Mississippi in 2010. Photograph taken by the author. All rights reserved. This
is the fourth article in a series on ‘confronting authoritarian populism and
the rural world’, linked to the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI). The article opening the series can be read here.
‘The United States is
coming to resemble two separate countries, one rural and one urban,’ political
analyst David Graham proclaimed in a 2017 article in The Atlantic. Viewing the map of 2016 presidential election
results, it is hard to avoid a similar conclusion. Donald Trump carried over
2,500 largely rural counties and Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote, less
than 500 mostly urban ones.
The ‘two countries’
thesis echoes scholars of uneven development going back decades, from Michael
Lipton’s study of ‘urban bias’ to Cynthia Duncan’s Worlds Apart and – more recently – Katherine Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment. Too often now, though, ‘rural’ has become a
synecdoche for ‘Trump voters,’ ‘working-class’ or ‘white’ – misrepresentations that
Samantha Bee demolished in hilarious video interviews with small-town
minority voters. In fact, Trump voters had a higher median
income than
Clinton voters, reflecting backing among affluent whites without university
degrees, many of them business owners in suburban counties. In fact, Trump voters had a higher median
income than Clinton voters.
Multiple studies point
to racial resentment as the strongest predictor of voting for
Trump’s brand of bigotry, faux populism and economic nationalism. Racial anger
intensified in the lead-up to 2016 not just because the US had an African
American president, but also from an accelerated decomposition of community
life and livelihoods that many whites worried could reduce them to what they
imagined as the level of Blacks and other minorities.
It drew on a deep
historical well of entrenched racism and anti-Native and anti-Black violence. These whites feared that the hopelessness and
decay of the country’s rural and urban ‘sacrifice zones’ was spreading. Chris Hedges described ‘sacrifice zones’ as places where ‘the
marketplace rules without constraints, where human beings and the natural world
are used and then discarded to maximize profit’.
Economic and political transformations
White
privilege had many dimensions – decent wages in largely industrial employment,
defined-benefits pensions, seemingly permanent jobs – but these began to unravel in the neoliberal
1980s and imploded during the Great Recession of 2008.
The punditry and media
didn’t grasp the enormity of these transformations because so many analyses
were piecemeal, examining home foreclosures but not the opioid epidemic, or
deindustrialization and unemployment, but not the disappearance of
locally-owned financial institutions.
They also failed to
place US decline
in global and historical perspective, rarely asking why in one of the richest
nations people did not enjoy the right to health or a dignified retirement.
After the mid-1970s wages decoupled
from productivity
gains and stagnated. Internationally, the key factor was the mid-1970s collapse
of the Bretton Woods framework, which since 1944 had promoted protected
national economies, and the subsequent ‘opening up’ of international finance
and trade. Domestically, attacks on unions, particularly once Ronald Reagan
became president in 1981, further eroded workers’ bargaining power.
Income and wealth
inequality soared. By 2016, 63 percent of
Americans didn’t
have enough savings to cover a $500 emergency. Today, nine million have zero cash income. The divide had a pronounced racial dimension.
In 2014, the median earnings gap between black and white men, which narrowed sharply
in 1940-1970, was larger than in 1950. In 2014, the
median earnings gap between black and white men was larger than in 1950.
One striking finding
of Cramer’s Politics of Resentment was that rural Wisconsinites viewed the 2008
Great Recession as ‘unremarkable’. They had been living in a recession for
decades. The economic precarity of low-income Americans is such that the cost of a car repair may initiate a downward spiral that culminates
in job loss and even homelessness. Nationally, residential foreclosures – 383,037 in 2006 – climbed rapidly, with
around one million each year in 2009-2012. The cumulative impact was devastating,
as families doubled up with relatives, went on the road, or moved to shelters.
Rural sacrifice zones
Some features of US
sacrifice zones are specifically rural. The 1980s saw the worst farm crisis since the 1930s depression. Petroleum and
fertilizer costs skyrocketed, grain prices plummeted, and interest rates climbed,
as monetary policies sought to dampen inflation and loans were called in. The
rapid consolidation of input and machinery suppliers, and in the processing,
brokering and exporting of key commodities, allowed a handful of giant corporations to garner a rising share of the total
value-added between the farm gate and the consumer.
Survivors of the 1980s
suffered a second crisis in the past five years, following the end of
the commodities boom of the 2000s. In 2013-2016 US farmers and ranchers
experienced a 52 percent drop in real net farm income, the largest
three-year decline since the 1930s depression. Over
half of farm households now lose money on farming. As farmers again go bankrupt, the multiplier
effects further destabilize local economies.
Populist demagogues like Trump blame job
loss exclusively on free trade and factory flight: their liberal critics also cite automation.
But financialization has clearly been a central factor. In the 1980s leveraged
buyout specialists loaded companies with debt, dismembered them, slashed wages
and pensions, and cashed out. One small-town Ohio manufacturer even ordered
executives to live elsewhere, ‘so they wouldn’t be troubled by requests for
civic involvement or charitable contributions’. Buyout
specialists loaded companies with debt, dismembered them, slashed wages and
pensions, and cashed out.
Big investors also
targeted mutually-owned banks, which long powered small-town economies.
Directors often donated to local institutions and sometimes made loans based on
trust rather than credit scores. As giant financial institutions took over,
they sucked wealth out of communities, instituting stricter lending criteria, undermining
small businesses, creating ‘banking deserts’, and forcing the newly un-banked into
high-cost check cashing outlets and payday lenders, themselves frequently financed by large banks. During 2008-2016, rural areas, which have
less access to broadband and Internet banking, saw 86 new banking
deserts.
