David Brooks is spot on in his analysis of "The rotting of the Republican mind."
In a recent Monmouth University survey, 77% of Donald Trump's backers said Joe Biden had won the presidential election because of fraud. Many of these same people think climate change is not real. Many of these same people believe they don’t need to listen to scientific experts on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
We live in a country in epistemological crisis, in which much of the Republican Party has become detached from reality.
Moreover, this is not just an American problem. All around the world, rising right-wing populist parties are floating on oceans of misinformation and falsehood.
What is going on?
Many people point to the internet — the way it funnels people into information silos, the way it abets the spread of misinformation. I mostly reject this view. Why would the internet have corrupted Republicans so much more than Democrats, the global right more than the global left?
. . .
Over the past decades, the information age has created a lot more people who make their living working with ideas, who are professional members of this epistemic process. The information economy has increasingly rewarded them with money and status. It has increasingly concentrated them in ever more prosperous metro areas.
While these cities have been prospering, places where fewer people have college degrees have been spiraling down: flatter incomes, decimated families, dissolved communities. In 1972, people without college degrees were nearly as happy as those with college degrees. Now those without a degree are far more unhappy about their lives.
People need a secure order to feel safe. Deprived of that, people legitimately feel cynicism and distrust, alienation and anomie. This precarity has created, in nation after nation, intense populist backlashes against the highly educated folks who have migrated to the cities and accrued significant economic, cultural and political power. Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center calls this the “Density Divide.” It is a bitter cultural and political cold war.
In the fervor of this enmity, millions of people have come to detest those who populate the epistemic regime, who are so distant, who appear to have it so easy, who have such different values, who can be so condescending. Millions not only distrust everything the “fake news” people say but also the so-called rules they use to say them.
People in this precarious state are going to demand stories that will both explain their distrust back to them and also enclose them within a safe community of believers. The evangelists of distrust, from Trump to Alex Jones to the followers of QAnon, rose up to give them those stories and provide that community. Paradoxically, conspiracy theories have become the most effective community bonding mechanisms of the 21st century.
For those awash in anxiety and alienation, who feel that everything is spinning out of control, conspiracy theories are extremely effective emotional tools. For those in low-status groups, they provide a sense of superiority: I possess important information most people do not have. For those who feel powerless, they provide agency: I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals. As Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School points out, they provide liberation: If I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want.
Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mindset. He and his media allies simply ignore the rules of the epistemic regime and have set up a rival trolling regime. The internet is an ideal medium for untested information to get around traditional gatekeepers, but it is an accelerant of the paranoia, not its source. Distrust and precarity, caused by economic, cultural and spiritual threat, are the source.
What to do?
You can’t argue people out of paranoia. If you try to point out factual errors, you only entrench false belief. The only solution is to reduce the distrust and anxiety that is the seedbed of this thinking.
That can only be done first by contact, reducing the social chasm between the members of the epistemic regime and those who feel so alienated from it. And second, it can be done by policy, by making life more secure for those without a college degree.
Rebuilding trust is, obviously, the work of a generation.
The conclusion that the roots of the “reality disconnect” involve alienation from an “information economy” elite in urban areas with different values and much greater prosperity that is culturally different is spot on.
He’s also correct that economic measures that would alleviate that economic distress would start to end that alienation and put everyone on the same page.
It is in the interests of the GOP, as the conservative party in the U.S. two party system, to have people feel scarcity, uncertainty, alienation, and fear. Those are the conditions that tend to make people more conservative politically and socially. So, there is a strong political incentive for conservatives to encourage the continuation of those conditions and attitudes. Prosperity, predictability, trust and security makes people liberal and that hurts the GOP.
Few conservative pundits, scholars and politicians would admit that or articulate it that way. But the politicians, at least, know it instinctively. It explains, for example, GOP opposition to programs like Medicaid Expansion that cost states nothing and provide lots of material economic benefit to the GOP base in those states if adopted.
If Republicans backed programs that made working class voters more economically secure and well off, those voters would start voting for liberals and become Democrats (absent another trade of positions on the left-right spectrum between the two major U.S. parties like the one seen in the second half of the 20th century).
