Mississippi in 2010. Photograph taken by the author. All rights reserved. This
\nis the fourth article in a series on \u2018confronting authoritarian populism and
\nthe rural world\u2019, linked to the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI). The article opening the series can be read here.<\/i><\/p>\n
\u2018The United States is The \u2018two countries\u2019 Multiple studies point It drew on a deep White The punditry and media They also failed to After the mid-1970s wages decoupled Income and wealth One striking finding Some features of US Survivors of the 1980s Populist demagogues like Trump blame job Big investors also Like mutual banks, cooperatives and credit unions that reinvested locally the Family-owned stores More recently, In recent decades, federal Because As once vital The scale of the In the 2016 election Trump performed Trump discerned the Trump repeatedly In Should To To Mississippi in 2010. Photograph taken by the author. All rights reserved. This is the fourth article in a series on \u2018confronting authoritarian populism and the rural world\u2019, linked to the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI). The article opening the series can be read here. \u2018The United States is coming to resemble two separate countries, one…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1081\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\ncoming to resemble two separate countries, one rural and one urban,\u2019 political
\nanalyst David Graham proclaimed in a 2017 article in The Atlantic<\/em>. Viewing the map of 2016 presidential election
\nresults, it is hard to avoid a similar conclusion. Donald Trump carried over
\n2,500 largely rural counties and Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote, less
\nthan 500 mostly urban ones. <\/p>\n
\nthesis echoes scholars of uneven development going back decades, from Michael
\nLipton\u2019s study of \u2018urban bias\u2019 to Cynthia Duncan\u2019s Worlds Apart<\/em> and \u2013 more recently \u2013 Katherine Cramer\u2019s The Politics of Resentment<\/em>. Too often now, though, \u2018rural\u2019 has become a
\nsynecdoche for \u2018Trump voters,\u2019 \u2018working-class\u2019 or \u2018white\u2019 \u2013 misrepresentations that
\nSamantha Bee demolished in hilarious video interviews with small-town
\nminority voters. In fact, Trump voters had a higher median
\nincome than
\nClinton voters, reflecting backing among affluent whites without university
\ndegrees, many of them business owners in suburban counties. In fact, Trump voters had a higher median
\nincome than Clinton voters.<\/p>\n
\nto racial resentment as the strongest predictor of voting for
\nTrump\u2019s brand of bigotry, faux populism and economic nationalism. Racial anger
\nintensified in the lead-up to 2016 not just because the US had an African
\nAmerican president, but also from an accelerated decomposition of community
\nlife and livelihoods that many whites worried could reduce them to what they
\nimagined as the level of Blacks and other minorities. <\/p>\n
\nhistorical well of entrenched racism and anti-Native and anti-Black violence. These whites feared that the hopelessness and
\ndecay of the country\u2019s rural and urban \u2018sacrifice zones\u2019 was spreading. Chris Hedges described \u2018sacrifice zones\u2019 as places where \u2018the
\nmarketplace rules without constraints, where human beings and the natural world
\nare used and then discarded to maximize profit\u2019. <\/p>\nEconomic and political transformations<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\nprivilege had many dimensions\u00a0 \u2013 \u00a0decent wages in largely industrial employment,
\ndefined-benefits pensions, seemingly permanent jobs \u00a0\u2013 but these began to unravel in the neoliberal
\n1980s and imploded during the Great Recession of 2008. <\/p>\n
\ndidn\u2019t grasp the enormity of these transformations because so many analyses
\nwere piecemeal, examining home foreclosures but not the opioid epidemic, or
\ndeindustrialization and unemployment, but not the disappearance of
\nlocally-owned financial institutions. <\/p>\n
\nplace US decline
\nin global and historical perspective, rarely asking why in one of the richest
\nnations people did not enjoy the right to health or a dignified retirement. <\/p>\n
\nfrom productivity
\ngains and stagnated. Internationally, the key factor was the mid-1970s collapse
\nof the Bretton Woods framework, which since 1944 had promoted protected
\nnational economies, and the subsequent \u2018opening up\u2019 of international finance
\nand trade. Domestically, attacks on unions, particularly once Ronald Reagan
\nbecame president in 1981, further eroded workers\u2019 bargaining power. <\/p>\n
\ninequality soared. By 2016, 63 percent of
\nAmericans didn\u2019t
\nhave enough savings to cover a $500 emergency. Today, nine million have zero cash income. The divide had a pronounced racial dimension.
