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   Obama’s administration tried to prevent similar consolidation in beef   
   production. The industry was trending the wrong way, with a few large   
   corporate meatpackers steadily expanding their hold on hundreds of   
   thousands of small, independent cattle producers. There was a sense of   
   hope that here, finally, was an administration that would take on the   
   industry, according to Bill Bullard, whom I caught on the phone in between   
   service dead zones as he drove across Montana.   
      
   Bullard used to operate a cow-calf operation in South Dakota and today   
   runs R-Calf USA, the largest advocacy group representing independent   
   ranchers and slaughterhouses. Obama’s Department of Agriculture held   
   public meetings across the country to hear from ranchers and farmers.   
   Bullard recalled one event in 2011 in Fort Collins, Colorado, for which he   
   estimated that more than 2,500 people showed up, with the crowd spilling   
   out of the event center.   
      
   Under Obama, the USDA proposed rules that would protect farmers who spoke   
   out against unfair contracts and tried to negotiate better prices for   
   their products, as well as stronger enforcement of the Packers and   
   Stockyards Act of 1921, a bill that cracked down on Gilded Age meat   
   monopolies.   
      
   This would have been the pinnacle of Obama’s agricultural reform, giving   
   the USDA real teeth in preventing mergers and holding corporations   
   accountable for anti-competitive behavior. But little came of the effort.   
   Industry groups like the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association ratcheted   
   up lobbying pressure, and Congress repeatedly blocked stronger USDA   
   corporate enforcement – often led by rural state Republicans. In the end,   
   Bullard said, Obama “left the farmers and ranchers out to dry”.   
      
   Today, the “Big Four” – Tyson, Cargill, National Beef, and JBS – control   
   an estimated 85% of the beef industry. As R-Calf alleges in an ongoing   
   lawsuit, the companies have illegally colluded to fix artificially low   
   prices, driving independent producers to bankruptcy even as beef prices   
   soared. “We took a private action,” Bullard said, “because we couldn’t   
   rely on the Congress or the administration.”   
      
   In Obama’s last year in office, Congress finally passed legislation   
   strengthening the USDA’s antitrust powers. Then Donald Trump took office.   
   Allies of corporate agriculture were put in charge of the USDA, which   
   promptly threw out a rule that made it easier for small farmers to sue   
   large meatpackers and demoted the agency’s independent antitrust office to   
   a subdivision of the Agricultural Marketing Service. (Joe Biden is   
   proposing to revive some of the Obama-era rules.)   
      
   These issues of corporate domination and consolidation persist, affecting   
   every facet of rural America, while both parties have stood by. Their   
   efforts eased by weak antitrust enforcement, corporate retailers like   
   Walmart muscled out independent businesses in small towns. Now, dollar   
   stores proliferate in rural communities, sometimes forcing the big box   
   stores to close. There are more dollar stores in the US than Walmarts and   
   McDonald’s locations. In many large geographic areas with low populations,   
   people live with reasonable access to only one hospital, or even a single   
   healthcare provider. Lack of competition in rural areas is a crucial   
   reason why Obamacare exchanges have failed to keep down healthcare costs,   
   as the Intercept reported. And that was before the pandemic, which has   
   caused a record number of rural hospitals to shut down for good.   
      
   It’s no coincidence that this trend toward consolidation tracks a   
   sustained stretch of economic stagnation in the rural United States. Forty   
   years ago, just over 20% of new businesses came from outside metro areas.   
   By the 2010s, that number had declined to 12%. According to one recent   
   study, 97% of net job growth between 2001 and 2016 went to cities.   
      
   And it’s a plain fact that rural areas never recovered from the Great   
   Recession. From 2010 to 2014, counties with fewer than 100,000 people had   
   a 0% net rate of new business creation. While many cities bounced back,   
   jobs and businesses didn’t return to rural areas, especially those with   
   predominantly communities of color. Unemployment levels were still   
   trailing pre-recession levels when the Covid-19 economic fallout arrived   
   to hammer rural areas yet again. Deindustrialized towns continue to bleed   
   population and jobs. Broadband access lags, preventing established   
   industries from keeping up and new ones from breaking ground, while gaps   
   in secondary educational attainment between rural and metro areas yawn   
   wide.   
      
   At the same time, the rural gentry has only expanded its wealth. According   
   to a central Kansas dairy farmer I called, just a few families own most of   
   the farmland that surrounds his town, with holdings that swell to tens of   
   thousands of acres. These families, he said, get the sweetest federal   
   contracts, call the shots on Covid protocols in the church, and tend to   
   rotate in and out of local positions of power in government.   
      
   This isn’t limited to Kansas. Using county data from 1980-2016, a 2020   
   peer-reviewed study published in Population Research and Policy Review   
   found an association between the chronic population decline in rural areas   
   and an increase in income inequality. In other words, the economic forces   
   that have meant immiseration and population decline for rural economies   
   have benefited a small class of capitalists. This relationship, write the   
   study’s authors, “suggests that income and other forms of wealth (by   
   extension) are becoming increasingly concentrated into the hands of a   
   select few”.   
      
   After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, these compounding rural crises   
   became something of a preoccupation for national media and mainstream   
   liberals. Rural America suddenly seemed to them a distant shore, home to   
   strange customs, backward people, and jokes that weren’t funny. National   
   reporters dropped in to diners and filed dispatches from Trump rallies.   
   Pundits wrote countless columns with titles like “Why rural America voted   
   for Trump”, “Penthouse populist: why the rural poor love Donald Trump”,   
   and “Explaining the urban-rural political divide”.   
      
   Democratic politicians such as Tester and the former Missouri senator   
   Claire McCaskill criticized the party for abandoning moderates and   
   recommended that it run candidates who could relate to rural voters –   
   there’s a throughline between these suggestions and the cowboy hats.   
      
   Trump’s success in rural areas and among non-college-educated whites   
   spawned a market for books that sought to explain non-coastal areas. The   
   condescending infatuation with JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy was the most   
   obvious example, but more sophisticated works – including Arlie Russell   
   Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the   
   American Right, Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History   
   of Class in America, and Elizabeth Catte’s What You Are Getting Wrong   
   About Appalachia – also became prominent.   
      
   Four years later, though Trump didn’t win, he took an even greater share   
   of the rural vote. In 2020, he won roughly 90% of rural counties. Whatever   
   lessons Democratic strategists have absorbed do not seem to be working.   
      
      
   There’s a certain sort of liberal who looks at all this and writes off   
   rural areas as deserving of whatever policies the GOP inflicts on them. As   
   a New York magazine headline blared after the 2016 election, “No sympathy   
      
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