A little bit of country life - political lessons from the US elections

The election of Donald Trump has led to a veritable stampede of chicken lickens rushing wildly about crying that the sky has fallen in. I'm pretty sure they're wrong and that, for all Trump's manifest failings, we aren't heading towards nuclear war, chaos and depression. What's interesting is why, faced with the election of Trump, we are getting this reaction. Partly it's not a new phenomenon - my sister reminded me that in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected president they (Frances was a student at the Royal College of Music back then) held an 'End of the World Party'. But mostly it's quite simply a fear of 'them', of 'others' - just the same fear as we point to in people supporting Trump.

“You know, you’re the first professor from Madison I’ve ever met, and you’re actually kind of normal.”

The comment comes from Kathy Cramer, who is a professor from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and reports her meeting people in rural Wisconsin as part of a long term study leading to her book "The Politics of Resentment". Just before this comment, Cramer had said:

Thank God I was as naive as I was when I started. If I knew then what I know now about the level of resentment people have toward urban, professional elite women, would I walk into a gas station at 5:30 in the morning and say, “Hi! I’m Kathy from the University of Madison”?

And here we have the first glimpse of our problem - not just the resentment of rural communities towards urban elites but the belief among urban professionals that such resentment will play out like the less savoury scenes from 'Deliverance' complete with a sinister banjo soundtrack. Here's David Wong from Cracked talking about how half of America lost its mind:

Every TV show is about LA or New York, maybe with some Chicago or Baltimore thrown in. When they did make a show about us, we were jokes -- either wide-eyed, naive fluffballs (Parks And Recreation, and before that, Newhart) or filthy murderous mutants (True Detective, and before that, Deliverance). You could feel the arrogance from hundreds of miles away.

Many Americans only ever fly over or drive through rural America and their image of the communities out there come from books, from films and above all from TV. The image of the thick redneck, the hypocritical preacher and the associated sneering put down of Christianity all play to a belief that the values of folk out there in the backwoods just ain't the same as good progressive folk in the cities. But what are those values? Here's David Wong again:

Basic, obvious truths that have gone unquestioned for thousands of years now get laughed at and shouted down -- the fact that hard work is better than dependence on government, that children do better with both parents in the picture, that peace is better than rioting, that a strict moral code is better than blithe hedonism, that humans tend to value things they've earned more than what they get for free, that not getting exploded by a bomb is better than getting exploded by a bomb.

Or as they say out in the country, "Don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining."

The foundation upon which America was undeniably built -- family, faith, and hard work -- had been deemed unfashionable and small-minded. Those snooty elites up in their ivory tower laughed as they kicked away that foundation, and then wrote 10,000-word thinkpieces blaming the builders for the ensuing collapse.

And the sad truth is that, as Kathy Cramer found out when she talked to them, people in rural America aren't so very different from those living in the cities. Cramer also talks about the nature of that resentment - things like:

All the decisions are made in Madison and Milwaukee and nobody’s listening to us. Nobody’s paying attention, nobody’s coming out here and asking us what we think. Decisions are made in the cities, and we have to abide by them.

This still makes sense to me if I switch the words Madison and Milwaukee to Bradford and Leeds. As a local councillor serving a ward called Bingley Rural for 21 years, I've heard this sentiment time and time again especially in the most rural, most working class parts of my ward. A sense of 'being done to', a belief that other people (and, yes, there's a racial element to this in Bradford just as there is in Wisconsin) are getting the benefits of decisions, spending and attention. Some of this is true - always and everywhere, governments are most fearful about how people living in cities will respond so give them more attention - but much of it is either a function of isolation or the cost of service delivery in remote rural areas.

The problem is compounded by the economic decline of those rural areas. Some, and we see this in the UK, become places of rural retreat and second homes for that urban elite (creating a whole new set of resentments) but the places that aren't pretty enough or accessible enough simply decline. The best and brightest depart of the city leaving behind the old, poor and ill. And, as Aaron Renn - one of the best and brightest who left rural Indiana - describes, the result isn't pretty:

In Medora we see not only poverty, but nearly complete social breakdown. I don’t recall a single player on the team raised in an intact family. Many of them lived in trailer parks. One kid had never even met his father. Others had mothers who themselves were alcoholics or barely functional individuals. They sometimes bounced around from home to home (grandmother, etc.) or dropped out of school to take care of a problematic mother.

