An article by Thomas Frank in today’s Wall Street Journal:
....Leave the fantasy land of convention rhetoric, and you will find that small-town America, this legendary place of honesty and sincerity and dignity, is not doing very well. If you drive west from Kansas City, Mo., you will find towns where Main Street is largely boarded up. You will see closed schools and hospitals. You will hear about depleted groundwater and massive depopulation.
And eventually you will ask yourself, how did this happen? Did Hollywood do this? Was it those “reporters and commentators” with their fancy college degrees who wrecked Main Street, U.S.A.?
No. For decades now we have been electing people like Sarah Palin who claimed to love and respect the folksy conservatism of small towns, and yet who have unfailingly enacted laws to aid the small town’s mortal enemies.
Without raising an antitrust finger they have permitted fantastic concentration in the various industries that buy the farmer’s crops. They have undone the New Deal system of agricultural price supports in favor of schemes called “Freedom to Farm” and loan deficiency payments—each reform apparently designed to secure just one thing out of small town America: cheap commodities for the big food processors. Richard Nixon’s Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz put the conservative attitude toward small farmers most bluntly back in the 1970s when he warned, “Get big or get out.”
A few days ago I talked politics with Donn Teske, the president of the Kansas Farmers Union and a former Republican. Barack Obama may come from a big city, he admits, but the Farmers Union gives him a 100% rating for his votes in Congress. John McCain gets a 0%. “If any farmer in the Plains States looked at McCain’s voting record on ag issues,” Mr. Teske says, “no one would vote for him.”
Now, Mr. McCain is known for his straight talk with industrial workers, telling them their jobs are never coming back, that the almighty market took them away for good, and that retraining is their only hope.
But he seems to think that small-town people can be easily played. Just choose a running mate who knows how to skin a moose and all will be forgiven. Drive them off the land, shutter their towns, toss their life chances into the grinders of big agriculture . . . and praise their values. The TV eminences will coo in appreciation of your in-touch authenticity, and the carnival will move on.
Frank is right – this is the ruse. Every “small town Iowan” I’ve ever known (hey, I’m one myself) knows that there are forces out there that are slowly destroying the place they grew up in. It’s not “Hollywood” or “The Liberals”, it’s terms like “Smithfield” or “Cargill”. They know this, but have largely given up on the idea that the small town or a farm will be the place they want their children to grow up. The GOP knows this, too – they’ve made hay selling people on a new economic model for existence to a people that have largely given up on their own.
