US Rep. Ro Khanna’s enduring interest in rural America, Iowa in particular, is curious. He is a Silicon Valley Democrat, son of Indian immigrants, about as far away from corn and hogs as you can get. Yet he has become perhaps the leading voice for remembering those left behind by the digital revolution that swept the world while seemingly passing by Middle America.
Khanna just wrote a book hitting the streets, “Dignity in a Digital Age,” a clarion call to uniting America by spreading the wealth and jobs created by digital technology to places like Jefferson, Iowa, Flint, Mich., and Paintville, Ky.
Khanna made a lot of friends in Iowa, and learned a lot, as co-chair of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. At the same time, he helped bring California tech bosses together with Gov. Kim Reynolds, a conservative Republican, and local community colleges to train workers in coding jobs where they can make $60,000 per year — in Jefferson or Halbur or, yes, Boston if you’re tired of gravel roads.
He also brought tech money to help fund research into sustainable ag techniques at Iowa State University, such as planting prairie strips between crop rows to reduce nutrient outflow and build soil health.
Why Iowa? Well, Khanna was here in large part because we give life to long-shot candidacies (Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama). That does not give him enough credit for being earnest — he explored Kentucky before Iowa. The Hawkeye State, Khanna says, has the educational infrastructure to build a model that drives rural America into tomorrow.
The book can be viewed as a pre-presidential campaign introduction, or simply as a straight-forward analysis of our fundamental economic issue between haves and have-nots. It is full of policy ideas built around elevating democratic values in a capitalist society. It starts by addressing long-brewing anxieties and resentments from the hollers of Appalachia to the sweeping fields of Iowa grain and deteriorating small towns.
Those resentments only inflame racial animus and cultural divisions.
Khanna has his finger on the problem.
All the wealth flows to New York, D.C., L.A., San Francisco, Austin and Boston. The people follow to the mega-tech hubs.
The average worker can’t afford to live in the Bay Area, and people like Nikki McCloud, one of those students who got a coding education and sweet job through the Jefferson Forge, doesn’t want to leave Halbur where the living is cheap and family is dear and close.
You shouldn’t have to leave home to have a decent life. That’s the basic argument.
The pandemic proved that tech jobs can be worked remotely. But there is a need for clustering talent. Khanna proposes a revitalization of the land grant university mission by building regional tech hubs around places like Ames or Manhattan, Kan.
He says there will be 25 million new tech jobs in the next 25 years, more than oil and coal and construction combined. Those jobs have bigger economic multipliers in the community that serve them than traditional blue-collar jobs that are disappearing, he says.
Khanna is not alone. John Delaney tried to make a similar argument during his Iowa presidential campaign about reversing capital flows from the coasts to the heartland through a new energy economy. Delaney has now joined America Online founder Steve Case, whose Rise of the Rest venture fund invests in new companies from Kentucky to Arkansas (and even Iowa City). They recognize vast talent pools long ignored.
The rest can’t rise without democracy informing and restraining capital. Iowa is being colonized by Big Tech and Big Ag, sucking our water dry and mining our soil until there’s nothing left for us. Khanna argues to meet voters where they are — evangelicals want to talk about stewardship if you don’t approach them as enemies, or if you lead by telling a farmer how he should manage his land. Give him the tools to work with the land. People respond to incentives. Fear is not as effective a political tactic if people actually have nothing to fear from innovation that includes them.
The book is about policy. Its importance is that the corridors of wealth are awakening to the frustration, and the opportunities, in flyover country. Not everyone can be or wants to be a coder. But there are opportunities in advanced manufacturing, biosciences and sustainable food production (think lab-grown real meat) if capital is routed to it through enlightened government initiative. Tax the wealthy but offer that wealth a tax credit for rural tech investment.
If that is the stuff of a nascent presidential campaign, it’s a good start. Nobody else is talking about the basic issue eating at America — being left out — like Khanna. If it is just meant to be an earnest discussion that catches the attention of Silicon Valley and Washington policy leaders, that’s just as well for Iowa. He’s welcome here anytime.
Art Cullen, managing editor of The Progressive Populist, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in his day job as editor of The Storm Lake Times in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He is author of the book “Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” A documentary film, “Storm Lake,” on the challenges of running a rural biweekly paper during a pandemic, was broadcast in November 2021 on the Independent Lens series on PBS. Email times@stormlake.com.
From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2022
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