During the Trump presidency, some of the most interesting and innovative thinking on the center right has come from writers and politicians sometimes called “national populists.” This group challenges Republican orthodoxy on questions of economics and suggests that a new policy agenda, focused more on working-class concerns, could realign the U.S. electorate.
We consider the plausibility of their claims, examining the relevant scholarly literature and recent trends among voters.
The data show that most voters who supported Trump were overwhelmingly driven by cultural rather than economic concerns. This implies that the national populist vision is unlikely to provide major electoral gains for the Republican Party. Trump’s popularity among his supporters suffered very little due to his governing mostly as a conventional Republican politician, and those of his party who have adopted more redistributive voting patterns in Congress in recent years have not realized resulting gains at the ballot box. In fact, the American public gave Trump higher marks on the economy than any other major issue, contradicting the claim that more free market economic policies create an electoral cost.
We also note that continuity with previous trends, rather than electoral realignment, was the norm in recent election cycles, meaning that the idea that there has been a major shift towards Republicans becoming the “working class party” is mostly a myth.
Republican success in the future will depend on the party speaking to the cultural, rather than economic, concerns of its voters, whether symbolically or in more tangible terms. This can mean championing issues that Republicans have ignored in recent years like opposition to affirmative action, in addition to facilitating the kind of backlash politics towards cultural liberalism among non-white voters that has worked so well among whites in recent decades. Economic policies that seek to address working-class concerns but hinder overall growth can alienate both voters and donors for little gain.
While the paper’s reasoning isn’t as straightforward as it could be, and I would disagree with details of their conclusions, the conclusion that economic policies that seek to address working-class concerns won't help the Republican Party is probably right.
The "idea that there has been a major shift towards Republicans becoming the “working class party”", however, is not a myth. The charts below illustrates it the dramatic changes in the 2000 and 2016 election that remained unchanged in 2020:
The notion that Republican voters actually know or care if its economic policies would hinder overall growth is likewise absurd. The protectionist agenda advanced by Trump, for example, demonstrable and clearly hindered overall economic growth but did not shake the Republican base's support for their party as the authors of the paper themselves note.
Republican and Democratic analysts agree that Trump support was driven by social and cultural issues (to be less euphemistic, by racism), not by economics.
I am a sixth-generation native of Dunn County in rural west-central Wisconsin, a rolling landscape of forested ridges and farmed valleys, tied together by twisting roads and meandering rivers. My ancestors came here 150 years ago and farmed 6 miles south of where my wife and I currently raise our family. With a population of 45,000, Dunn County is a swing county in a swing state: The county went for Barack Obama in 2008 and again in 2012, then for Donald Trump in 2016.
After Trump’s election, I was one of those people who stepped off the sidelines. . . . As a longtime political independent, I decided to join a political party for the first time in my life, and by 2019, I became chair of the Dunn County Democratic Party. It turned out many others here felt the way I did about Trump. . . .
[G]ood organizing was not enough to win Dunn County. In November, Trump voters turned out in force, even stronger than they had in 2016. Despite all the work we did as Democrats, there were more Trump yard signs than four years ago; more flags in support of the president flew from more flagpoles and pickup trucks. It wasn’t just Dunn County. Roughly two-thirds of rural voters across the country cast their ballots for Trump. Any election results map you look at offers a bleak visualization of the political divide between rural and urban voters: a sea of red dotted with islands of blue.
Why did Trump do so well with rural voters?
From my experience, it’s not because local Democrats failed to organize in rural areas. Instead, after conversations with dozens of voters, neighbors, friends and family members in Dunn County, I’ve come to believe it is because the national Democratic Party has not offered rural voters a clear vision that speaks to their lived experiences. The pain and struggle in my community is real, yet rural people do not feel it is taken seriously by the Democratic Party.
My fear is that Democrats will continue to blame rural voters for the red-sea electoral map and dismiss these voters as backward. But my hope is for Democrats to listen to and learn from the experiences of rural people.
The signs of desperation are everywhere in communities like mine. A landscape of collapsed barns and crumbling roads. Main Streets with empty storefronts. The distant stare of depression in your neighbor’s eyes. If you live here, it is impossible to ignore the depletion.