Like mutual banks, cooperatives and credit unions that reinvested locally the
wealth communities produced had constituted a bulwark against rapacious
corporations and financial institutions. Of the 3,346 agricultural cooperatives – grain elevators and packing houses, among
others – that existed in 2000, 1,350 closed by 2015. Of the more than 8,000 credit unions in 2007, over two thousand closed by 2017.
Family-owned stores
and diners on small-town Main Streets were sites of human contact, invested
profits locally, and provided income and employment for farm and other rural
households. As malls and chain stores proliferated, such businesses withered from
relentless competition. Fewer small businesses means less ad revenue for local
newspapers, thousands of which closed in recent decades, some succumbing to the
Internet and others to the same financialization that was strangling industries and banks.
More recently,
low-wage retail and service jobs in chains and malls began to disappear because of e-commerce.
Empty storefronts and malls and vanished newspapers are not just signs of job
loss and economic precarity. Inhabitants of sacrifice zones read them as stark,
painful reminders of abandonment and a shredded social fabric.
The human toll
In recent decades, federal
and state governments have removed funding from social services of all kinds. Rural hospital closures doubled between 2011-12
and 2013-14. Post offices are closing too. They have long been lifelines for
rural people, serving as meeting places, delivering essential medicines,
information, and human contact.
Because
property taxes are a main source of education funding, when tax bases and
populations decline, schools – typically centers of small-town sociality –
close, cut back or consolidate with
adjacent districts. Thirty percent of all school closures nationwide in 2011-12
were in rural areas. Most recently, the Trump administration let funding lapse
for community health centers used by 26 million
Americans.
As once vital
communities and neighbourhoods hollowed out, losing their institutions and the
capacity to appropriate the wealth that they produce, despair and anxiety
triggered violence and addiction. Economist Umair Haque, in a trenchant essay on the ‘social
pathologies of collapse’ – school shootings, the opioid epidemic, ‘nomadic retirees’ who live in their cars and work low-wage jobs, and the normalization of indifference – concludes
that ‘we are grossly underestimating what pundits call the “human toll”’.
The scale of the
opioid problem – and of the physical and emotional pain behind it – is
staggering. In 2015, some 92 million or
38 percent
of US adults used prescription opioids, with 11.5 million (4.7 percent)
reporting misuse. In 2008-2017 drug companies shipped 20.8 million opioid pills to just two pharmacies in one
town – population 2,900 – in largely rural West Virginia. Drug overdoses now kill more people than gun violence and
auto accidents combined. Drug overdoses now kill
more people than gun violence and auto accidents combined.
Angry politics in shattered communities and
white suburbs
In the 2016 election Trump performed
best in counties
with the highest drug, alcohol and suicide mortality rates. In 2017, for the
second year in a row, life expectancy in the US fell, in significant part because of
opioid overdoses and other ‘deaths of despair’. Farmers, in particular, are killing themselves in record numbers.
Trump discerned the
anger, fear and alienation in the sacrifice zones, but directed his racist,
anti-immigrant harangues only at their white inhabitants. His country-club racism, off-hand authoritarianism, simple-minded
nationalism, overblown promises, and claims to be a ‘strong leader’ resonate in shattered communities, as well as among nouveau-riche entrepreneurs and well-to-do
white suburbanites, many of whom bought Republican claims about ‘burdensome’
regulation of business and were uneasy that their heretofore monochromatic
communities were being ‘invaded’ by affluent immigrants and people of colour.
Trump repeatedly
pathologised non-white inhabitants of the sacrifice zones, deploying age-old
right-wing tropes about ‘undeserving’ minorities that in turn served to justify
the traditional conservative agenda of shrinking government and protecting the
interests of the super-rich. Governments appeared unable or unwilling to
address the convergence of multiple crises –employment, housing, education, health,
decaying communities – and this revived memories of past broken promises,
including those of neoliberal Democratic administrations. This feeling of
abandonment, along with downward mobility, made white rural Americans receptive
to a candidate who cast
himself as an ‘outsider’.
Challenging questions
In
the Emancipatory Rural
Politics Initiative, activists and researchers are debating pressing
questions.
Should
the resistance in the US try to win over Trump supporters, or is it better to work
on combatting voter suppression, particularly of minorities, fighting for
campaign finance reform, and mobilizing the vast numbers that abstain from electoral
participation? In the #MeToo-Stormy Daniels moment, will white evangelical and white women voters drop their support for
the crude, misogynist, philandering president? Or does having a pliable, if
mercurial, conservative, racist ally in the White House trump all other
considerations?
To
what degree is global and US authoritarian populism a façade for a state-led project
that invokes ‘family values’, retrograde forms of masculinity and
heteronormativity, and an exclusionary vision of the nation in order to exacerbate
social divisions, roll back social conquests, and intensify exploitation of
human beings and the environment? Is it possible to re-legitimize the public
sphere and public investment, funded by progressive taxation, to create a stable
and more just society that provides opportunities for all? Are they taking shape as a global authoritarian populist
axis?
To
what extent are the world’s autocrats – Trump, Duterte, Erdoğan, Modi, Orbán, Putin,
among others – simply a mutually reinforcing collection of erratic rulers? Or are they taking
shape as a global
authoritarian populist axis? And finally, can movements in different
countries learn from each other to resist the authoritarian wave?