The Election Season's Agrarian Lament
What greater or more wonderful spectacle can there be, after all, or when is human reason more able after a fashion to converse with “The Nature of Things,” than when after seeds have been sown, cuttings potted, shrubs planted out, graftings made, each root and seed is questioned, so to say, on what its inner vita force can or cannot do, what helps and what hinders it, what is the range of the inner, invisible power of its own numerical formula, what that of the care bestowed on it from outside?
St Augustine.
"A Member of the Family". English idealized agrarian panting. While highly idealized to be sure, the painting does hit upon actual features of the agricultural and agrarian family. Fresh food, a connection with animals, and a close working family.
This thread goes back to the primary season. It has lingered there since long before Joe Biden was nominated on the Democratic ticket. A tour through The Front Porch Republic brought it back into mind. More specifically, it was last worked on, on November 26, 2019. . . nearly a year ago. For that reason, even though it will read extremely oddly, we're breaking it into two parts.
Nebraska homestead, 1880s.
One thing watching the (then) recent Democratic debates brings home is that there's no home for rural voters or voters of an agrarian mindset in the Democratic Party.
Which is not to say there's one in the GOP either.
Only one candidate in the recent debates mentioned rural concerns at all, Amy Klobuchar, and only in the context of her having carried rural districts in elections. But then Klobuchar is technically a member of the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party, and Minnesota, long time home to a type of liberalism that it is, is also heavily rural in quite a few areas. It's an odd state in that way, although that feature does repeat in other localities.
Now, in fairness, it wouldn't be true to suggest that the concerns of rural voters have really been in the forefront of national politics for a very long time. Arguably the last time they really were was during Franklin Roosevelt's administration, at which time a larger percentage of the country's population lived in rural areas and there was a gigantic rural (and urban) crisis going on. FDR's actions were very mixed in terms of what they achieved, however. Probably the biggest thing he did that really helped was to cause the end of homesteading, which was a good thing in that it preserved ranch and farm viability.
The first decade of the Cold War did see some attention to farm matters as agriculture was conscripted into the struggle against Communism, but the result wasn't really good long term. All of the administrations of the first fifteen or so years of the Cold War urged planting fence to fence, which had the ancillary result of really wiping out the remaining agrarian nature of American farming. Since that time there's been farm policies focused on this or that, but they're never really taken on the character of, let's say, French farm policy which is designed specifically to preserve the rural population for cultural reasons.
The basic American view has become pretty clear over the last decade or so, and in both parties. Everyone is headed towards a big city cubicle and big city career and they'll like it as they must.
Except many won't.
Indeed, if statistics are paid attention too, most won't.
Statistics about American workers show that nearly all of the assumptions about work made in both parties are made on a bunch of erroneous assumptions. Politicians like to talk about "fulfilling careers" and the like, but that's mostly a bunch of baloney unsupported by statistics. By and large Americans in all demographics don't like their careers very much.
What the modern economy has become very good at is generating income in a corporate setting, and that has indeed raised the standard of living globally. It can be argued, however, that at this point that cycle has passed and the type of capitalistic economy we have has passed a threshold where this is no longer true, and that its presently consuming occupations at the middle class level while distributing income to fewer and fewer at greater and greater levels. This can of course be debated.
But the statistics really cannot be. Repeated polls have demonstrated that a majority of Americans dislike their work even while working harder than ever. The impact on Americans health is fairly demonstrable. At this point we compare unfavorable with "developing nations" which, while adopting our economic system retain very strong connections with their traditional cultures and recently rural natures.
And it's no wonder. American work is deeply anti natural. Indeed, modern work is. Truth be known, except for hopeless weirdos, nobody really figures when they're young that they want to work in some esoteric branch of engineering, computing,or accounting, etc. People might later say "I always", but they never did, except for a tiny few, who are genuinely often odd and often not all that good at what they claim that they always wanted to do. That super accountant, in other words, or great engineer, probably came around to that through a lot of factors, including limited options, societal force and the modern worship of money that's imposed upon all.
Rather, people's attentions remain deeply focused, if now hopelessly debased in their focus in many instances, on what they always were. People want to be outdoors. They want to engage in natural activities like hunting, fishing, and raising their own food.
Thomas Jefferson, the last President who was deeply agrarian in thought. The basis of the Louisiana Purchase was, in part, to secure lands for future agrarians, the only way that Jefferson thought the republic would remain one.
And then, just as this post was first being worked on, came the outbreak of a deadly new virus in Wuhan China, COVID 19.
If anything, that outbreak out to be telling us that the densely packed urban blights that we've created are not only deeply unsatisfying to people, and an economy based on the false notion that, as Col. Saito stated in Bridge On The River Kwai, that you can "be happy in your work", if your work is just being a drone in a cubicle, is false. And indeed a lot of people did take that view. This past year, following the outbreak, has seen a record number of people out in the sticks. It also saw a record number of people, at least for awhile, out of work.
Female pheasant hunter, Colorado, 1960s.
So why does this remain unaddressed? As people like Robert Reich wring their hands in agony over rural states having disproportionate representation in the Senate, and people like Kamala Harris claim false connections with deeply distressed urban populations that they share no real connection with, and all over the country we continue to allow agricultural land to be converted into playground lands rather than lands sustaining agricultural families, maybe a policy to allow a return to the real, which would be the rural, is in order?
There's always all sorts of talk during an election season about "repairing the nation's infrastructure", and other stuff that nobody ever really intends to do. In a little more than a few days from now there's highly likely to be an oval office changing of the guard effected, and maybe a Senatorial one. President Trump and the GOP can claim some credit for passing statutes that guard wildlands and favor hunters, although at least one of those things is predictably tied up in court already (and likely the D. C. Circuit, with its absurdly broad jurisdiction), but nobody is going to interrupt conversations about bridges and highways with fields and farms. Pretty soon, they'll forget the conversations about bridges and highways.
Somebody should try to bring up the conversation about farms and fields.
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