Rural people want to share in America’s prosperity, but the economic divide between rural and urban America has widened. Small-business growth has slowed in rural communities since the Great Recession, and it has only worsened with Covid-19. As capital overwhelmingly flows to metro areas, the small-town economy increasingly is dominated by large corporations: low-wage retailers like Dollar General or agribusiness firms that have no connection to the community.
The source of our wealth is in the things we grow. But today, those things get shipped off into a vast global supply chain, where profits are siphoned off and little remains for us to save or invest. Farmers’ share of every retail food dollar has fallen from about 50 percent in 1952 to 15 percent today. Corporations control more and more of the agriculture business—from the seed and fertilizer farmers buy to the grain, milk and meat they sell—sucking out profits instead of giving farmers a fair price or a fair shot at the market. Every day, small farmers are squeezed: They can either expand their operations and take on more debt in an attempt to produce more, or close their business entirely because of chronically low commodity prices.
The digital divide is also real: About 28 percent of rural Wisconsinites lack high-speed internet, which stifles rural economic growth. Working from home or starting a new business is next to impossible in today’s economy without high-speed internet. Kids can’t learn from home without it either.
Rural health care is a disaster. At least 176 rural hospitals have closed since 2005, the majority of them in the past 10 years; it’s generally not profitable for hospitals to operate in low-population areas. Wisconsin has not been hit as badly as other states, but those hospitals that remain open in rural parts of the state are scaling back services and struggling to retain doctors. In my own county, there are zero ICU beds, even as Covid infection rates surge. Our profit-based health care system is failing rural people.
Rural people in Wisconsin are dying by suicide at rates higher than folks in suburban and urban parts of the state. This is not just a matter of poor mental health services—many rural counties lack a single practicing psychiatrist. It is also about an inescapable feeling of failure and an overwhelming sense that there is no future here.
The sad thing is none of this is an accident. It is the result of decades of policy decisions—by Republicans and Democrats—that deplete our communities.
Rural voters appreciated Obama’s repeated campaign promises to challenge the rise of agribusiness monopolies. But as president, he allowed for the continued consolidation of corporate power in the food system. His Department of Agriculture balked when it came time to enforce anti-monopoly rules such as those in the Packers and Stockyard Act, and failed to enforce Country of Origin Labeling, which would have allowed independent farmers and ranchers to better compete within the consolidated meat industry. The Obama Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission presided over a series of corporate mergers in the food and agriculture sectors, including the Kraft-Heinz and JBS-Cargill mergers. Taken together, these moves signaled that his administration did not have the backs of family farmers.
This is a large part of why Trump won Dunn County decisively in 2016 and in 2020. I have spoken with supporters of the president who were well aware of his shortcomings or admitted to disliking his leadership style, but who nonetheless believed he was willing to stand up to “elitist” Democrats and fight for citizens like them. For years, rural people have heard they are voting “against their own self-interest” when they elect Republicans, or that they vote the “wrong way” because they are uneducated. These are arrogant and damaging messages that are not easily forgotten. The reality, as I saw in my conversations with voters this year, is that many rural people have lost trust in the Democratic Party.
It was not for a lack of effort that the Biden campaign was unable to connect with rural voters this year. In May, Biden convened a virtual “rural roundtable” in western Wisconsin to show the candidate listening to stakeholders about rural economic development, health care and the crisis in Wisconsin’s dairy industry, brought on by chronically low milk prices. Nor was it for a lack of policy proposals: The Biden campaign released an exhaustive “rural plan” for anyone to read. All of these political gestures, however, are filtered through the lens of what political scientist Katherine Cramer calls “rural consciousness”—including a perception that cities are where decisions are made, culture happens and resources flow, and that rural communities are not in control of their own futures. Even as a kid from Scranton, Pennsylvania, Biden was seen as a creature of an establishment that has marginalized rural communities for decades.
Trust is earned slowly. It can’t be earned back with campaign slogans or TV ads. When people feel left behind, they look for a way to make sense of what is happening to them. There is a story to be told about rural America, yet Democrats are not telling it. That leaves an opening for other stories to be told to fill the vacuum—stories that villainize and divide us along racial, geographic and partisan lines. That is the story Trump told, but it’s the wrong one. The real story is that rural people feel our way of life is being sold off. We see the wealth of our sweat and soil being sent away to enrich executives, investors and shareholders.
