The rural-urban voter divide has plagued the United States for nearly three decades, and only continues to increase. For decades now, rural districts are typically governed by Republican House members, while suburban and urban areas tend to be governed by Democrats.
New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall spoke with many political science experts who have done extensive research on how rural voters’ growing “resentment” continues to fuel a rural-urban “apartheid,” and why it will likely persist for years to come.
MAGA politician Ron Johnson’s Senate win over Democrat Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin last year, Edsall wrote, is the one of the best case studies for “rural realignment and the role it plays in elections.”
Johnson is a Trump-backed lawmaker who staunchly denies the reality of climate change, has referred to Jan. 6 rioters as “people who love this country, that truly respect law enforcement,” and proposed cuts to social programs. Still, he has managed to win reelection.
Edsall talked to Marquette Law School scholar Craig Gilbert who found in his analysis that Johnson’s votes were much lower in the “red and blue suburbs of Milwaukee” compared to his 2016 race, but the group of voters that ultimately steered his win came from “white rural Wisconsin.”
He won the rural vote by 25 points in 2016, but that increased to 29 points this time around, leading him to victory.
University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Katherine Cramer summarized the reasons for this shift in her study “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker,” highlighting three points: “A belief that rural areas are ignored by decision makers, including policymakers; a perception that rural areas do not get their fair share of resources; and a sense that rural folks have fundamentally distinct values and lifestyles, which are misunderstood and disrespected by city folks.”
Edsall likens rural voters’ resentment towards Democrats to the “upheaval in the white South after Democrats, led by President Lyndon Johnson, won approval of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
But the start of the rural-urban split, according to Boston College political scientist David Hopkins’s book “Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics,” began during a “conflation of cultural and racial controversies starting in the late 1980s and accelerating into the 1990s,” such as two major Supreme Court abortion rulings and the 1993 debate over gay people in the military.
However, Hopkins says the milestone that really solidified the divide was the 1992 presidential election, as it started “the emerging configuration of ‘red’ and ‘blue’ geographic coalitions that came to define contemporary partisan competition.”
After the election, the percentage of House Democrats representing suburban districts increased by nearly 20 percent while Democratic seats in rural districts dropped from 24 percent to 5 percent.
Hopkins wrote in a 2019 study, “The Suburbanization of the Democratic Party, 1992-2018, that “Democratic suburban growth has been especially concentrated in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, reflecting the combined presence of both relatively liberal whites (across education levels) and substantial minority populations, but suburbs elsewhere remain decidedly, even increasingly, Republican in their collective partisan alignment.”
One of the reasons Republicans continue to pull in rural voters, Jordan Gest of George Mason University gathered in recent research, is that “Republicans are now beginning to attract socioeconomically ascendant and white-adjacent members of ethnic minorities who find their nostalgic, populist, nationalist politics appealing (or think Democrats are growing too extreme).”
Harvard postdoctoral research fellow Kristin Lunz Trujillo and University of Minnesota Ph.D candidate Zack Crowley, in their research found, “the key factor driving rural voters to the Republican Party: anger at perceived unfair distribution of resources by government, a sense of being ignored by decision makers or the belief that rural communities have a distinct set of values that are denigrated by urban dwellers.”
The scholars also found that, “culture differences play a far stronger role in determining the vote than discontent over the distribution of economic resources.” And stances on what they call symbolic issues “positively predict Trump support and ideology while the more material subdimension negatively predicts these outcomes, if at all.”
Rural voters blame the wrong people, but their troubles are real.
Possible repercussions of economic crisis on the stability of democracies that already show significant signs of fragility
There is a reasonable likelihood that the next global economic crisis could threaten the future of our democratic political systems. The global economic system is a complex, adaptive system, like many others in nature and in society, and shares their basic characteristics. Underlying stresses can result in crises which, moreover, can feed through to destabilize other systems. There is a growing understanding of the damage that can be done to the economy by health pandemics and environmental degradation. In contrast, this new INET Working Paper focuses on interactions working in the opposite direction: more specifically the possible repercussions of economic crisis on the stability of democracies already showing significant signs of fragility.
