The Recasting of Rural America by Sam Webb

DECEMBER 16, 2016 In election post mortems, I have been a little suspicious of commentary that gives too large a role to globalization in accounting for what happened on election day. It has a role for sure, but it can be easily exaggerated. And to the degree that it obscures or hides the role of political and cultural factors, it’s more hindrance than help.

Take the overperformance of Trump in rural and small town America. Globalization, if we understand it to mean corporate disinvestment from domestic locations in favor of investment in far flung regions and countries of the world, sheds little light on why Trump did so well in these communities. In fact, if pursued, it ends up in an analytical dead end.

For it wasn’t the flight of capital from huge swathes of rural and small town America across the Midwest and Plains states that set the stage for Trump’s showing among voters in these communities. It was, actually, the opposite – the inward and massive flow of giant agricultural and commercial capital into every nook and cranny of rural America over the past four decades that did.

As General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler were fleeing Detroit, Flint, and other auto centers in the last decades of the 20th century and relocating south of the border and elsewhere, corporate giants like Cargill, Monsanto, Du Pont, Archer Daniels Midland, International Harvester, Tyson Foods, WalMart, McDonald’s, Target, and CitiBank were descending on rural communities with the destructiveness of swarms of locusts. In this descent, small producers on the land and in the towns were ousted, long-standing social networks were dissolved, new technologies replaced living labor, familiar landmarks disappeared, and people were atomized.

Furthermore, the family farms and small businesses left standing after this convulsive whirlwind found themselves operating in the shadows and under the thumb of the new corporate gunslingers who quickly came to dominate every phase of the production and distribution process and much more. If, to paraphrase the famous lines of the Communist Manifesto, all that was solid didn’t melt into air, it is also fair to say that no more than a thread remained of a way of life that earlier seemed timeless and eternal.

http://samwebb.org/rural-america-turning-foe-to-friend/