For Democrats to start telling a story that resonates, they need to show a willingness to fight for rural people, and not just by proposing a “rural plan” or showing up on a farm for a photo op. Rural people understand economic power and the grip it has on lawmakers. We know reform won’t be easy. A big step forward for Democrats would be to champion antitrust enforcement and challenge the anticompetitive practices of the gigantic agribusiness firms that squeeze our communities. In his rural plan, Biden pledged to “strengthen antitrust enforcement,” but the term doesn’t appear until the 35th bullet point. For rural voters, antitrust enforcement is a top priority, and it should be coupled with policies to manage oversupply in commodity markets, so farmers can get a fair price. Another step forward would be an ambitious federal plan, in the spirit of the New Deal’s Rural Electrification Act, to bring high-speed internet to every corner of America.
What rural voters want is a glimmer of hope that things will change. They want politicians who see a future for rural communities in which food production is localized, energy is cheap and clean, people have good jobs, soil is healthy, Main Street is bustling with small businesses, schools are vibrant and everyone can see a doctor if they need to. Here in Wisconsin, we can look back in our state’s rich history of progressive populism to a time when politicians like Bob LaFollette, our former governor and U.S. senator, understood that concentrated wealth and corporate power are a threat to people’s livelihoods. As president, Biden will have the chance to prove he understands this, too. Democrats can win rural Wisconsin again, but they’ll need to try.
I don't doubt that this account is truthful, sincere, and factually accurate. But I'm not convinced that it draws the right conclusions.
I've both highlighted and underlined the author's vision, which I think is widely shared in rural communities. I am almost certain that it won't happen.
The Inevitable Decline Of Rural America
The economic stagnation of rural America isn't just an evil plot of big agribusinesses that need to be tamed. It is more fundamental than that.
In almost every single decade since the first U.S. Census in 1790, the share of the U.S. work force engaged in agriculture has declined and the percentage of the population living in cities has increased.
(Source)The chart below (from here) shows the change in population in U.S. counties from 2010 to 2018 during which average population growth in the U.S. was 6%.
Blue counties grew in population with the darkest blue counties growing by 20% or more in eight years, and the intermediate blue counties growing by at least 10% but less than 20% in eight years. Light blue counties are barely keeping up with, or falling behind, in their share of the nation's population. Red counties saw their populations fall, with the darkest red counties declining in population by 20% or more in eight years, and the intermediate blue counties declining in population by at least 10% but less than 20% in eight years.
Why is rural America depopulating?
Fundamentally, farms are just little factories. Technology has made farmers more productive, so fewer farmers can grow more farm products with the same amount of land. And farm productivity has soared (at the big farms that provide the lion's share of our food). There are lots of old farmers are running mostly small unproductive operations: 74% of farms produce just 3% of U.S. farm products on 31% of U.S. farm acreage and about 57% of all U.S. farm production comes from just 4% of U.S. farms on 19% of U.S. farm acreage.
(Source).You have to be extremely productive to be competitive, and will see your income decline unless you can keep up with this productivity growth. You are directly competing in a national and oftentimes international marketplace against literally everyone else in the industry. And, increased productivity in the industry from technological advances (see also e.g. GPS guided self-driving tractors) means every generation somebody's children has to get out of farming and your small towns continue to depopulate a little bit more.
With current farming technology as actually practiced in the United States about 10 acres of land (40,000 square meters) is used to produce food for each average person. Globally, we use about a third as much land to product the same amount of food as we did fifty years ago, and agricultural productivity per land area has increased steadily year in and year out.
This represents are remarkable improvement in agricultural productivity in the last half century or so. Between 1950 and 2000, during the so-called "second agricultural revolution of modern times", U.S. agricultural productivity rose fast, especially due to the development of new technologies. For example, the average amount of milk produced per cow increased from 5,314 pounds to 18,201 pounds per year (+242%), the average yield of corn rose from 39 bushels to 153 bushels per acre (+292%), and each farmer in 2000 produced on average 12 times as much farm output per hour worked as a farmer did in 1950.