\nIn 2014, the median earnings gap between black and white men, which narrowed sharply
\nin 1940-1970, was larger than in 1950. In 2014, the
\nmedian earnings gap between black and white men was larger than in 1950.<\/p>\n
\nof Cramer\u2019s Politics of Resentment<\/em> <\/em>was that rural Wisconsinites viewed the 2008
\nGreat Recession as \u2018unremarkable\u2019. They had been living in a recession for
\ndecades. The economic precarity of low-income Americans is such that the cost of a car repair may initiate a downward spiral that culminates
\nin job loss and even homelessness. Nationally, residential foreclosures \u2013 383,037 in 2006 \u2013 climbed rapidly, with
\naround one million each year in 2009-2012. The cumulative impact was devastating,
\nas families doubled up with relatives, went on the road, or moved to shelters.<\/p>\nRural sacrifice zones<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\nsacrifice zones are specifically rural. The 1980s saw the worst farm crisis since the 1930s depression. Petroleum and
\nfertilizer costs skyrocketed, grain prices plummeted, and interest rates climbed,
\nas monetary policies sought to dampen inflation and loans were called in. The
\nrapid consolidation of input and machinery suppliers, and in the processing,
\nbrokering and exporting of key commodities, allowed a handful of giant corporations to garner a rising share of the total
\nvalue-added between the farm gate and the consumer. <\/p>\n
\nsuffered a second crisis in the past five years, following the end of
\nthe commodities boom of the 2000s. In 2013-2016 US farmers and ranchers
\nexperienced a 52 percent drop in real net farm income, the largest
\nthree-year decline since the 1930s depression. Over
\nhalf of farm households now lose money on farming. As farmers again go bankrupt, the multiplier
\neffects further destabilize local economies. <\/p>\n
\nloss exclusively on free trade and factory flight: \u00a0their liberal critics also cite automation.
\nBut financialization has clearly been a central factor. In the 1980s leveraged
\nbuyout specialists loaded companies with debt, dismembered them, slashed wages
\nand pensions, and cashed out. One small-town Ohio manufacturer even ordered
\nexecutives to live elsewhere, \u2018so they wouldn\u2019t be troubled by requests for
\ncivic involvement or charitable contributions\u2019. Buyout
\nspecialists loaded companies with debt, dismembered them, slashed wages and
\npensions, and cashed out.<\/p>\n
\ntargeted mutually-owned banks, which long powered small-town economies.
\nDirectors often donated to local institutions and sometimes made loans based on
\ntrust rather than credit scores. As giant financial institutions took over,
\nthey sucked wealth out of communities, instituting stricter lending criteria, undermining
\nsmall businesses, creating \u2018banking deserts\u2019, and forcing the newly un-banked into
\nhigh-cost check cashing outlets and payday lenders, themselves frequently financed by large banks. During 2008-2016, rural areas, which have
\nless access to broadband and Internet banking, saw 86 new banking
\ndeserts.<\/p>\n
\nwealth communities produced had constituted a bulwark against rapacious
\ncorporations and financial institutions. Of the 3,346 agricultural cooperatives \u2013 grain elevators and packing houses, among
\nothers \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
\nand diners on small-town Main Streets were sites of human contact, invested
\nprofits locally, and provided income and employment for farm and other rural
\nhouseholds. As malls and chain stores proliferated, such businesses withered from
\nrelentless competition. Fewer small businesses means less ad revenue for local
\nnewspapers, thousands of which closed in recent decades, some succumbing to the
\nInternet and others to the same financialization that was strangling industries and banks. <\/p>\n
\nlow-wage retail and service jobs in chains and malls began to disappear because of e-commerce.