The global economic system is already showing worrisome signs of stress. Ratios of debt to GDP have been rising for decades and in many jurisdictions are now at record levels. Debt exposes debtors to default in both good times (when interest rates rise) and in bad (when revenues shrink). Moreover, due to low investment and declining productivity growth in recent years, a huge, inverted pyramid of measured “assets” is now supported by a narrowing base of real production. While the “everything asset price bubble” has recently shrunk, the scope for further declines still seems significant. The migration of credit from regulated banks to less well-regulated financial institutions and markets also implies that the good health of less transparent entities cannot be assumed. Finally, in recent years, many financial markets have been showing signs of malfunctioning, including the market for US Treasuries.
The global economy has recently been subject to two negative supply shocks; the covid pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The macroeconomic authorities in advanced economies initially underestimated the magnitude of the inflationary effects and then erred in assuming they would be only of short duration. In combination with massive demand-side support for the economy, this led to an unexpected upsurge in inflation. In turn, this led to a belated and unprecedentedly aggressive monetary response from an equally unprecedented number of countries. As of early 2023, credible arguments are being advanced for both further aggressive tightening and for some moderation of these policy actions.
Looking forward, a number of negative supply shocks can be identified that will intensify or prolong inflationary pressures. While the short-run effects of the two recent shocks have clearly abated, longer-run effects (for example, long covid and supply chain restructuring) will continue. For various reasons, there also seems likely to be secular upward pressure on commodity prices, especially metals, food, and energy. Demographic evolution will reduce the number of workers while increasing the number of pensioners with adequate means to maintain their consumption. Environmental change will constrain output in a variety of important ways, while time will increasingly reveal the effects of “malinvestments” encouraged by expansionary monetary policy over many years. Adding to all these negative supply effects, there are many reasons to anticipate the need for higher investment levels; to mitigate and adapt to climate change and replace scarce workers, and for other purposes. Combined, these forces imply a future of higher inflation and higher real interest rates. This could potentially lead to problems of private debt distress, leading towards debt/deflation, or public debt distress, leading towards much higher inflation.
This raises the issue of how economic distress might affect political developments in democratic countries. Democracies are also CAS and inherently fragile. Many requirements must be met for them to work properly. As well, there exists a natural tension in such systems between individual rights and concern for the common good. Historical experience indicates that such tensions can lead to excesses in both directions and an eventual rupture with the democratic order.
Today, ordinary citizens in many countries are legitimately concerned about the rise of inequality of income, wealth, and opportunity for their children. This disquiet is being fanned by vested interests, both internal and external, and is further amplified by the “echo chambers’ of social media. Many objective measures show that the underpinnings of democracy are breaking down with the nationalist right seemingly the biggest beneficiary. As happened in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, and as seen on numerous other occasions, successive economic shocks can contribute to a change in the political order.
Before trying to identify policies that might contribute to economic and political stability, it will be necessary to adopt a new analytical framework based on the reality of interacting complex, adaptive systems. Within systems, this implies focussing on the longer-run effects of suggested policies. Between systems, it implies avoiding spillover effects that might support stability in one system while undermining it in another.
Restructuring debt levels in an orderly way would contribute to economic stability while reducing tensions between creditors and debtors. Recognizing the joint reality of lower economic potential and the need for greater investment underlines the need to moderate consumption over time. It would serve both economic and political ends if those more capable of exercising such moderation could be induced to do so. Direct measures to reduce inequality should also be contemplated. Private sector initiatives, like greater attention to stakeholder Interests, should be encouraged. Similarly, government measures to alter tax incentives (e.g., interest rate deductibility and other tax expenditures) and to improve educational and health outcomes would also be welcome.
