I hate this shit so much and I refuse to play the “city dwellers must always be humble and servile to their noble country lords” game that too many Americans still buy into.
I am very tired of the way the GOP can say the absolute vilest things imaginable about cities but doing anything other than singing the praises of rural communities is politics suicide.
I lived in a cabin in the woods with no running water when I voted for Sanders in 2016, weird how that's not what they mean though when they want to talk to rural voters...
This coastal city dweller is the granddaughter of farmers. It's not like we don't understand or can't understand people who live in different areas of the country. Some of us do talk to our relatives and study our family history.
Why can't we listen to each other?
My favorite is Hilary said basket of deplorables one time and it was a whole thing. How many times has Trump literally said that liberals kill babies after birth? And that's like oh whatever.
My ex maga friend who denied being maga, hated Hilary for the deplorable statement. Because she was really maga I think she took it personally. But when we told her (after she asked) we thought Trump was a terrible person, she lost her shit. Bye, bye Felicia.
It's also fun living in a rural area and knowing you're completely outnumbered, so you have to be quiet, or they'll vandalize your house and/or your car.
WV here. Even in my small town, people get on their high horse about real america. American rural life depend on goods made in centralized locations. It always has! The general store 200y ago, walmart now. Driving into town once a week with a shit eating grin as they shop. Fucking hate that shit.
A significant portion of the backwoods back home was hippies and weirdos and nudists and people surreptitiously farming weed out back, but somehow THOSE don’t seem to count in the ol’ “salt of the earth rural Americans” narrative
It’s always people from mid size nowhere cities that are just stroads and strip malls that cling to the “rural” identity virtue signaling. They have Starbucks and work in offices yet feel the need to project this persona, the most vocal people about it are usually transplants from major metro areas
I think a lot is missed in that farmers are just as varied in politics as anyone else. In Canada we have a lot of left leaning farmers who are terrified of climate change, etc. to the east.
And then in the prairies (gas and oil land) it largely shifts conservative.
Problem:
A lot of rural people think they can starve the cities into submission.
I hate to say this but, until we figure out how to synthesize everyone, we're kinda at their mercy.
They’re mostly corn & soy farmers, sucking the USDA tit. They’ll shrivel up & die without their crop insurance and federally subsidized loans. They’re the biggest welfare cheats on this planet, usually to the tune of 7 or 8 figures annually. And every penny of that is blue state, blue city income.
There’s a part of me really wanting the staff attorneys at the various green-progressive environmental NGOs to fire up their printers and start suing BLandManagement for failing to protect the land. If Chevron’s dead, flood the zone with our wishlist. Throw enough at the wall, some’ll stick.
A huge proportion of our arable farmland is left fallow while the "farm" corporations who own them gobble up all the subsidies and tax breaks they can without actually producing anything. It's a good grift if you can get into it. 🙃
Yup.
And the corn being grown for food — both field and sweet — are mostly grown by farmers not getting the federal money, whose livelihood depends on selling to cities.
Meat might get (more) expensive. Which wouldn’t harm most of us, because we need to reduce that, anyway.
My brother lives & works in a very rural area and there's a sharp divide between wealthy, subsidized "farmers" who don't actually do much work and not-wealthy not-subsidized farmers who don't have much time (or money) to socialize. One group likes to brag about how hard working they are.
Which aligns with our childhood in a different rural area where farmers decided they didn't want to pay property taxes because they owned most of the property so they'd be paying a lot in taxes for schools and stuff so they just... didn't have to pay property taxes. Because of where we lived...
Even the most well armed farmer isn't gonna repel a few dozen people dragging him off his farm and using it to grow food again.
Besides, most farmers are in debt up to their eyeballs, they can barely keep their farm afloat in the best of times. And the bank always gets its due.
Honestly, if they tried, the actual impact would probably be the cost of meat going up (since so much of what rural America grows is corn for animal feed, as well as soybeans) and people moving to plant-based diets from crops grown in CA and overseas.
I am currently in a relatively rural area and, frankly speaking, the overwhelming majority of the food grown locally goes elsewhere. I can’t find affordable fresh produce to save my life!
Not really.
If that were the case (setting aside how little arable land is [anymore] used for human foodstuffs) farmers would have had the upper hand throughout history.
1: They did grow all the good.
2: They were the VAST majority of people.
3: Have never been at the top of the political heap.
The US Presidency is not a direct election; and was designed to make it so hoi polloi didn't make the decision about who was in charge.
The Senate; as designed, was the same way.
And if you think Trump's administration (and so the exercise of power) was run by Farmers, well I can't help you.
Remember Trump lost the popular vote, which was also the case for Bush's first term.
Which is before the question of "farmer" vs. Landholder comes into the various equations.
Yes, the past couple of hundred years have see the source of wealth shift, but actual farming has never meant power.
No, it didn't.
Trump lost the vote. (how he, or anyone in the US would do if we had wholehearted turnout is a different question).
But even if it were the case; those aren't "farmers".
At most 2 million people are Farmers.
Fun fact: guess who their customers are? And guess what happens when they can't make the payments on their expensive farm equipment because they don't have any money coming in?