This is the stark picture of rural America's failures but we also see - reported by Kathy Cramer and described by many others - a bunch of rural folk doing what Americans always felt was the right thing: working hard, looking out for the neighbour, sticking by the family. Problem is that, for too many such folk, this doesn't seem to be working quite so well these days:

28.3% of poor families receive child-care subsidies, which are largely nonexistent for the middle class. So my sister-in-law worked full-time for Head Start, providing free child care for poor women while earning so little that she almost couldn’t pay for her own. She resented this, especially the fact that some of the kids’ moms did not work. One arrived late one day to pick up her child, carrying shopping bags from Macy’s. My sister-in-law was livid.

Again, any English politician with ears will have heard the same resentment. I remember a colleague - and I worked for a charity helping people into work at the time - angrily condemning some of her relatives because they'd a car that worked and a foreign holiday but were "on welfare" whereas her and her husband, both working, felt they were barely scraping by.

There's nothing new in all this, it has been gently simmering away in places too many commentators choose to patronise as "left behind" but what has happened over the last ten years or so is an accentuation of the difference and the 'othering' of those communities as, well, just a bit backward. Worse urban-driven, progressive policies actively damage the economy of 'fly over ' USA.

Geographer, Joel Kotkin, describes two Americas - urban 'Ephemerals' in the Democrat-voting coastal states dependent on new media, software and moving money about, and a 'New Heartland' that depends on tangible goods production. Assertive climate change policies, for example, directly impact the economy of this 'New Heartland':

Climate change increasingly marks a distinct dividing line. Manufacturing, moving goods, industrial scale agriculture, fossil fuel energy all consume resources in ways many progressives see as harming the planet. Progressives threaten these industries with increasingly draconian schemes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Gone are the days of supporting moderate shifts -- which could work with some Heartland economies -- from coal to gas and improving mileage efficiency.

Instead the demand from the left is for a radically rapid de-carbonization, which will reduce jobs in the Heartland and lower living standards everywhere. In California, Jerry Brown is fretting about ways to curb cow flatulence, an obsession that is unlikely to be popular in Kansas, Nebraska or Iowa.

The result of this is that more small towns lose their reason for existence more quickly - it all feels a bit like 'Other People's Money', the 1991 Danny DeVito, Gregory Peck film about a declining business in small town American. Back then it was an attack on heartless, uncaring capitalism but looking at the film now, it has the same concerns as Trump has hit on in rural America - loss of community, unemployment, off-shoring and wealthy untouchables swishing out from the cities to dump on struggling communities.

But it's no so simple as looking back to a golden age through rose-tinted glasses however much the progressive want to believe. People living in the rural and small town places are looking to a troubled future:

Economic anxiety is about the future, not just the present. Trump beat Clinton in counties where more jobs are at risk because of technology or globalization. Specifically, counties with the most “routine” jobs — those in manufacturing, sales, clerical work and related occupations that are easier to automate or send offshore — were far more likely to vote for Trump.

This reminds me of a recent post of mine asking what we'd do about 'proper jobs for proper blokes' - those routine jobs that are crucial to places like Bradford but which will be the ones our digital, robot-run age will kill off first. But in the city we've the chance to catch up with ourselves - as David Wong points out, this is pretty tricky in a small place:

See, rural jobs used to be based around one big local business -- a factory, a coal mine, etc. When it dies, the town dies. Where I grew up, it was an oil refinery closing that did us in. I was raised in the hollowed-out shell of what the town had once been. The roof of our high school leaked when it rained. Cities can make up for the loss of manufacturing jobs with service jobs -- small towns cannot. That model doesn't work below a certain population density.

The thing is that, while there's plenty of displacement, poverty and loss of work in urban areas, it feels like we can fix that problem, indeed that the government is trying to do just that. Up in the hills away from those big cities is doesn't look that way. Tatty boarded up places linger on and the only change seems to be the buddleia colonising every untended nook and cranny. For some places there's a roll of sticking plaster - the UK's coalfield communities (unlike America's - another argument in the Trump camp) got a load of regeneration cash and this has smartened such places up. But the problem's still there - just as Aaron Renn described above, anyone with any get up and go, got up and went, leaving behind a community in a place with no purpose.

