Why has fascism spewed forth in America like the stench of hell? One source of this once unimaginable horror can be found in a crucial piece that's missing from our national conversation. It might surprise you, but a re-examination of the slogan, "We are the 99%," could help us to understand how the creeping tide of Trumpism and fascism have saturated so much of our country, particularly rural areas.
The Occupy movement was a very important wake-up call when our national zeitgeist still pushed the idea that hard work was all that was necessary to make a decent living. The white population began to see that the "American Dream" had been an illusion for most people of color all along and had been evaporating for a lot of white people since the Reagan years. "We are the 99%!" is right and true if the goal is simply to point out the massive transfer of wealth syphoned from the bottom up in the decades since Reagan. But it can feed into the vague notion that we're all in the same class. And that can lead to a serious misreading of our current situation, because "the 99%" contains at least two distinct classes. Besides the working class, there is also the small-business / professional / independent contractor class, basically what some economists call the "petite bourgeoisie."
In metro areas, the working class and small-biz ownership class have different perceptions of their respective places in society, but in a lot of rural areas, particularly in the midwest, working class people have traditionally had some social ties with the business owners and professionals. They shop in the same stores, go to the same churches, send their kids to the same schools, and cheer for the same sports teams. This can happen in our race-stratified society because many hundreds of those towns are all white. Everyone from the richest doctor (and doctors are the richest people in town) to the lowest-paid food worker, are all white. And while this uniform whiteness is slowly changing, it remains a major reason why so many rural white people think that race is not an important economic factor. The people they see every day at the bottom of the economic ladder are all white and many of the white business owners that they see are struggling.
At the heart of the cultural identity of the small business class is the ideal of self-determination, a universally expressed human desire.
Europeans came to America in massive numbers with the hope that they would be freed from rigid class systems. The horrific treatment of our continent's original inhabitants has always been in service to the Jeffersonian ideal of the "yeoman farmer," that any (white) man could be a property owner, independent of kings and lords. This has deeply infused American culture with the notion that a man could "be his own boss," deciding for himself how to allocate his time each day. He could make a good living by owning a small business or farm and his fate could be based solely on his own talents, his own good or bad decisions. (Notice, of course, who is left out of this.) But in the past 40 years, this idealized path to prosperity has run smack into the brick wall of corporate domination. As both major political parties have succumbed to corporate money and influence, the small business class has had a much harder time staying afloat.
What our metro-centered media don't understand is that in rural areas, family farms and small businesses have historically been almost the entire economy. When they die, the town dies. And that matters very much to me personally. I grew up in a farming family, near a small town in Illinois. Its economy was originally based on farming and coal mining, but the last mine closed in 1957. Then came the 1970s, when President Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture sneered at small farmers with his advice, "Get big or get out." As many local farms were going under, my hometown struggled to survive. And because this was happening massively, all across the country, rural distress finally penetrated the consciousness of the metro media, by way of Willie Nelson's Farm Aid concert tours. But the media grew tired of the subject and soon dropped it.
In the late 1980s, Walmart moved into my hometown, and because economic laws and regulations have been constructed to boost Wall Street and corporations over small businesses, Walmart was able to cut its prices so low that it destroyed a large number of the other businesses in town. Their profits, rather than contributing to the local economy, were transferred to financial institutions, suppliers, and investments in far-off metro areas. It's important to note that in metro areas, when businesses close there are usually other jobs and business opportunities available, but rural areas can't produce enough revenue to satisfy the corporate appetite for profits in the long run, so there's little interest in sustaining any investment there. Which leads to this: once Walmart managed to suck our town dry, it closed down and moved on to decimate other towns.
For the former owners of businesses displaced by Walmart, life changed drastically. A few moved into lower levels of management for franchise chains in large towns, no longer "masters of their own fate," but still nominally members of the "middle class." Others dropped down into the working class, feeling robbed of an identity that was rooted in the all-important ability to determine how they spent each workday. And as for the workers displaced from the "mom & pop shops" (and later from Walmart's closure), many now have to drive long distances to jobs in other towns, while others have been forced to move away entirely. These days, my hometown has become an empty shell of what it once was. The population is continuously in decline. Downtown, vacant brick buildings are collapsing. Some have been gutted by fire. There's also a meth problem. In fact, a lot of the problems that we see in economically depressed urban areas are now also plaguing many rural areas. Which might be why the crime issue works so well for Republicans. They always explain it as "urban crime is coming to your small town!" (In other words, "blame Black and brown people for your troubles, not the corporatists behind the curtain.") But the reason for this social decay is the same in both places: the serious lack of economic investment in the community.