\nEmpty storefronts and malls and vanished newspapers are not just signs of job
\nloss and economic precarity. Inhabitants of sacrifice zones read them as stark,
\npainful reminders of abandonment and a shredded social fabric.<\/p>\nThe human toll<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\nand state governments have removed funding from social services of all kinds. Rural hospital closures doubled between 2011-12
\nand 2013-14. Post offices are closing too. They have long been lifelines for
\nrural people, serving as meeting places, delivering essential medicines,
\ninformation, and human contact. <\/p>\n
\nproperty taxes are a main source of education funding, when tax bases and
\npopulations decline, schools \u2013 typically centers of small-town sociality \u2013
\nclose, cut back or consolidate with
\nadjacent districts. Thirty percent of all school closures nationwide in 2011-12
\nwere in rural areas. Most recently, the Trump administration let funding lapse
\nfor community health centers used by 26 million
\nAmericans. <\/p>\n
\ncommunities and neighbourhoods hollowed out, losing their institutions and the
\ncapacity to appropriate the wealth that they produce, despair and anxiety
\ntriggered violence and addiction. Economist Umair Haque, in a trenchant essay on the \u2018social
\npathologies of collapse\u2019 \u2013 school shootings, the opioid epidemic, \u2018nomadic retirees\u2019 who live in their cars and work low-wage jobs, and the normalization of indifference \u2013 concludes
\nthat \u2018we are grossly underestimating what pundits call the \u201chuman toll\u201d\u2019. <\/p>\n
\nopioid problem \u2013 and of the physical and emotional pain behind it \u2013 is
\nstaggering. In 2015, some 92 million or
\n38 percent
\nof US adults used prescription opioids, with 11.5 million (4.7 percent)
\nreporting misuse. In 2008-2017 drug companies shipped 20.8 million opioid pills to just two pharmacies in one
\ntown \u2013 population 2,900 \u2013 in largely rural West Virginia. Drug overdoses now kill more people than gun violence and
\nauto accidents combined. Drug overdoses now kill
\nmore people than gun violence and auto accidents combined.<\/p>\nAngry politics in shattered communities and
\nwhite suburbs<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\nbest in counties
\nwith the highest drug, alcohol and suicide mortality rates. In 2017, for the
\nsecond year in a row, life expectancy in the US fell, in significant part because of
\nopioid overdoses and other \u2018deaths of despair\u2019. Farmers, in particular, are killing themselves in record numbers.<\/p>\n
\nanger, fear and alienation in the sacrifice zones, but directed his racist,
\nanti-immigrant harangues only at their white inhabitants. His country-club racism, off-hand authoritarianism, simple-minded
\nnationalism, overblown promises, and claims to be a \u2018strong leader\u2019 resonate in shattered communities, as well as among nouveau-riche entrepreneurs and well-to-do
\nwhite suburbanites, many of whom bought Republican claims about \u2018burdensome\u2019
\nregulation of business and were uneasy that their heretofore monochromatic
\ncommunities were being \u2018invaded\u2019 by affluent immigrants and people of colour. <\/p>\n
\npathologised non-white inhabitants of the sacrifice zones, deploying age-old
\nright-wing tropes about \u2018undeserving\u2019 minorities that in turn served to justify
\nthe traditional conservative agenda of shrinking government and protecting the
\ninterests of the super-rich. Governments appeared unable or unwilling to
\naddress the convergence of multiple crises \u2013employment, housing, education, health,
\ndecaying communities \u2013 and this revived memories of past broken promises,
\nincluding those of neoliberal Democratic administrations. This feeling of
\nabandonment, along with downward mobility, made white rural Americans receptive
\nto a candidate who cast
\nhimself as an \u2018outsider\u2019. <\/p>\nChallenging questions<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\nthe Emancipatory Rural
\nPolitics Initiative, activists and researchers are debating pressing
\nquestions. <\/p>\n
\nthe resistance in the US try to win over Trump supporters, or is it better to work
\non combatting voter suppression, particularly of minorities, fighting for
\ncampaign finance reform, and mobilizing the vast numbers that abstain from electoral
\nparticipation? In the #MeToo-Stormy Daniels moment, will white evangelical and white women voters drop their support for
\nthe crude, misogynist, philandering president? Or does having a pliable, if
\nmercurial, conservative, racist ally in the White House trump all other
\nconsiderations? <\/p>\n
\nwhat degree is global and US authoritarian populism a fa\u00e7ade for a state-led project
\nthat invokes \u2018family values\u2019, retrograde forms of masculinity and
\nheteronormativity, and an exclusionary vision of the nation in order to exacerbate
\nsocial divisions, roll back social conquests, and intensify exploitation of
\nhuman beings and the environment? Is it possible to re-legitimize the public
\nsphere and public investment, funded by progressive taxation, to create a stable
\nand more just society that provides opportunities for all? Are they taking shape as a global authoritarian populist
\naxis?<\/p>\n
\nwhat extent are the world\u2019s autocrats \u2013 Trump, Duterte, Erdo\u011fan, Modi, Orb\u00e1n, Putin,
\namong others \u2013 simply a mutually reinforcing collection of erratic rulers? Or are they taking
\nshape as a global
\nauthoritarian populist axis? And finally, can movements in different
\ncountries learn from each other to resist the authoritarian wave?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"