Rural Routes/Margot Ford McMillen

The Urban-Rural Divide

To begin, let’s be clear: Hillary didn’t lose the election of 2016 on the popular vote. She won the popular vote, but that’s not how presidential elections are decided in the USA. It’s about the Electoral College and not one person, one vote, as we’ve always believed. Where you vote matters. For the candidates, strategy matters. And, the Trump campaign is counting on winning the states they won in 2016. While we can do very little about foreign meddling in our elections, we need to focus on something we can control. Voter turn-out is the best tool we have, and that’s a sticky wicket.

Little by little, urban folks are getting a clue and starting to reach out to their country constituents. Farmers’ markets are booming and restaurants that buy local are staying in business with carryout. Next step could be a gingerly conversation between urban and rural about the future of America and the policies it will take to get there. This kind of support could bring urban ideas to rural places, but it will take time.

I can’t tell you just when things shifted in rural America — my county once voted solidly Democratic — but, today, the Republicans have the keys to rural hearts. Racism plays a small part, but not as big a part as you might think. While there has been discrimination since settlement, today other cultural problems run deep. Whether it’s guns, religion or abortion, the Republicans have learned to speak the language of rural life. Almost any subject, it seems, can be bent to fit the narrative that goes “The enemy is coming to take away your freedom. You are liberty’s last stand.”

Corporate messages have used this theme forever. It can be bent to serve the anti-environmentalists who want to scare farmers into thinking there are new regulations just over the horizon. Trump removed many of those regulations, much to the detriment of nature. Rural people, who know better than anyone how global climate change affects their business, will fight tooth-and-nails to avoid regulations that would, in the long run, help.

It would be easy to blame Fox News, which many of my neighbors play 24/7, or to blame the churches, where you’ll see Trump signs posted. Part of the blame should go to folks on the left’s tradition of sending the kids off for a good education: Kids graduate from college with big-city careers on their minds, leaving parents and grandparents in charge of the family farm, businesses, media, politics, religion and all that. The youngsters might intend on coming back after they’ve gotten a toehold, but they end up staying until retirement. When they finally do return, they find place and culture much changed from their memories. They put the farm on the auction block, where it might even be added to the holdings of some corporation, and they move to Florida, tsk-ing when they read in the paper that their state has moved to a redder place. Neighbors are forgotten.

There has always been an urban-rural divide, of course. It’s a familiar theme for popular culture. The dumb country bumpkin is as old as Shakespeare (who some argue was himself a country bumpkin) (but that’s a whole other issue). The TV shows we grew up with portray urban folks as hip and well-off, while country cousins ride around in old cars and crack worn-out jokes.

Here’s how you get from the closest city to my farm: Start east on the highway. When you see the giant Trump sign on the right, turn left. Take that blacktop to the giant Trump flag. Turn left. You are here.

Those are the directions I gave some of my leftie friends coming for a meeting a couple of weeks ago, and everyone found the place just fine. It’s a fact of life around here that if you’re in town, you’ll see signs for the Democrats, but in the country, not so much. We are as likely to see a runoff in the primaries between two Republicans with no Democrat challenger as we are to see real political rivalry.

COVID-19 has played particularly well into the anti-regulation narrative. Rural communities have been relatively isolated from the scourge, so right-wing pundits have had an easy time convincing us that shut-downs are a far-left plot. A contractor working on the barn roof teased me one morning, “Margot, I can tell you’re a Democrat because you’re wearing a mask.”

I had an easy come-back, honed after hearing the same thing from other folks. “Ronnie,” I said, “if you owed me as much money as I owe you, I’d be damn sure you’d be wearing one.”

And, it doesn’t help that peaceful protests turn into riots, which the far-right can spin into demonstrations against you-name-it. Protesters, if you want to help, stay peaceful. Leave when things escalate and, especially, leave your guns at home.

And we’ll all be better off.

Margot Ford McMillen farms near Fulton, Mo., and co-hosts “Farm and Fiddle” on sustainable ag issues on KOPN 89.5 FM in Columbia, Mo. She also is a co-founder of CAFOZone.com, a website for people who are affected by concentrated animal feeding operations. Her latest book is “The Golden Lane: How Missouri Women Gained the Vote and Changed History”. Email: margotmcmillen@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2020

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