In most circumstances it’s a sign of health and success if the members of an organization are flourishing financially. It means they’re producing a product or service that people want and they have a solid and profitable process. People are buying their cars. The mutual fund is getting great returns. The movie studio is making hit films. The toy company is making popular games. The doctors’ office is adding many new clients. The law firm is winning big cases.
Yet, we’re all familiar with the story of the wealthy and successful person who gives it all up to live a simpler life. The popular 1980’s sitcom Newhart was an extended dream a Chicago psychologist had about moving to Vermont to be an innkeeper. There have been many movies and books with the same theme. There are now countless detective shows premised on the city cop moving to a small town in the hope of having a safer and lower pressure job. Another popular theme is the Wall Street trader who has a midlife crisis and takes a job serving the people, often as a teacher. People recognize the obvious moral of these stories, which is that life is about more than the rat race and it’s nobler to look after the needy than it is to spend your life working on ways to separate them from their money.
Real life isn’t bifurcated in this way between soulless strivers and capitalists and virtuous social workers and nuns. But there is a tension between these two very real human impulses. In a general sense, right-wing parties emphasize the first and left-wing parties the second. When it comes to the proper role of government, some think it should provide basic safety and the conditions that best allow commerce to thrive. Others believe it should assure that as few people as possible are left behind and that those on the bottom have a decent opportunity to rise to the top. Traditionally, Republicans have been the party for folks at the apex of the capitalist food chain and the Democrats have represented the small farmers and factory workers.
But that is now changing, as we can see in a pair of current articles. Writing for CNBC, John Harwood looks at the results of a new Brookings Institute study:
The House Democratic majority, which represented 39% of the U.S. land area in 2008, now represents just 20%. The House Republican minority 80% of U.S. territory.
That widening red-blue economic divide in turn drives the parties’ starkly different policy agendas. It helps explain why Democrats lavish more attention on education, technology and protecting immigrants, for example, while President Donald Trump and other Republicans place mining, manufacturing and border control on center stage.
That coincides with a sharp increase in incomes and economic output for the constituencies Democrats represent in Congress. Today, the $61,000 median income of blue districts substantially exceeds the $53,000 median income of red ones, reversing the order from 2008.
The average gross domestic product for Democratic districts, near parity with Republican ones in 2008, has grown 50% higher. Output per worker has followed the same pattern…
…The share of professional and digital services jobs in Democratic districts more than doubles the share in Republican districts; a significantly higher proportion in blue areas now holds college degrees. By contrast, Republican districts now boast the lion’s share of work in basic manufacturing, agriculture and mining. They also have a slightly higher proportion of residents age 65 or older – 16.6%, compared to 14.7% in Democratic districts.
The Wall Street Journal tells the same story in infographic form. The Republican Party is morphing into a farmer/worker party, and that’s changing to nature of the Democratic Party too.
One problem here is clear from the fact that I didn’t say that the GOP is becoming a farmer/labor party. They are still hostile to unions and don’t support class-based solidarity at all. Instead, they support race-based solidarity and a cultural unity based on white-dominant traditional small-town values. They seek to hold modest income people together by appealing to their worst instincts rather than their common aspirations. And they have an easier time doing this precisely because they’ve been so successful in undermine organized labor in this country and offshoring manufacturing jobs.
But it’s also easier for them because the Democrats are getting easy pickings from professional and college-educated voters who live mostly in cities and near suburbs. The Democratic Party is changing not only because they are representing more affluent constituents but because they no longer feel the need to represent small farmers or a dwindling manufacturing base.
In 2016, Trump pulled off a miracle election victory by winning this swap. He lost millions of traditional Republican votes in the suburbs but won even more traditional Democratic votes in small towns and rural areas. The trade didn’t benefit him on the whole. He lost the popular vote by a good margin. But it helped him win in enough Rust Belt states to take the Electoral College.
But I am less concerned about election results than the culture of the country. When I talk about fascism, I don’t typically have in mind death camps like Auschwitz. That’s the extreme. Fascism arises when the right wins the support of working people based on a resentment-based solidarity. Typically, scapegoats are found to explain why a war was lost or the economy is in the shitter. Normally this involves racial or religious minorities, as well as intellectuals and cultural elites.
Militarism is often a feature, but opposition to immigration and hostility to education are mainstays of fascism. The encouragement of vigilantism and street violence are recurring themes. The sense that the culture is under threat and that people should use any means to fight back is stoked, and in extreme cases results in the formation of politicized paramilitaries or militias.