None of the above recommendations will be easy to sell politically. Citizens and voters will instinctively react negatively to the suggestion that future consumption might have to be constrained, even in the interest of species survival. The intellectual and business elites will resist giving up power in the interests of greater equality. Political leaders will have to put the common good ahead of their immediate chances of re-election. Overcoming these incentive problems is a necessary first, if not sufficient, step toward resolving the prospective economic and political problems facing our democracies.
The bill would also eliminate corporate income taxes and abolish the IRS
A Media Ceiling Is About To Fall In on Democrats
Mark Brody
Wed, 01/25/2023 – 22:48
A pair of reports published Thursday show that many workers employed in the U.S. military-industrial complex support shifting manufacturing resources from military to civilian use—a conversion seen as vital to the fight against the climate emergency.
Moving “from a war economy to a green economy” can help avert the worst consequences of the climate crisis, noted the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute, publisher of the new research.
“Ever-higher military spending is contributing to climate catastrophe, and U.S. lawmakers need a better understanding of alternative economic choices,” Stephanie Savell, co-director of Costs of War, said in a statement. “Military industrial production can be redirected to civilian technologies that contribute to societal well-being and provide green jobs. This conversion can both decarbonize the economy and create prosperity in districts across the nation.”
In one of the papers released Thursday, Miriam Pemberton, an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, described “how the United States developed a war economy,” as reflected in its massive $858 billion military budget, which accounts for roughly half of all federal discretionary spending.
As Pemberton explained:
When the U.S. military budget decreased after the Cold War, military contractors initiated a strategy to
protect their profits by more widely connecting jobs to military spending. They did this by spreading their
subcontracting chains across the United States and creating an entrenched war economy. Perhaps the
most infamous example: Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jet, which is built in 45 states.
The strategy proved successful. Today, many members of Congress have political incentives to continue to
raise the military budget, in order to protect jobs in their districts. Much of the U.S. industrial base is
invested in and focused on weapons production, and industry lobbyists won’t let Congress forget it.
Not only is the Pentagon a major contributor to planet-heating pollution—emitting more greenhouse gases than 140 countries—and other forms of environmental destruction, but a 2019 Costs of War study showed that “dollar for dollar, military spending creates far fewer jobs than spending on other sectors like education, healthcare, and mass transit,” Pemberton continued.
Moreover, “military spending creates jobs that bring wealth to some people and businesses, but do not alleviate poverty or result in widely-shared prosperity,” Pemberton wrote. “In fact, of the 20 states with economies most dependent on military manufacturing, 14 experience poverty at similar or higher rates than the national average.”
“A different way is possible,” she stressed, pointing to a pair of military conversion case studies.
“The only way to really lower emissions of the military is you’ve got to make the military smaller.”
As military budgets were shrinking in 1993, Lockheed was eager to expand its reach into non-military production.
“One of its teams working on fighter jets at a manufacturing facility in Binghamton, New York successfully shifted its specialized skills to produce a system for transit buses that cut fuel consumption, carbon emissions, maintenance costs, and noise, called ‘HybriDrive,'” Pemberton explained.
By 1999, Lockheed “sold the facility producing HybriDrive buses and largely abandoned its efforts to convert away from dependence on military spending,” she wrote. “But under the new management of BAE Systems, the hybrid buses and their new zero-emission models are now reducing emissions” in cities around the world.
According to Pemberton, “This conversion project succeeded where others have failed largely because its engineers took seriously the differences between military and civilian manufacturing and business practices, and adapted their production accordingly.”
In another paper released Thursday, Karen Bell, a senior lecturer in sustainable development at the University of Glasgow, sought to foreground “the views of defense sector workers themselves,” noting that they “have been largely absent, despite their importance for understanding the feasibility of conversion.”
Bell surveyed 58 people currently and formerly employed in military-related jobs in the U.S. and the United Kingdom and found that “while some workers said that the defense sector is ‘socially useful,’ many were frustrated with their field and would welcome working in the green economy.”
“This was a small group so we cannot generalize to defense workers overall,” writes Bell. “However, even among this small cohort, some were interested in converting their work to civil production and would be interested in taking up ‘green jobs.'”