None of this represents the whole reason for Trump's election (any more than does accusations of racism, xenophobia and general horridness) but it has thrown a light on a challenge facing every developed nation - in a time of economic change how do we protect the idea of community and can we create purpose for places that, right now, are losing their reason for existing. And, even if we recognise that places must die if they have no purpose, are we doing enough to ease the transition for the people who're from those places:

The vast majority of possible careers involve moving to the city, and around every city is now a hundred-foot wall called "Cost of Living."

Cities are expensive places that we've chosen (for reasons of keeping them liveable and not too big - or so we claim) to make even more expensive. And perhaps the Trump Presidency is the price we're paying for the selfishness of making the city too expensive?

I have a new explanation for Trump's win that does not involve Weiner or talking about Deplorables or emails. California's zoning codes caused the win. If California had Texas style housing regulations, then 80 million people would live in California and the state would have 100 electoral votes. The state would still vote Democrat (because of the composition of these new voters) and Clinton would have won.

There's some truth in this. Planners - of all stripes - helped created the sort of divided world that made Donald Trump's election possible. And if you think this is a problem, ask how you bring on side those who are victims of those planners, folk patronised by left-wing academics, sacked by climate change policies, and insulted as racists or xenophobes day in and day out by the punditry. What I fear is that you won't do this, you'll call them 'morlocks' and punish them for having an opinion you didn't like.

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Robert Heinlein - America's most important libertarian writer.

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Forget Ayn Rand, ignore Robert Nozick, push aside all the cacophony of recent writing about libertarian ideas. If you want to understand American libertarianism - including the conflicts and contradictions inherent in what it says - go and read Robert Heinlein.

In the early 1970s, according to a survey undertaken at the time by SIL, the Society for Individual Liberty, one libertarian activist in six had been led to libertarianism by reading the novels and short stories of Robert A. Heinlein. Among the prominent libertarians of the late 20th Century who have named Heinlein as an important influence on the development of their own political thinking were Dave Nolan (the founder of the Libertarian Party) and the late Samuel Edward Konkin III.

Here's why maybe?

“I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.” 

Take some time out to read 'Stranger in a Strange Land' or "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and understand Heinlein's examination of the contradictions and restrictions of modern America in the former and invocation of the US constitution as the guarantor of freedoms in the latter.

Heinlein's words are echoed in libertarian - and, in America's confused polity - conservatives politics today. Here, from 'Stranger in a Strange Land':

 “Government! Three-fourths parasitic and the rest stupid fumbling - oh, Harshaw concluded that man, a social animal, could not avoid government, any more than an individual could escape bondage to his bowels. But simply because an evil was inescapable was no reason to term it "good."

How close this is to Reagan's famous dictum:

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'

I'm sure there are people who prefer to hack their way through the turgid forest of Ayn Rand's prose, to try to empathise with her soul-less, cold characters. But next to the reflections of the author in Heinlein - most of his 'political' works feature an older, wealthy man as the vehicle for that politics - Rand's work lacks impact, few read it without political purpose whereas many will have read 'Friday' or 'Doorway into Summer' just for the good read.

Heinlein doesn't analyse, he merely states those freedoms that Americans cherish- whether or not they profess to be libertarians. None of which makes Heinlein a libertarian although throughout his work, and especially his later work, he always using that knowing quasi-narrator figure as the means to play with political argument and ideas. Whether this is the survivalism (and troubling racial stereotypes) of 'Farnham's Freehold', the war fascism of 'Starship Troopers', the attack on organised religion in 'Stranger in a Strange Land' or the libertarian reworking of the War of Independence that is 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress'.

In the end Heinlein was a writer who played with ideas, who speculated what they might mean to society, rather than a libertarian polemicist. But his writing always contains that idea of independence, self-reliance and frontier so essential to the American psyche - he doesn't shout or lecture but adopts the stance of the old man sat on the porch dispensing the wisdom of experience and takes his reader with him.

