[continued from previous message]   
      
   wrong way around while fishing with a reporter from Outside Magazine.   
   Today, Zinke is favored to win Montana’s new House seat, though according   
   to a deeply reported Politico story, he appears to spend most of his time   
   in Santa Barbara, California.   
      
   Americans of all kinds, urban and rural alike, rightfully feel excluded   
   from the centers of political decision-making and ignored by a giant,   
   faceless bureaucratic state.   
      
   For a politician, exuding a sense of familiarity, of shared concern and   
   experience with the citizens you hope to represent, can be a valuable   
   thing – if you can pull it off.   
      
   Some can – take Senator Jon Tester, Montana’s sole Democrat holding   
   statewide office. Tester still works the dryland wheat farm in the rural   
   Montana county where he was raised. When he was nine years old, he was   
   feeding raw beef into a meat grinder in his family’s butcher shop when his   
   left hand slipped into the machine. He lost three fingers. A 2017   
   Washington Post profile notes that he still uses the same meat grinder.   
      
   Tester can campaign as a farmer without fearing accusations of hypocrisy,   
   and in a state that has gone from purple to deep red in recent elections,   
   he wins consistently. But Tester is the exception that proves the rule.   
   Finding seven-fingered farmers is not a political strategy, and appearing   
   authentic, whatever that may mean, is no guarantee of smart policy or   
   political courage.   
      
   Tester, who has spent the past few years criticizing Democrats for   
   abandoning rural voters, voted to deregulate the financial sector in 2018,   
   claiming that the Dodd-Frank legislation passed after the financial crisis   
   had hurt small community banks. (An Associated Press factcheck found that   
   the laws were not the primary cause of consolidations and closures.)   
      
   Some on the left have an explanation for this state of affairs. Laid out   
   most famously in Thomas Frank’s influential What’s the Matter with   
   Kansas?, and most recently invoked by Bernie Sanders backers who note his   
   popularity in rural areas, the argument goes like this: like the rest of   
   the country, rural communities have been and remain dominated and   
   exploited by the economic forces that transcend local control –   
   deregulation, unrestrained financial markets, and deindustrialization. If   
   Democrats would simply run on bold economic populism, it goes on, rural   
   voters would overlook the cultural issues where they align with   
   Republicans and vote in accordance with their economic interests.   
      
   Frank’s account of the trouble with Kansas has troubles of its own. His   
   diagnosis of the Democratic party’s shortcomings is not wrong, but his   
   remedy is simplistic. It misunderstands how political motivations work at   
   an individual level. Yes, the economic forces that tear apart rural   
   communities and lives are material – most things are. These forces that   
   remade and degraded rural economies also deepened class divides, and   
   consolidated wealth in the hands of a few. But the rural identities and   
   cultural norms that formed in response to these forces are deeply held,   
   not easily discarded, and, crucially, not always functionally related to   
   economic conditions in ways that leftists would prefer. Right now, rural   
   America’s dominant political culture is conservative. Any serious attempt   
   to build political power here must begin by conceding this fact.   
      
   This is a tangle. Republicans pander to rural voters with fabricated   
   authenticity, with false displays of rural cred – and win. Democratic   
   attempts at replicating this strategy predictably fall flat. A watered-   
   down version of GOP cultural politics, taken in the context of the party’s   
   electoral slide in rural areas, smacks of desperation. Some leftists treat   
   rural Americans as possessed by an enchanting ideology, sure to fall into   
   line once the spell is broken.   
      
   Untying this knot requires an understanding of what’s happened to rural   
   America and why the caricatures that both parties rely on float far from   
   the truth, failing to acknowledge its political complexity and demographic   
   diversity. About a quarter of rural residents are not white, an   
   accelerating trend according to the 2020 census. That a majority of   
   Indigenous Americans live in rural areas – and most sovereign tribal land   
   is rural – is often ignored. Lower-income people and the poorest rural   
   Americans tend not to vote at all. And with both parties, each in its own   
   way, taking rural areas for granted, can you blame them?   
      
   A century ago, there were more than 6 million farmers; today, fewer than   
   750,000 remain. Yet the US’s agricultural output has increased fourfold   
   since then, while total acres farmed have declined only slightly.   
      
   Same set of resources, more capital, fewer owners: this is an instructive   
   way of understanding the economic stratification that has occurred in many   
   rural communities. A class of local elites owns the valuable land that   
   surrounds a typical small town, which is home to a post office, public   
   schools, a grocery store, and sometimes a hospital.   
      
   According to a recent Atlantic article by Patrick Wyman, the owners of   
   physical assets – fast food franchises, apartment complexes, car   
   dealerships – make up the rest of this scaled-down hierarchy. They sit on   
   local non-profit boards, run the chamber of commerce, and are influential   
   members of their churches. They often hold elected office. And they   
   frequently vote. Wyman called this class of people the American gentry:   
   local oligarchs, with wealth more often tied up in material assets than   
   hedge funds.   
      
   As Wyman explains, the rural gentry lack the familiar emblems of extreme   
   wealth; these are not people with luxury penthouses, Wall Street offices,   
   wealth accumulated in global finance, and offshore bank accounts. But on   
   the ground at the town or regional level, they hold substantial economic   
   power and are disproportionately responsible for the political   
   constitution of rural areas.   
      
   Excluded from the gentry are the vast majority of rural Americans. The   
   political messaging of both major parties tends to glorify rural America   
   as full of small farms and yeoman farmers. In reality, American   
   agriculture is enormously reliant on government subsidies and tax breaks,   
   while education, healthcare, manufacturing, and retail employ more rural   
   Americans than agriculture, as of the 2015 census. As for all that   
   farmland – hundreds of millions of acres nationwide – it is increasingly   
   held by the wealthy and powerful.   
      
   In early November, a 127-acre Iowa farm sold at auction for $18,500 per   
   acre. As Mother Jones reported, institutional investors like Prudential,   
   Hancock, and TIAA have purchased huge amounts of farmland in recent years.   
   The single largest owner of American farmland, though, is Bill Gates, with   
   holdings spread across the country. His plans for the land are not clear,   
   but the financial incentives are obvious. With the climate crisis set to   
   dramatically reduce the amount of arable land, Gates likely sees this   
   oncoming scarcity as a smart investment. He’s probably right.   
      
   Fear of resource consolidation in the hands of the powerful few has been a   
   constant in rural areas since America’s founding. In the mid-1830s, the   
   English sociologist Harriet Martineau spent several years traveling around   
   the US and recording her observations of the new country, a popular   
   activity among European intellectuals of the time. A characteristic of   
   Americans, in Martineau’s view, was pride in the land, in its vast   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)