One respondent told Bell: “Just greenwashing isn’t going to do it. Just putting solar panels up isn’t going to do it. So we’re trying to stress that the only way to really lower emissions of the military is you’ve got to make the military smaller.”
“By the way, do we really need to update all our ICBMs [Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles]?” the survey participant asked. “Don’t we have enough to blow up the world three times over, or five times over? Why don’t we take those resources and use them someplace else where they really should be?”
Here is the story that the mainstream news media should be telling: The Republican Party doesn’t support democracy
Millions of working people watched as twenty right-wing Republican Freedom Caucus members of the new House of Representatives held Republican Party leader Kevin McCarthy hostage as they demanded concessions in exchange for supporting him as House Speaker. The Freedom Caucus – which includes the far right MAGA Squad – ultimately forced McCarthy to make a […]
History suggests that many are trying to “stabilize” America rather than just pillage her.
Why are America’s plutocrats funding efforts to weaken our democracy and replace it with plutocracy and oligarchy? Is it just about money? Or is there something much deeper that most Americans rarely even consider?
An extraordinary investigative report from documented.net tells how morbidly rich families, their companies, and their personal foundations are funding efforts to limit or restrict democracy across the United States.
In an article co-published with The Guardian, they noted:
“The advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation, the powerful conservative think tank based in Washington, spent more than $5m on lobbying in 2021 as it worked to block federal voting rights legislation and advance an ambitious plan to spread its far-right agenda calling for aggressive voter suppression measures in battleground states.”
Their efforts have had substantial success, as you can read in Documented’s article.
This effort, of course, is not unique to the one think tank they called out. From Donald Trump all the way down to the lowest Republican county official, efforts to make it harder for what John Adams called “the rabble” to vote and otherwise participate in democracy are in full swing across America.
But why? Why are some wealthy people so opposed to expanding democracy in America?
Most Americans — and lots of editorial writers — are convinced it’s simply because rich folks want to influence legislation to benefit themselves and keep their regulations and taxes down. I proposed a motive like that in yesterday’s Daily Take.
And surely, for some, that’s the largest part of it. But that’s not the entire story.
I can’t claim (nor would I) to know the exact motives driving the various wealthy individuals funding efforts to reduce the Black, Hispanic, senior, and youth vote. But history does suggest that many are trying to “stabilize” America rather than just pillage her.
They are worried that America is suffering from too much democracy.
The modern-day backstory to this starts in the early 1950s when conservative thinker Russell Kirk proposed a startling hypothesis that would fundamentally change our nation and the world. The American middle-class at that time was growing more rapidly than any middle-class had ever grown in the history of the world, both in terms of the number of people in the middle class, the income of those people, and the overall wealth that those people were accumulating.
The middle-class was growing in wealth and income back then, in fact, faster than were the top 1%.Kirk and colleagues like William F. Buckley postulated that if the middle-class and minorities became too wealthy, they’d feel the safety and freedom to throw themselves actively into our political processes, as rich people had historically done.
That expansion of democracy, they believed, would produce an absolute collapse of our nation’s social order — producing chaos, riots, and possibly even the end of the republic.
The first chapter of Kirk’s 1951 book, The Conservative Mind, is devoted to Edmund Burke, the British conservative who Thomas Paine visited for two weeks in 1793 on his way to get arrested in the French revolution. Paine was so outraged by Burke’s arguments that he wrote an entire book rebutting them titled The Rights of Man. It’s still in print (as is Burke).
Burke was defending, among other things, Britain’s restrictions on democracy, including limits on who could vote or run for office, and the British maximum wage.
Burke and his contemporaries in the late 1700s believed that if working-class people made too much money, they’d have enough spare time to use democratic processes to challenge the social order and collapse the British kingdom.Too much democracy, Burke believed, was a dangerous thing: deadly to nations and a violation of evolution and nature itself. Summarizing his debate with Paine about the French Revolution, Burke wrote:
“The occupation of a hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler [candle maker], cannot be a matter of honour to any person—to say nothing of a number of other more servile employments. Such descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively are permitted to rule [by voting]. In this you think you are combating prejudice, but you are at war with nature.”