So when people encountered libertarian ideas in Heinlein it was more homespun than the intense, finger-wagging of Ayn Rand or the turgid academia of European writers:

"Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws — always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said: "Please pass this so that I won't be able to do something I know I should stop." Nyet, tovarishchee, was always something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them "for their own good" — not because speaker claimed to be harmed by it.” 

For all that he was more a contrarian - Heinlein was America's most important libertarian writer. And he liked cats.

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Why we're conservatives...

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It's pretty simple really but sometimes someone captures the heart of it with a little story. Here's Marco Rubio:

Many nights growing up I would hear my father’s keys at the door as he came home after another 16-hour day. Many mornings, I woke up just as my mother got home from the overnight shift at Kmart. When you’re young and in a hurry, the meaning of moments like this escape you. Now, as my children get older, I understand it better. My dad used to tell us — (SPEAKING IN SPANISH) — ‘in this country, you’ll be able to accomplish all the things we never could’. A few years ago, I noticed a bartender behind the portable bar in the back of the ballroom. I remembered my father, who worked as many years as a banquet bartender. He was grateful for the work he had, but that’s not like he wanted for us. You see, he stood behind the ball all those years so that one day I could stand behind a podium, in the front of a room.

It's not about elites or privilege. It's not about government or administration. And it's not about banks or capitalism.

It's about people, about opportunity and a world where, if we take responsibility for our future, we have the chance to succeed. Even if that success is just seeing our children get a better start, a higher score on the dice. Rubio's little story doesn't mention the government, it doesn't weep about ill-luck or carp about poverty. Instead it tells of the human spirit and the pleasure of knowing that our achievement stands atop the broad shoulders of family and community.

It's why I am - and you should be - a conservative.

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America!

 

"...sudden burst of sunshine seemed to illuminate the Statue of Liberty, so that he saw it in a new light, although he had sighted it long before. The arm with the sword rose up as if newly stretched aloft, and round the figure blew the free winds of heaven."

OK, so Franz Kafka was wrong about the sword but the symbolism of arriving in America is so often written that we forget why so many arrived there. Today we seem only to hear the shrill, snide, judging voices of anti-American sentiment. And we forget. We forget that - almost uniquely - the USA was founded on the principle of freedom. On the idea that government has no right to rule. That rulers must act with the consent of the ruled. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are not merely the founding documents of the United States but represent a voice of liberty - symbolised by that statue - that echoes today.

Yet so many continue to condemn the USA. To cry foul at its every act. To point at its flaws and failings. To focus on its mistakes - or rather on the mistakes of its rulers. And they are wrong to condemn a whole nation - to claim that the aim of expanding liberty and freedom bequeathed to US government by John F Kennedy is somehow an evil force in the world. The United States remains a force for good - for all its errors a beacon of liberty in a world where too many still believe the state exists other than with the permission of the people, who want some role for priests in government and who prefer the disposition of bureaucracy to the choices of free men.

Today we remember a terrible attack on America. An act supposedly committed in the promotion of god's rule on earth. An act that chose terror over conversation, murder over persuasion. An unforgivable and inexcusable act that saw thousands killed without reason and, in a cry of collective pain, led Americans to acquiesce to a set of military adventures - some with good reason and some without. But the deaths the anti-Americans point to were not caused by America - they are the direct result of that unwarranted, that evil attack on New York and Washington in September 2001.

And that attack was an attack on liberty. On the ideas that founded the USA. On the principle of inalienable rights. And on the power of choice in the world of men. It was as much an attack on Bradford, on Paris and on Islamabad as it was an attack on the USA.

I will not forget. I will always remember the stunned silence in the room as we watched - over and over again - those planes crash into the twin towers. The images of smoke, fire, chaos and confusion will never go away. Nor will the quiet heroism of ordinary men and women faced with such an act of evil.

The United States of America is a great country - its very act of foundation brought more good to the world than the sum of its sins since that date. And the power of freedom and choice allowed the USA to lead man's advance to greater wealth, happiness and health. I am - and you should be - grateful not envious. Appreciative not condemnatory. Thankful not fearful.

Long live America!

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