The alarmist argument is: “Hey, things are different, and they’re heading in a dangerous direction.” The anti-alarmist argument is: “No, things have always, or at least often, been this way. The parties always say bad things about each other. Politics have always been ugly.”
The anti-alarmists have a point if you contrast the political drama of two recent eras. When Obama was President, he was taking us into a faithless state-controlled future and the sky was falling. With Trump as President, he is taking us into a truthless xenophobic aristocracy and the sky is falling. The parties are squabbling, and they have always squabbled, so get over it. I take the anti-alarmist point seriously.
I’m making a case that things are different, and that some fundamentals in America have shifted. We're losing one special advantage that made democracy work. American political life has also become more normal, but normal in a destabilizing way.
I'll start with the special advantage that we've lost.
Agriculture was a special advantage that helped make America more democratic and egalitarian for much of its history. Yes, farming. I wish I could start with something more exciting, but it’s true.
Immense amounts of wealth were sewn into the soil across this country. For most of American history, farming was an intensely local enterprise. Starting with the first European immigrants, families spread across the land and extracted value from the land through hard work and intimate knowledge of local weather, soil, and crops.
In aggregate, the value produced was immense. We take it for granted today, but nations can't exist without food security.
This crucial resource could not be concentrated into the hands of a few owners. A few owners could monopolize railroad empires, oil empires, and manufacturing empires, but all the while farmers continued to extract their reliable value from the soil. The practicalities of farming prevented the concentration of that great resource, and provided a large voting block that disliked the concentration of power and resources.
The distribution of a crucial resource helped America remain relatively more democratic and egalitarian than other parts of the world. China has vast expanses of land, but not the distributed agricultural wealth of America. As such, it has a history of centralized power. Africa and the Middle East both have immensely valuable resources, but they are concentrated in specific locations, not spread across the land. As such, they have a history of different groups fighting over access to those resources.
Agriculture in America has changed profoundly over time. Advances in technology and horsepower allow many fewer people to farm larger expanses of land. Advances in transportation and food storage allow food to be shipped globally. Food has been commodified, and the percentage of Americans working in agriculture is a tiny fraction of what it once was.
The inherent distribution of value has been lost, and the American economy looks more like that of less democratic countries. Specifically, it is easier to concentrate the sources of value. Agriculture is the driving example, but it’s true across the economy.
Where it is easier to concentrate value, greed will do its work. Greed will capture sources of value, bend the rules to its own advantage, and generate propaganda to glorify greed.
America's agricultural wealth still makes it strong and resilient. But it's no longer a special advantage for democracy and the broad distribution of power. We're more vulnerable than we used to be.
Next time, I’ll unpack a change that has made American more normal, but in a destabilizing way.
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Article: Paul Krugman, economic decline in rural America is hard to fix.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/opinion/rural-america-economic-decline.html
Recommended book: The Rise and Fall of American Growth, by Robert J. Gordon
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