That was why Parliament passed a law making it illegal for employers to pay people over a certain amount, so as to keep wage-earners right at the edge of poverty throughout their lives.
It was explicitly to avoid too much democracy and preserve the stability of the kingdom. (For the outcome of this policy, read pretty much any Dickens novel.)
Picking up on this, Kirk’s followers argued that if the American middle-class became wealthy enough to have time for political activism, there would be similarly dire consequences.
Young people would cease to respect their elders, they warned. Women would stop respecting (and depending on) their husbands. Minorities would begin making outrageous demands and set the country on fire.
When Kirk laid this out in 1951, only a few conservative intellectuals took him seriously. Skeptics of multiracial egalitarian democracy like William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater were electrified by his writings and line of thinking, but Republicans like then-President Dwight Eisenhower said of people like Kirk and his wealthy supporters: “Their numbers are negligible and they are stupid.“And then came the 1960s.
In 1961, the birth control pill was legalized and by 1964 was in widespread use; this helped kick off the Women’s Liberation Movement, as women, now in control of their reproductive capacity, demanded equality in the workplace. Bra burning became a thing, at least in pop culture lore.
By 1967, young people on college campuses were also in revolt; the object of their anger was an illegal war in Vietnam. Along with national protest, draft card burning was also a thing.
The labor movement was feeling it’s oats: strikes spread across America throughout the 1960s from farm workers in California to steel workers in Pennsylvania. In the one year of 1970 alone, over 3 million workers walked out in 5,716 strikes.
And throughout that decade African Americans were demanding an end to police violence and an expansion of Civil and Voting Rights. In response to several brutal and well-publicized instances of police violence against Black people in the late 1960s, riots broke out and several of our cities were on fire.
These four movements all hitting America at the same time got the attention of Republicans who had previously ignored or even ridiculed Kirk’s 1950s warnings about the dangers of the middle class and minorities embracing democracy.
Suddenly, he seemed like a prophet. And the GOP turned on a dime.
The Republican/Conservative “solution” to the “national crisis” these movements represented was put into place with the election of 1980: the project of the Reagan Revolution was to dial back democracy while taking the middle class down a peg, and thus end the protests and social instability. Their goal was, at its core, to save America from itself.
The plan was to declare war on labor unions so wages could slide down or at least remain frozen for a few decades; end free college across the nation so students would study in fear rather than be willing to protest; and increase the penalties Nixon had already put on drugs so they could use those laws against hippy antiwar protesters and Black people demanding participation in democracy.
“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. Do you understand what I’m saying?
“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.
“We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”While it looks from the outside like the singular mission of the Reagan Revolution was simply to help rich people and giant corporations get richer and more powerful (and that’s certainly been the effect), the ideologues driving the movement also thought they were restoring stability to the United States, both socially, economically, and — most important — politically.
The middle class was out of control by the late 1960s, they believed, and something had to be done. There was too much democracy, and it was tearing America apart.
Looking back at the “solutions” England used around the time of the American Revolution (and for 1000 years before) and advocated by Edmund Burke and other conservative thinkers throughout history, Republicans saw a remedy to the crisis. As a bonus, it had the side effect of helping their biggest donors and thus boosting their political war-chests.If working people, women, minorities, and students were a bit more desperate about their economic situations, these conservative thinkers asserted, then they’d be less likely to organize, protest, strike, or even vote. The unevenness, the instability, the turbulence of democracy in the 1960s would be calmed.
To accomplish this, Reagan massively cut taxes on rich people and raised taxes on working-class people 11 times.
He put a tax on Social Security income and unemployment benefits and put in a mechanism to track and tax tips income, all of which had previously been tax-free but were exclusively needed and used by working-class people.