So when you hear the Trumpies screaming "freedom, freedom, freedom!" one major factor at the root of it is an entirely valid (though often subconscious) fear of the loss of self-determination and the loss, or deterioration, of a place they have called home for generations.
The precarious position of the small business / independent contractor class, particularly in rural areas, has been destabilizing our nation for decades, yet it is seldom directly addressed as an issue. When the economy is discussed, it's usually in terms of things like inflation or stock market volatility or jobs numbers. The thousands of ways in which Wall Street has wrenched control away from small businesses are seldom mentioned. Which leaves individual business owners and contractors either to believe that the real difficulties they face are their own fault, or the fault of some targeted "other." Guess which one they're likely to choose?
The Republican party has captured the distress of this class, strategically channelling their anger away from corporate power, aiming it directly at those who oppose their rule. After Trump's stunning election, our media was all about how his "blue collar voters" inexplicably "voted against their own interests." Then, when actual statistics showed that more of his votes came from a slightly higher income bracket, there was widespread puzzlement about how these seemingly prosperous people could be feeling so aggrieved. Racism was often mentioned and there was also talk of education as a key factor, college vs. non-college. But my answer is that, while the racism is clearly visible and highly destructive, it's also tightly entangled with a class issue that has been rendered almost completely invisible by our media, academics, and politicians. And the messages political parties use to communicate with that class can make a huge difference.
For my entire lifetime, the Republican party has done a bang-up job of cramming their deep love and devotion for "business" down all of our throats. And while their policies have always advantaged Wall Street and multinational corporations, they have managed to convince huge numbers of small business owners, professionals, contractors, farmers, and even independent truck drivers, that "business" means them. If you're struggling to stay afloat, they argue, it's the fault of *insert bigotted term here.* They enjoy employing bigotry of all kinds in their weaponization of the legitimate "fear of falling" of the small biz/professional class. And because that class includes all races, they can even lure in some people of color by targeting Jews.
At the same time, over the past 40 years, the majority of the Democratic party hasn't made a big point of standing up for small businesses and farmers, although they sometimes vaguely hint at it, using words like "the middle class" or "Main Street." That fuzzy terminology and an outdated understanding of this class often hinder our communications about it and advocacy for policies that would make a difference.
It is my belief that it is entirely possible to gain voters in rural areas and to mitigate our national slide into fascism by widely promoting policies that put some brakes on the corporate juggernaut, while making sure to tie that directly to how those policies affect rural America. It would take nothing away from racial and social justice concerns, while adding something to gain rural votes. And here's something to ponder: During the 2016 Democratic primaries, I paid close attention to all of the county-level results in my original home state of IL and my adoptive state of CA. In both, the results were sharply divided. About 95% of rural counties chose Bernie and the ones with cities chose Hillary. And there's a reason for that. After reading this far, hopefully you can see how a message emphasizing freedom from corporate rule might appeal to rural voters. And as a more recent example, consider John Fetterman's Senate win in PA. Among other things, he campaigned on "standing up to corporate greed," and "taking on Big Ag so Pennsylvania’s small farmers can have a fair shot." To me these examples show that rural voters respond well to policy ideas that clearly and unambiguously support small businesses and limit corporate power. And finally, with his most recent SOTU, it looks like President Biden is starting to get much more explicit about going in that direction. Hallelujah!
All of this means that strong support for independent businesses and family farms can feed directly into the ideal of self-determination at the core of rural identity, snatching the terms "independence" and "freedom" right out of Republican hands and putting them to good use for our side.
A final note: I once read that the discontent of the "petite bourgeoisie" has historically been the driver of the rise of fascism, and from what we have seen in the past few years, I believe that's a valid conclusion. After the 2022 election there's a possibility that Trumpism and fascism will fade away for a time, but the discontent will keep boiling up again unless we do something serious to eliminate the conditions causing it. Watch out for another autocratic Pied Piper, one that won't be as clumsy as Trump.
(For more insight into the intellectual / professional / managerial portion of this class, check out Barbara Ehrenreich's book, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, an oldie but goodie.)
--------------------
I'm not an academic or intellectual, but have been thinking about this issue for about 20 years, trying to gain some insight. Since this is my first "diary," after being a daily reader of this site for many years, I'm hoping you'll go easy on me in the comments. I'll try my best to respond, but being new to this, I don't know if I'll get the hang of it right away.
