatives complained about how angry Berry had become, which if one looks and listens to the video of his speech, is a laughable charge in contemporary terms...other than that, the coastal elites snubbed a near-great man’s highest honor, the nation’s own Jefferson Lecture(r). Yes indeed, Democracy’s Demise.
Now I’m with Berry only part of the way; I don’t have the adulation of the “Local” that he has, coming from a small state, New Jersey, with 567 or so local governments with land-use powers, which, if they weren’t curbed by reforming regulatory governors, would have paved over the entire ironically named Garden State. And I don’t know how much of the modern world of technology we can turn our backs upon, and I write that even being a staunch supporter of the Green New Deal which wants fossil fuel free & local agricultural practices, and more small, diversified farms. But you have to realize events since November of 2016, the election of Donald Trump by his people (with lots of help from wealthy Republican suburbanites, let’s not forget...) has presented Berry’s worldview with some major dilemmas. If the rural folks are good and true and the heartbeat of genuine democracy, and given the values pouring forth from the pages of Berry’s polemical books and his poetry, one cannot easily imagine the virtues of the good rural folk then being invested in the inflated gold plated persona and policies of the Tyrant . This is how Berry frames it up, the rural America vote for Trump, not so different from the way I would put it, and actually have put it, the most positive light on the desperate leanings of hard-pressed people: it was the extractions and abandonments of globalized corporate America which deserted them, and the cultural contempt of the coastal elites that embittered them, and they turned in desperation to Trump: here is the Bastille Day, July 14, 2019 article in the New Yorker: www.newyorker.com/… entitled “Going Home with Wendell Berry.” And here are the relevant excerpts from the article, the interview with the New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich:
What do you think people—journalists, commentators, citizens—mean when they use the term “rural America”?
Since the election, liberal commentators have made “rural America” a term of denigration, the same as “boondocks” and “nowhere.” It is noticed now, by people who never noticed it before, only because of its support for Donald Trump. Rural America could have supported Trump, these people conclude, only because it is full of bigoted “non-college” white people who hate everybody but themselves. These liberals apparently don’t know that, with their consent, urban America has been freely plundering rural America of agricultural products since about the middle of the last century—and of coal for half a century longer. Conservation groups have accepted this abuse of non-wilderness land about as readily as the corporate shareholders. Benson* gave permission to urban America to accept that industrial technology could solve all the problems of food production. And so urban America could just forget about rural America. What a relief! And then Mr. Trump arrived. A century ago Robert Frost spoke of “the need of being versed in country things,” and that need has now been reinforced, at least politically.
In the book you talk about Trump’s election being less of a surprise than a clarification.
People who are hopeless will do irrational things. And these people wanted to make a disturbance in the hopes that the disturbance would bring forth something better. They were hoping for the wrong things, but also they were being ignored. I believe in the importance of conversation. I think our conversation is worth more right now than either one of us thinking separately.
Editor’s Note: * Benson is Ezra Taft Benson, the Secretary of Agriculture under President Eisenhower and the favorite whipping boy of Berry because of his admonition to American farmers “to get big or get out.” Here are the details: en.wikipedia.org/...
Conclusion:
It’s a long way, a very long way, from my findings, which match Potts’ very closely, to the view expressed in another article, which just arrived in the Fall Issue of Dissent Magazine, from a landscape architect at Ivy League Penn. It’s a ringing and accurate assessment about the first New Deal and the Promise contained in the Green New one, entitled “Design for a Green Future,” by Billy Fleming and Xan Lillehei. Having lived with a green-card landscape architect in the 1990’s, working for perhaps the last-living disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, a woman architect herself, I have some sense at least of the devastating impact of conservative thinking on the profession, which is accurately aired out in all its tragic consequences by Fleming and Lillehei. And it is contrasted with the visionary work of the New Deal on land-use, the scene of some of its greatest triumphs — and the arousal of its most intense opposition, including from the Farm Bureau, over the policies of the Farm Resettlement Administration, trying to give new land on very good terms to tenant farmers and farmers displaced from soil depleted lands...and by questioning if the free market in land, based entirely on private ownership, wasn’t going to drive out, and under, small farmers and tenant farmers.
Here’s how the authors describe the impact of Conservative thinking, the Neoliberal monopoly, on their field:
Like other professional services, contemporary design firms are focused on sites, not systems, and on elite desires, not public interests — they aren’t capable of or interested in tackling climate change at a scale appropriate to the crisis. Rather than challenging or subverting these core structural constraints, projects like RBD* merely tweak the machine of disaster recovery and redevelopment. Such incrementalism has been a key feature of landscape architecture and design for decades. We’ve reached the limits of how much this model of climate adaption can accomplish. We need big, bold, national-scale interventions. We need more than a small constellation of private firms acting earnestly, if fruitlessly, as the lone bulwark in our struggle to redesign the planet for a changing climate. We need a Green New Deal.
*{Editor’s Note: that’s the Rockefeller Foundation’s push under the theme “Resilience,” in the wake of hurricane Sandy, the “Rebuild by Design” program...one of the many reasons I’m so leery of promoting the very “elastic” term “resilience.” }
...time is running out in so many ways…and if I haven’t made it clear above: let’s not abandon rural America to the Right and the bitter “fruits” of its Market Utopianism. Let’s remind ourselves that there was a time in the 1890’s when white, rural Protestant America shook with fury at the depredations of the railroads and the banks. And again, against the banks foreclosing on hopeless farmers in the 1930’s...with even the head of the Farm Bureau testifying in Washington in that grim January of 1933: “’Unless something is done for the American farmer we will have revolution in the countryside within less than twelve months.”” And that something was federal structural and financial intervention into the sacred private commodity markets with prices so low it was driving the average farmer under...
If their economic state is now unhappy but determined to “go it alone,” observe that we are now at “the peak” of the business cycle and in most conventional economic accounts, have experienced the longest record of economic growth in modern history. What will happen when the economy turns down, and the empty Main Street storefronts grow starker and more numerous, and the tax base erodes even further: shut the libraries and the public schools, and “home school” all the kids?
Isn’t it time that private foundations in a once democratic republic start thinking of ways to establish progressive outposts of debate and dissent in rural America? Or are they also happy with the way things are going, believers more in privatization and individual upward mobility than in the public good, even an ancient notion of that good founded on the semi-elitist concept of “republican virtue?” Democracy’s demise is unfolding even in age which is rife with “non-profits” and private foundations...are they too being bent, like rural America, under the crushing weight of free-market “austerity” ideas...have they too erased the memory of the first New Deal, and the drafts of the Green New one on the table?
BillofRights
Frostburg, MD