Things I Know I Know

I've mentioned this first bit before, but Hillary Clinton didn't win her seat in the US Senate in spite of the voters in rural, conservative upstate New York state. She won with the help of people in those counties. They voted for her despite controversy during her husband's presidency, despite agruments about whether she was enough of a New Yorker to run, despite some people's utter hatred of her. They did it, at least in part, because she was the candidate who came there and talked to them about economic hard times and lost opportunities as if what they experienced actually existed. Those votes were there for a Democrat to take--even a controversial, much reviled candidate--because she listened.

As I visit various left-leaning blogs, I see contempt, condescension, and dismissal of people in the 'Red' states. They're usually throw-away comments, sometimes made in the blog itself, sometimes made by visitors. And it bothers me, because it dismisses people who I think could be on our side.

I posted the following comments over at MaxSpeak in response to discussion generated by this post (about the tobacco farmer who drove his tractor into a pond in Washington, DC) and thought I'd repost them here (for the five or six people who come here occasionally):

You know, no one likes to be treated with contempt. And I can't figure out for the life of me why there's so much contempt for farmers in liberal circles. It bothers me quite a lot.

I agree strongly with Max that we need more ways for people to be free economic citizens. We need more ways to promote independence (for all of us, not just farmers). Whether we have economic freedom has a lot to do with whether we feel as if we can speak out on important issues. When you're most worried about getting a dime for your next meal, you're not going to criticize your employer for having the worst safety record in the business or increasing your hours without paying overtime.

Farms and farmers are failing not because we pay too much in subsidies (I mean, think about it) but because we pay them as little mind as necessary, because we promote agribusiness consolidation, which severely restricts their access to markets, and because we fail to add the value (and there is significant value) of stewardship of the land, returns to the environment, and economic stability.

Medium-sized farms support small towns. Large corporate farms do not. Medium-sized farmers buy locally. Large corporate farmers may not even buy in-state. When those medium-sized farms fail they take four or five other businesses with them. Poverty in rural areas is pervasive and deep and largely invisible to most people.

Hard-working, reasonably intelligent people have been forced, through bad advice, bad government programs, lack of power, and their own decisions into desperation and poverty and suicide. There's huge opportunity for creating influential progressive voters in rural communities...but it's not going to happen if we'd rather spend our time being snarky and superior.

...and this...

Two things:

A few years ago at the National Pork Congress, I was thinking about factory hog farms and pollution and production vs shoved-over-to-the-side-and-ignored 'alternative' agriculture and why people inssited on doing what, to me, seemed just willfully ignorant and destructive. And I had a revelation: all these people on the convention floor were just doing the best they could with what they had. It didn't make what they were doing less destructive or even less ignorant. But, basically, these were people who loved farming (even many of the agribusiness folks) and it was dying on them and they honestly didn't (and don't) know what to do about it. We can yell at them about what they're doing or we can invite them in, find common cause, and proceed together in areas like civil liberties and government regulation and promoting economic fairness. Most farmers want what we want--to make a living, to raise their families, to live in freedom. But they're not going to walk with us just so we can say--my god, you're ignorant aren't you.

A lot of farmers and rural dwellers are conservative, but a lot of them are 'old-style' conservatives, not Federalist society conservatives. There's a guy I know who lives well north of me in a very rural area with whom I've had political conversations for 10 years and we've never agreed on a single thing--taxes, government, women, nothing. And he told me the other day that he's pissed about the economy, worried about the PATRIOT act and has no faith at all in the Bush administration.

We need numbers and people and voices. We won't agree on everything, but the things we will agree on can use all of us to support them.

Farmers aren't more noble or purer or simpler than the rest of us. Neither are they stupider or more out of touch. They want, as I said above, what we all want. And they care a lot about individual freedoms and civil liberties. Their support often goes to Republicans because that's who they feel is listening to them and understanding what they're dealing with. You know, we can listen, too.