These factors are glaringly present in our current environment, and I do not believe they will improve if there is no left-wing alternative seeking to unite famers and workers around economic principles that transcend racial or religious differences.
A successful left-wing party in present-day rural America may look quite different from the Democratic Party, but it doesn’t have to pander to people’s prejudices. It should actually exist primarily as an alternative to the familiar fascist impulses we see when workers are under stress. What it would absolutely have to do, though, is put their constituents’ concerns first on their list of priorities.
This isn’t going to happen in the American system because the rules governing our elections force us into a two-party system. The Democrats are going to put the priorities of urban and suburban people first because that is where they get most of their votes. What results is a party that is left-wing in most respects, but only for some people and only in some communities. It’s a trade-off that actually abets the shift to fascism in large parts of America, and that’s very dangerous. Even on the matter of civil rights it is dangerous, because it’s well and good to show a consistent commitment to protecting the vulnerable but if you’re actually part of a process that is putting people at more risk, your votes and rhetoric are not the only consideration. In the end, you have more hate crimes and more race or religious-based violence. Being more reliable about protecting against a threat isn’t necessarily an improvement if the threat keeps increasing.
Aside from these considerations, there’s also a cost of the poor regardless of where they live. Elizebeth Warren just celebrated winning the Working Families Party endorsement over Bernie Sanders. That’s a nice accomplishment, but the Democratic Party is supposed to be the party for working families. Increasingly, it’s not. And it’s not because they are changing into the party for professionals.
These changes often seem inexorable to me–driven by changes that are outside of the control of party strategists. There’s a ying and a yang to it, so that changes originating mostly in the right are molding the left into something equally unrecognizable. What concerns me is that people don’t focus enough on what this means for our people and their representation.
I don’t believe we explain much by using terms like “polarization” and “division.” Forces are driving us apart and they have a compounding effect. When we’re repelled by the worst behavior from white rural America, we respond in ways that accelerates our mutual alienation. And that makes them even more isolated and reliant on right-wing solutions and points of view.
I don’t think any community of any makeup or size can be healthy without a left-wing party fighting hard to represent them. And I think there’s an unacceptable risk to sitting back and doing nothing while a fascist movement takes hold of one of our two major political parties.
We agree on the importance—both for the party’s and the nation’s long-term civic health—of Democrats representing working people. That said, here are a couple of reactions to this essay:
1) Rural – Rural doesn’t necessarily mean working-class. I’d be interested to see voting #s by income/wealth in rural areas. I suspect a big part of the Republican vote in those districts is from professional, middle-class, upper-middle-class, and wealthy residents.
2) Farmers – It’s one thing to build a “farmer-labor” political coalition in 1900 when farmers made up 30-40% of the US work force. It’s another when A) farmers make up roughly 1% of the work force, B) farm households have higher than median incomes, and C) poor agricultural workers are largely transient and disenfranchised.
3) Workers – Like agriculture before it, manufacturing is increasingly mechanized and accounts for a steadily shrinking share of the working-class. If the “face” of the Democratic party increasingly is urban women of color who work in the service sector that’s largely because those same workers are increasingly the “face” of the working-class.
Now, none of what I’ve just said is of any earthly use to most working-class residents of central PA, or northern ME, or eastern OR, or western IA. What might be of some use is a Democratic party that’s staunchly pro-union (including revamping our woefully outdated labor laws), that has a well-developed anti-monopoly platform (like the one you and others at the Washington Monthly have begun to lay out), that uses the Green New Deal (or something like it) to spur investment in small towns and rural areas (and not just in a handful of megalopolises). Doing something about the opioid epidemic/”Drug War” would help, too.
Let me add a few anecdotal thoughts to your essay and what MassCommons said. I have family who live in rural western Ohio. They work in places like Walmart and small factories. The pay is not good – even if they call you a Manager- and those small factories pay slave wages. My grandson regularly gets his eyes burned. It is easy to feel abandoned and feel some animosity to those in the cities making more money with less stress.
When I was a young person, I worked on a dairy farm. We milked between forty and sixty cows. Now I understand dairy farms may milk a few thousand. Clearly they are not family farms any longer. They are large corporate affairs and many people work in support of them. So the culture surrounding the farm from my day to today has also changed. People are no longer the owner and manager of their business.
Coal miners in WVa are often talked about. It is a dying or dead occupation. But what do we offer them?
