I tend to avoid writing about politics in Cairns but there has been something festering since 2016 whenever I read an article about the Electoral College. As you surely are aware, a map of the United States that shows the counties that voted Republican as red and the counties that voted Democrat as blue will appear overwhelmingly red with intense blue spots in the urban areas. Politically, our country appears polarized across a rural/urban divide.
This divide is long-standing. The story of the country mouse and the city mouse originated in the B.C. era. For thousands of years, the country has been seen as a place of simple, frugal niceness and the city has been a place of wealth, luxury, excitement, but also somewhat decadent.
I am a country mouse. I grew up in a wheat country town. My dad’s business served ranchers. I was a ranger in wilderness parks. Though I’ve lived several years in cities, I don’t feel at home in them. My place is in the red counties. My wife and I moved thirty years ago to where our daughters could grow up with streams and mud and climbing trees. In all that time, my representatives in Congress have been ridiculously conservative Republicans.
My fester surfaces each time I see an article that decries the electoral college system because it gives rural, lightly-populated states disproportionately more power in electing the president than urban, heavily-populated states. The Electoral College is part of the Constitution. Therefore, to change it requires an amendment that requires the state legislatures of 3⁄4 of the states (38 of them) to approve the amendment. There is no way the legislatures of the rural, low-population states are going to give away one of their few powers by approving such an amendment. So the articles are a blathering waste of time and ink. But they also cause harm.
These articles tend to lead the urban reader to frustration with rural areas. This frustration can easily slip into negative stereotyping of us rural people. About a month after Trump’s election, I read an op-ed piece in the New York Times titled Why Rural America Voted for Trump. It was ok. Then I started reading the comments readers had written in response. I was stunned, dismayed at the prejudice and contempt readers of the New York Times heaped upon us uneducated hicks. Most of the disparaging comments fell into three categories.
The first and smallest category was like these:
“We would be better off cutting the rural areas loose. The only thing that sustains those areas is all the money that is generated within the cities that has to go to support those backward people. We dynamic people in the cities could do so much more if we could just cut them loose.”
“What do these people contribute except feeding livestock?”
“I think it’s time to devise a plan to allow those in red counties to luxuriate exclusively in their world, without the buckets of money blue states send their way, and allow us “liberals” to luxuriate in ours. I’m perfectly comfortable with that solution. It would be interesting to see how comfortable those in the red counties would be with it. I say we give it a try, as soon as possible.”
To which I reply “’It would be interesting to see how comfortable those in the’ blue ‘counties would be’ ‘without the buckets of’ food, lumber and water red ‘states send their way’.” (The southbound trains in rural Northern California contain lots of loaded lumber cars. The northbound trains return those cars empty.)This person thinks life would be so much better if they could cut those rural areas loose? That’s pretty out of touch with the basics of biology.
The second category, also a minority, was a thoughtful analysis of how the delivery of services can be accomplished far more easily and cheaper in a dense, urban center than in a diffuse, rural area. Because of this, the rural areas will always be lagging behind and will always be an economic backwater. This leads them to conclude that the wisest thing for all is for the rural people to abandon the backwater (as many of the commenters had done) and move to the cities where the future lay. Here’s an example:
“I left the area, which had growing economic problems 30 years ago, to get an education and find more opportunities. Those who remained behind, who have not had an easy time economically, have grown bitter, just like those in Mr. Leonard’s piece. They find it easier to blame everyone else for their lives than acknowledge that they, too, should have listened when they were told the world was changing, that they could have moved away, could have done something else.”
This solution leaves unanswered where the food will be coming from to feed the cities.
The largest category was head-shaking disgust at how rural people could have been so stupid to vote against their own economic self-interest by voting for Trump. The main explanation for this by the commenters was lack of good education in the rural areas.
“You cannot learn and won’t learn. You did this before not long ago. Can you say “War Criminal Bushie administration?!” And now because of your arrogance and ignorance, you deplorables are doing it all over again but this time only worse. Thanks stupid deplorables. President Hillary Clinton was right by calling you deplorables!”
“The truth, though, is that while they were washing dishes and picking sweet corn the “bad” people were doing schoolwork and learning calculus and languages. The economy rewards the educated. Their problem is they are uneducated. And who really is to blame for that other than themselves?”
These comments bother me personally because I teach these red country kids and they are wonderful. These comments bother me because they tend to equate knowledge with book learning and computer technology, discounting knowing how to do blue-collar things like building a house, replacing a car engine, pulling a pump out of a well, welding, sewing, butchering a pig, milking a goat, raising food, operating a backhoe. In the comments section of another op-ed piece about taxes on SUV’s and pickups, lots of commenters lambasted the tendency of rural people to buy pickups. One commenter said that anything that needed a pickup to carry, he could carry in his SUV. I thought of the freely-urinating, pregnant nanny goats we’ve taken to the vet in our pickup and I don’t think the commenter would want them in his SUV’s carpeted interior. If the commenter replied, “Oh, I didn’t think of that,” that would be exactly the point.
One of the commenters wrote “Uneducated, superstitious, inward-looking, immigrant-averse people live outside of the urban areas while intelligent, thriving people who are in the habit of reading books tend to reside in cities where they constantly come into contact with those of other cultures, languages, and lands and adapt accordingly.” Perhaps true. But many of the people in cities don’t constantly come into contact with rural people, which allows these ‘intelligent, thriving people’ to label the rural people as ‘uneducated, superstitious’.
Over and over again I read disbelief that rural people keep voting against their own economic self-interest. How uneducated is that? But does this mean that the educated thing to do is vote for your own economic self-interest? That is precisely one of the things that is driving our country in a downward spiral: people putting their economic self-interest before all else. Externalize costs and internalize profits. Harvest the Commons for private profit.
Many of us progressives believe that one of the main systems problems we face is that the political system has been bought by those people who are intensely focused on pursuing their economic self-interest above all else. Economic self-interest appears smart in the short run but it is not wise in the long run. To promote “economic self-interest” as the guiding value of our society perpetuates the mess we are in.
There is a liberal tendency to write off the rural areas as hopeless and then fume about how the Electoral College locks up too much power in the rural states. Hillary Clinton flew over the red states to attend fund-raisers in the blue cities. Do we progressives have nothing to say to rural people? Do progressives see nothing of value in the small towns and rural areas? Farmers helped birth the progressive movement more than a century ago. Urban progressives are losing contact with their roots. Literally. In so many ways.
Being close to and working with the land can (though not necessarily) inoculate one against economic self-interest at any cost. This is where the rural areas can help revitalize the progressive movement and where a progressive movement can help revitalize rural areas and, with their political support, steer political decisions towards a sustainable future. If we progressives want the electoral power to steer our ship of state, if we want to make the electoral map more blue, the quickest and most profound way is to stop fuming about the Electoral College with stereotypes of the rural states. We need to engage together. There are real differences between the rural and urban experience. That’s why the country and city mouse fable started thousands of years ago. The two regions nourish different values to this nation. A creative, respectful synthesis of these values can change elections far faster than trying to change the Electoral College.
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