This isn't a new trend. The number of people employed in farming as a whole has declined every decade since the United States was established to less than 2% of the workforce today. In 1820, 72% of of U.S. workers were engaged in farm occupations; in 1840 it was 69%; in 1860 it was 59%, in 1880 it was 57%, in 1900 it was 38%, in 1920 it was 27%, in 1940 it was 17%, in 1960 it was 6%, in 1980 it was 3%, by 2000 it is a little over 2%. The actual number of people in farm occupations has declined from about 2.9 million in 1820 to 2.1 million in 2000.
In 1978, the percentage of farmers age 65 and over, and under age 35 were about the same, 16% or so each. By 2007, the percentage of farmers age 65 and over has nearly doubled to about 30%, and the percentage of farms aged under 35 has declined by about two-thirds to about 5%. The trend measured at five year intervals by the University of Iowa has been steady and unbroken since 1978 (and probably earlier). Just in the past five years [ed. from 2002 to 2007] the average age rose to 57 (from 55) and the ranks of the 75-and-up set increased by 20 percent from 2002 to 2007. The number of those younger than 25 has dropped by nearly a third.
There have been some bright spots for the agricultural industry. In the last decade or two (i.e. since the 2000 census) there has been a rare increase in the total number of farms as new organic farms and marijuana and hemp industry grows have started essentially new industries in parallel to the existing agriculture industry. But, those numbers aren't huge in the overall scheme of things and are often in urban or suburban locations. Metro Denver has more than 100 acres of indoor marijuana cultivation facilities providing more than half of the state's total marijuana crop, for example.
Populations in farm counties have steadily declined as well. For example, according to forecasts from the state demographer in Colorado (as of 2007), every rural front range county except Morgan (county seat Fort Morgan) and Logan (county seat Sterling) will see its share of the state's population decline in the census in 2010, 2020 and 2030. The same forecast applies to most of the San Luis Valley. Most of the state's growth is expected to occur in the I-25 corridor (although Denver, Jefferson County, Boulder and Arapahoe County, all home to many landlocked central cities and first ring suburbs, will also decline in their share of the state's population), and in countries with tourism and mining driven economies. Fewer farmers leads to fewer people living in rural areas and lower population density. Lower population density means that the per capita cost of maintaining roads and bridges and telecommunications systems and hospitals and schools in a county increases. It means that rural communities consume less of everything. This means fewer retail sales and a reduced demand for services from doctors, teachers and more.
While there are economies of increased scale for almost every kind of business and non-profit or governmental service provider, the reverse is also true. The smaller the scale at which you try to operate a business or a non-profit or a governmental agency, the less efficient it becomes. So, while farms and agribusinesses are consolidating and becoming more efficient, the communities that serve them are becoming more strained and less efficient as they fall in population.
No amount of anti-trust enforcement or government regulation can change that reality. Rural America will relentlessly decline in population in the short to medium term future no matter what policy makers try to do about it.
Most rural small towns don't have much of a future.
Main street in most of America's small towns isn't coming back. Instead, most of those small towns will end up like the towns where my parents grew up: Felch, Michigan and Dola, Ohio. Those towns are now included in lists of American ghost towns.
Rural Education Is Expensive
The schools in those communities will never be vibrant and full of children again. One by one, they will close, because young people have had to move to the cities and suburbs of America since the rural economy of America doesn't need as many people anymore because it is more efficient, and there are fewer and fewer children in these communities that need schools. And, the per child cost of educating kids has soared because the schools with too few children are inefficient. It costs two or three times as much non-local subsidy per student to offer a public K-12 education in a rural area as it does in a city partly due to cost and partially due to local inability to pay, despite an overall lower quality educational product is some important respects.
While it is a small example, small towns tied to the agricultural industry have depopulated so greatly that few rural school districts can field full sized football teams any more because their schools are too small. Similarly, most rural school districts in Colorado have already resorted to teaching classes only four days a week. And, they pay their teachers less than teachers in urban districts, which means that they often can lure the best new teachers in the state to their schools. Yet shrinking rural communities don't have the money to pay the higher cost per child to educated children there, leading to a vicious cycle in which even young people with school aged children who might have have been able to find work in rural areas decline it, because their children can't get good educations there.
Rural Health Care Problems Aren't Just A Matter Of Financing It
Declining populations in rural areas mean that they can support fewer doctors, so older rural doctors aren't replaced when they retire. And, even when doctors are needed, doctors often don't want to live in these communities because they don't offer the kind of life for them and their families that they would like to live.
