John Tester has written some thoughts on how Democrats need to approach rural voters and how we need to craft our platform to appeal to them. I don’t need to post any quotes because there’s nothing new that we haven’t already tried and which hasn’t already failed. It consists of a lot of approaches that from where I’m sitting simply haven’t resulted in any meaningful results over the many many decades that we’ve instituted similar rhetorical and government initiatives. Crafting a rhetorical message tailored to rural people is in direct contrast to the values of our base, and only ends up diluting our platform and making both urban and rural people mistrust DC Dems as insincere when they see the clear inconsistencies. It doesn’t matter if Al Gore’s southern drawl is the one promoting it. Offering rural people payoffs in the form of subsidies or investments they think they want doesn’t seem to work either. They’ve only become increasingly racist and have retreated only further into their own bubbles after decades of subsidizing their failures in the way they request.
The correlation between subsidizing their welfare lifestyles and expecting them to become less racist simply isn’t there. The same is true of education. There is not a correlation IMO between education and empathy, between intelligence and racial tolerance. In fact, Republicans on average have more college degrees than Democratic voters. Becoming a member of a fraternity at a US college isn’t a path towards racial tolerance. It’s the other path, quite frankly. The route to changing rural people’s views on race is unfortunately not via the kind of education red states will craft if given more money to craft it. It would require a level of cult deprogramming that isn’t possible in our educational system as it currently exists in our red state schools and colleges. If we could send these people to an urban inner-city school at a young age when they can still be reformed, where the cultural poison of their rural community could be sucked out: maybe that would help. But that’s logistically impossible. Likewise, broadband access isn’t a miracle cure for racism, either. That’s nonsense. If anything, access to the Internet has only made those living in the red bubble more racist, more extreme, and more divorced from reality. It’s enticing to believe that education and Internet access are miracle cures, but they simply aren’t. The real solutions are nowhere near that easy. We’re going to have to get real about that if we actually care about making things better instead of just coming up with new ways to subsidize the private Internet providers and other tech companies who benefit from those types of programs. Broadband access for rural blacks would be a great thing from all angles, but doing it isn’t going to change what rural white people believe in.
So, what’s to be done? What’s our counter-offer to John Tester’s failed, rehashed vision for what to do to improve our electoral chances in rural areas? I believe we should abandon cheap rhetorical cosmetic approaches and simply stop subsidizing their bad behavior… while at the same time offering them only the kinds of subsidies that force them to embrace better lifestyles.
1. We need to use the momentum of a green energy revolution to fundamentally change energy extraction infrastructures in red states. No more subsidies for dirty fossil fuels. Period, end of story. No more “weaning” them off it via fracking or other false hopes. Let those businesses go bankrupt but offer them the subsidized option to change and become green energy providers. Rural areas are where our wind farms, geothermal, and solar farms need to be built and those are the only new energy sector subsidies that any red state citizens should receive. People can only truly change by living a more healthy, more responsible lifestyle, and if rural folks don’t believe in doing that for cultural reasons, they need to be forced to do it by having no other option.
2. We need to fundamentally reform farming in the United States. There should be no more subsidies for family farms (or larger farms) that don’t accept a new normal of organic, responsible farming practices that re-energize the soil and remake the way that Americans experience food in their daily lives. Farms that refuse to evolve for cultural reasons should fail. Families that are ready to evolve and live responsibly on the land should receive all the subsidies needed to make that happen. Larger farms should be given the exact same choices. But we should no longer subsidize rural people feeding us poison and contributing to the destruction of our planet. If they won’t reform, then our only remaining option is to radically accelerate and subsidize the construction of urban vertical farming facilities and simply cut rural people out of the picture as much as possible. That’s not the ideal solution but if they force our hand, we should choose it. Let’s give them one last opportunity before going down that road in full force.
3. Universal basic income. Paltry offerings of broadband Internet aren’t nearly enough and won’t achieve what we’re after. The true reality of our modern economy is that there simply aren’t enough well-paying jobs to own a decent home and raise a reasonably large family. And they aren’t coming back. We don’t currently have enough realistic access to the kind of hoarded wealth we need to subsidize the rebirth of manufacturing at the level we would need to actually solve this problem rather than make cosmetic gestures towards it. In the long term, after decades and decades of sustained progress…. maybe. But not anytime soon. In the meantime, we also need to accept and find solutions for the “new normal” cycles of climate change-fueled economic emergency after emergency that will re-scatter and totally disrupt employment levels every decade or so… for the next 100 years at least. The solution in my view is a universal basic income. The bedrock relationship between “a full day’s work” and the American spirit has already been destroyed. Rural America’s meth and opioid addiction problem is the clearest signpost anyone could need. What people need is basic security, a home base to hunker down in, and food on the table. Once they have these basics, paid for with their own money, from a basic income our wealthy owe to all Americans after sucking the soul out of our way of life, then they can spare the brain power to sit down and do something productive with their days. They can start small businesses from their homes and get busy inventing the next generation’s new ideas and new solutions to our problems from their basements, the same way we’ve always done in the past, only then with inherited wealth we no longer have. But first, we need to just bite the bullet and accept that there’s no realistic way out of our modern jobs predicament any time soon and it’s going to take decades to fix it even if we were able to go full force on all the Democratic initiatives we need to take and assume unrealistically that no Republicans would undermine it when they’re in office. We need to embrace the one solution that can actually work for the next few decades and then dare Republicans to take that benefit away once Americans have discovered how well it works.
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Manufacturing isn’t coming back any time soon in a way that would make a difference for rural and suburban Americans. I don’t think it makes sense to keep promising people that it will. It’s just not honest and people can smell it a mile off. We need to adapt to the reality we’re living in. What does make sense in the meantime are sticking to our healthy progressive principles of justice and fairness and simply taking all the cosmetic and rhetorical nonsense of the past off the table. We don’t need to keep wasting time and resources on changing urban Americans who are the heart and soul of our country. We need to embrace their calls to stop wasting money on the police departments and the military, rather than running away from them. We need to get serious about changing rural Americans in a way that would enable them to lead the kinds of healthy lives that will by example change their next generation of children from the inside out. Because in the end, rural America won’t change until the decent children who grow up there aren’t either poisoned by the cultural decay or forced to flee to urban areas simply to be who they are. And that isn’t going to happen until those children can look at their parents and not be ashamed. If their parents aren’t going to change and pull themselves up by their own bootsraps to embrace that healthy change, then we have to force them to change by simply taking away any other option and leading them into a new path. We have enough money to lure rural people onto that path but if we waste it merely giving them what they think they want, like we’ve done in the past, then we won’t have enough left to actually solve the real problems. There’s no getting around that and I have zero tolerance for wasting another decade we can’t afford on the kind of rhetorical insincerity that John Tester is calling for… simply because it doesn’t work. If it did, I’d consider it, but it doesn’t. It’s insane to keep trying the same thing even though we’ve seen that it doesn’t. Some would and have said that that’s the definition of insanity. They’ve also said you can’t reason people out of a situation they didn’t reason themselves into. We can’t convince rural people to change, but we can take away all the other options except change.