Rural Diner Menu Choices are Limited

By ART CULLEN

The liberal elite Out East are waking up to the fact that their brand suffers from chronic disaffection among rural voters, and they are starting to wonder why.

Just last week the New York Times carried two columns, one by Thomas Edsell asking academics what is wrong with us, and a follow-up by Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate economist, ruminating on what the academics said. To which other well-informed liberals responded on Twitter, why don’t journalists go to a rural diner and ask?

We have been to the diner and asked.

You call us deplorable. You say we mindlessly cling to our guns and bibles. You say that a farmer should not be on the Senate Judiciary Committee. And, you helped to engineer a rural economy over the past 50 years that has halved real manufacturing wages and put the independent pork producer out of business.

We have been fed a steady diet of propaganda seven days a week on AM radio before the Internet, and now on Facebook, that says Social Security and Medicare are Ponzi schemes that can’t last. The progressive response is … People in the diners are left to digest what they are served: they are better at managing their money than the government. When test scores are falling and Johnny can’t write, you might just as well turn it over to the charter school company and cut my taxes. Since the government can barely keep a school in Early, why should anyone buy what the Democrats are selling? Infrastructure funding? What infrastructure funding?

It started a long time ago. For 20 years we wrote about radical Republicans like Steve King but nobody paid attention until Trip Gabriel of the New York Times called him out on racial and ethnic ignorance. King had become too much for the narrative creators, and he was taken out, although we hear the echoes loud and clear right now in the Iowa Capitol. The structure was already built.

King served a useful purpose helping to galvanize the base around the myth that immigrants are taking our jobs. The immigrant did not shut down the Electrolux plant at Webster City. Iowa, in favor of a maquiladora plant in Mexico. He did not bust the unions. He did not write the free trade agreements that destroyed the corn culture in Mexico while sucking jobs out of Burlington and Keokuk. In battle for your remaining outpost, you must have an enemy and he comes without proper documentation — what could be more dangerous?

The man who reported to his station every day and worked until his teeth turned to dentures wonders why nobody will pay his dental bills. He lives here because he can afford it. He would rather fish clean water. He can handle a gun just fine. He jokes — is it a joke? — that he wishes they had a program for him like they do for the bankers and the farmers and the insurance companies and you bow-tied publishers. He paid off his house and his ex and all his debts, and he has that and a decent pickup to get him to town. He begrudges no one. He is an independent man. At the diner, he realizes there is no free lunch.

The slow drip, drip, drip on the forehead over time can make a person edgy, so resentful that you just want to blow the whole thing up. To be left to do as you will, assuming you will not fall when nobody is there to catch you.

When you ignore somebody for a half-century, if you are not actively working to keep them down, they tend to believe you don’t understand or care about them.

Sure, we get farm subsidies. There are way more Mexicans in Buena Vista County than there are farmers. They get squat. Do you think that’s why Storm Lake, Iowa, Latinos did not turn out in the 2016, 2020 or 2022 elections? Do you think that is perhaps how Rep. Steve Holt of Schleswig gets elected in Denison with views to the right of King? Do you think that the way farm subsidies are structured is not intended to favor consolidation, and forcing independent wealth creators out of the economy?

Rural Americans may be misinformed by design, but they are not necessarily stupid. We see corporatists on both sides, one side offering a tax credit if you can prove your worthiness, and the other side offering to set you free from the government yoke. It’s not much of a choice, until you come to appreciate that one side increasingly has an authoritarian bent. Now there is a conversation point — the preservation of democracy and liberty — that Joe Biden employed to get into the White House, and it kept the Democrats in control of the Senate. If only they were willing to have that conversation in rural America, we might not face the prospect of QAnon running the House of Representatives for the foreseeable future. Think about that over your hot beef sandwich if you can still find a rural diner.

Art Cullen is publisher and editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2017 and is author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” Email times@stormlake.com.

From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2023

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