Why work in a community with lousy schools, decaying roads, no hospitals, no high speed internet access, few peers to interact with, little high culture, few opportunities to shop at high end stores?
Even if you are paid very well and housing costs are modest, the money isn't worth much if you can't buy much with it because no many other people live there and those that do aren't very affluent. In contrast, if you live in a city or suburb, your high compensation as a high end medical professional can be translated into a better quality of life.
And, unless you can serve enough patients, you aren't paid very well. A rural community with a declining population may still be able to support a doctor specializing in internal medicine with a primary care practice, but simply doesn't have enough work for a brain surgeon or a radiologist to have one of their own.
But for a massive influx of medical professionals from abroad year after year since the 1960s (when my inlaws joined that flow from Korea) brain draining the rest of the world, rural medical care would have collapsed decades ago for reasons like this.
Providing rural medical care is not easy and it isn't simply a matter of financing as many rural health care agendas suggest.
Modern medical care needs economies of scale to be provided in a manner that isn't grossly expensive beyond the level it is in urban areas manyfold.
In the hey day of small town America doctors came in two flavors (surgeons and non-surgeons), med schools were producing twice as many doctors per capita, and there was one kind of nurse who was less highly trained/skilled than an LPN but a bit more highly trained/skilled than a CNA, and a doctor's equipment other than an examining table could be carried in a large bag, or at least a steamboat trunk.
Now, standard quality medical care for a whole community requires a team of at least a couple of dozen professionals with highly varied specialties, multiple rooms full of specialized and expensive medical equipment (like MRIs, X-ray machines, CAT scanners, oxygen and nitrogen on tap, endless monitors, UV-rooms, ICU equipment and facilities with special ventilation considerations, sterilizers, etc.), pharmacies with hundreds of kinds of medicines and compounding equipment to make custom blends, and so on, which can't be cost effectively provided to a community of much less than multiple hundreds of thousands of people.
For older middle age and senior populations that are common in rural areas there is really no workable way to provide urban quality health care close to home. It would be far cheaper to subsidize what it costs to relocate them to places with decent health care in the same standard of living they had in rural areas (which as a bonus also makes it possible to have more family support since their children can't make economically in rural areas), than to bring health care to them. Modern medical care can do miracles that old town country doctors couldn't dream of (my dad survived more than a decade after being diagnosed with Stage 4 Pancreatic cancer after being treated at Mayo Clinic). And, everyone should have access to that. But what makes that possible is armies of specialized medical professionals and lots of expensive gear.
Hard Truths
The hard truth is that most of rural America will gradually decline in population no matter who is in Washington. Rural American can deny that reality and fail trying, or it can try to come to terms with its inevitable downsizing. Government intervention can delay the inevitable a little, at great expense, but that only prolongs the suffering.
Old people are stubborn and not inclined to change their ways to relocate to new homes and new careers late in life, especially if they own farms or small business that they've invested their life's savings in and spent most of their working lives trying to keep going that they can't take with them.
Retirees in rural communities benefit from low housing costs and incomes that aren't dependent upon a local community that provides employment for them. But even they pay a cost in declining healthcare access by insisting on continuing to live in rural communities that can support a health care system large and specialized enough to meet their needs. And the lack of work in rural communities that no longer need as many workers and inferior schools mean that their children have moved away and can't live in the same communities as their parents which makes it harder for those children to support them.
The humane thing to do is to subsidize the process of downsizing rural communities by helping people who are no longer needed in these local economies relocate to communities that are stable or growing, because until that has run its course, these communities will continue to relentlessly decline. But that isn't what people who live in rural communities want to hear, any more than someone suffering from gangrene wants to hear that their leg needs to be amputated to save their life.
Reapportionment and Redistricting
Red states will gain seats in Congress at the expense of blue states in the reapportionment mandated by the 2020 census.
But that masks what will happen within most of our fifty states during the redistricting process that follows.
In almost every single one of those states, the political clout of more urban and more Democratic leaning counties will grow, and the political clout of more rural and more Republican leaning counties will fall.
Gerrymandering can try to cushion the blow a little, but the legal reality that every legislative district must have approximately the same population means that gerrymandering can only do so much, particularly because many red states are already nearly maximally gerrymandered already.