He ended the deductibility of credit-card, car-loan and student-debt interest, overwhelmingly claimed by working-class people. At the same time, he cut the top tax bracket for millionaires and multimillionaires from 74% to 27%. (There were no billionaires in America then, in large part because of FDR’s previous tax policies; the modern explosion of billionaires followed Reagan’s massive tax cuts for the rich.)
He declared war on labor unions, crushed PATCO in less than a week, and over the next decade the result of his war on labor was that union membership went from about a third of the American non-government workforce when he came into office to around 10% today.
He brought a young lawyer named John Roberts into the White House to work out ways to overturn the 1973 Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision. His VP brought in his son, George W., to build bridges between the GOP and the most fanatical branches of evangelical Christianity, who opposed both women’s rights and the Civil Rights movement.
He and Bush also husbanded the moribund 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades (GATT, which let Clinton help create the WTO) and NAFTA, which opened a floodgate for American companies to move manufacturing overseas, leaving American workers underemployed while cutting corporate donor’s labor costs and union membership.And, sure enough, it worked.
Reagan’s doubling-down on the War on Drugs shattered Black communities and our prison population became the largest in the world, both as a percentage of our population and in absolute numbers.
His War on Labor cut average inflation-adjusted minimum and median wages by more over a couple of decades than anybody had seen since the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s.
And his War on Students jacked up the cost of education so high that an entire generation is today so saddled with more than $1.7 trillion in student debt that many aren’t willing to jeopardize their future by “acting up” on campuses.
The key to selling all this to the American people was the idea that the US shouldn’t protect the rights of workers, subsidize education, or enforce Civil Rights laws because, Republicans said, government itself is a remote, dangerous and incompetent power that can legally use guns to enforce its will.
As Reagan told us in his first inaugural, democracy was not the solution to our problems, but democracy — government — instead was the problem itself. He ridiculed the once-noble idea of service to one’s country and joked that there were really no good people left in government because if they were smart or competent they’d be working in the private sector for a lot more money.
He told us that the nine most frightening words in the English language were:
“I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.
”Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, wealthy people associated with Kirk’s and Reagan’s Republicans built a massive infrastructure of think tanks and media outlets to promote and amplify this message about the dangers of too much democracy. As the reporting from documented.net indicates, they’re working at it with as much enthusiasm today as ever.
It so completely swept America that by the 1990s even President Bill Clinton was repeating things like, “The era of big government is over,” and “This is the end of welfare as we know it.” Limbaugh, Hannity and other right-wing radio talkers were getting millions a year in subsidies from groups like the Heritage Foundation, the group documented.net wrote about yesterday.
Fox News today carries on the tradition, warning almost daily about the danger of “people in the streets” or political movements like anti-fascism and BLM.
When you look at the long arc of post-Agricultural Revolution human history you discover that Burke was right when he claimed that oligarchy — rule by the rich — has been the norm, not the exception. And it’s generally provided at least a modicum of stability: feudal Europe changed so little for over a thousand years that we simply refer to that era as the Dark Ages followed by the Middle Ages without detail. It’s all kind of black-and-white fuzzy in our mind’s eye.
Popes, kings, queens, pharaohs, emperors: none allowed democracy because all knew it was both a threat to their wealth and power but also because, they asserted, it would render their nations unstable.These historic leaders — and their modern day “strongman” versions emerging in former democracies like Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Egypt, The Philippines, and Russia — are the model for many of today’s conservatives. And not just because they were rich.
Understanding this history gives us clues to how we can revive democracy in America. Step one is to help people realize that instability, like labor pains before birth, is not a bad thing for a democracy but most frequently is a sign of emerging and positive political and social advances.
Hopefully one day soon our vision of an all-inclusive democracy — the original promise of America, to quote historian Harvey Kaye — will be realized. But first we’re going to have to get past the millions of dollars mobilized by democracy’s skeptics.
I believe it’s possible. But it’s going to take all of us getting involved to make it happen. As both Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama were fond of saying: “Democracy is not a spectator sport.”Tag, we’re it.
Independent Media Institute
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Research finds that thinking about daily political events evokes negative emotions — but increases engagement