A Green New Deal would help a lot of this and we need to get on with it or,,our own lives will be torn apart, not by our rural neighbors, but by the environment. And before I forget, those health care insurance deductibles are killers to many of these rural working people. Where in heavens name are they supposed to come up with it? Medicaid is the only real solution and that is never secure. M4A would fix it.
“The salient fact of American politics is that there are fifty to seventy million voters each of whom will volunteer to live, with his family, in a cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, if someone would only guarantee that the black, gay, Hispanic, liberal, whatever, in the next box over doesn’t even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow to put on it.”
Attributed to commenter Davis X. Machina, Ballon Juice
In order to bring these people ‘under the tent’, you need to appeal to their basic instincts, just like Trump. You will NEVER win that, unless you do the things they prefer.
In which case you lose the democratic base……because that base knows what they are.
.
And that is why I think we need to give up and govern for our voters. NOT those who vote Republican. It gains us nothing and costs people who do vote for us. If we focus on making life easier for OUR side, it becomes easier to vote. More security = more reliable votes
If you bring them in the tent, you will lose others out the back.
Voting for Trump might not prove you are a racist, but it sure is a leading indicator.
“I do not say that all Trumpites are racists, but it is the case that all racists are Trumpites”
Modifying J S Mill for America, circa 2019.
Too much truth in that. So I don’t like it. Best I ignore it. Anyway whatever happened to Davis?
He still posts on Lawyers Guns, Money and Ballon Juice.
I don’t mean to be contrarian, but the “conservative” movement never had very strong farmer/labor roots, and have been permanently doing the bidding of plutocrats, BigAg and multinational corporations for the entire duration of the (ongoing) “conservative” era, yet that didn’t stop small farmers and a huge chunk of (white) laborers from taking the bait and falling for the conservative shit. Why is not the blame to be placed on these farmers and “laborers” for abandoning THEIR farmer/labor roots? How do they think they are benefiting by walking away from their New Deal roots? I surely don’t see how the Dems abandoned their economic interests to a greater degree than the Repubs have, yet the (white) rural/small city farmer/workers now vote 85% Repub (or higher).
90s Globalism (which was largely a project of “conservatism”) destroyed small manufacturers and their jobs, while the relentless opportunistic consolidations of Big Ag destroyed the family farm. Repubs certainly didn’t aid these small farmers and manufacturers through their “conservative” policies, and the foolish Dem party didn’t do much to stand in the way of these developments, but they didn’t do MORE to destroy these people than Repubs did.
We could note that there are different motivations for evangelical Neo-confederate rural voters, and high plains/mountain rural voters and Rustbelt/Midwestern rural voters. They each joined the “conservative” (and now National Trumpalist) movements at different points in the Conservative Era. They all happily gorged on “conservative” hatred of Big Gub’mint (i.e. Job Killin’ Regulations) because they think they should be allowed to do whatever they wish to the environment, and think that all federal lands should be given to them to despoil and exploit for their (short term) benefit. They are overwhelmingly denialist on climate change, and begrudge urban areas the ability to combat the ocean of high power weaponry that is killing hundreds of people a month. Hell, they think they get to have a vote on whether police brutality is frequent in urban neighborhoods! And with Trump’s assault on ag markets via his (already lost) Trade War, the primacy of their racialist concerns stands revealed.
But sure, Dem candidates should be advancing some sort of agenda that would restore the number of smaller family farms and reduce the power of BigAg–that’s where the forced divestment should occur. They should look to subsidize the placement of Green New Deal manufacturing in cities smaller than (say) 50,000 as the bargaining chip for climate action. They should say that we’re going to control the border in a sensible hi-tech way, but also reform our (failed) immigration system. But ultimately, I don’t think most of these rural voters really believe in or care about the common good. They simply care about being angry reactionary culture warriors shaking their pitchforks for a bygone age.
Euzoius, I agree with all your points, but most with the policy/action recommendations in your final paragraph. Like you, I’m pessimistic that actually following through on those steps would result in changing the votes of today’s rural voters, but nonetheless, they are the right steps to take for the future stability of our country. We do need to make sure climate-change mitigation (Green New Deal) singles out and benefits smaller cities in order to assure their financial viability. We do need to encourage the survival of smaller farm holdings and the families that own them. If these federal policies benefit primarily ‘white’ constituencies, so be it. I’d love to see our new Dem President and Dem Congress pass legislation that remedies some of the evil and incompetence that is the legacy of failed conservative ideas. The Dem party needs to take back leadership on policies that benefit ALL citizens, not just the ones whose votes they are most likely to get.