For all of the social trauma that Donald Trump’s election in 2016 put the county through — culminating with the shocking events of Jan. 6, 2021 — one curious good has come from it. Some on the left now have a renewed interest in the economic fate of rural America.
Many liberals were shocked to see the thunderous margins that Trump won rural precincts by in 2016 (and again in 2020). They shouldn’t have been. Rural areas have always been socially conservative; it’s just that for a long time Democrats found ways to appeal to them anyway. What’s happened in more recent times is that Democrats have moved left as Republicans have moved right, and if those are the only two choices, then of course rural areas are going to break Republican. Trump found new ways to connect with rural voters, promising a restoration to whatever period in the past voters cared to imagine, but Democrats also found new ways to alienate themselves from rural voters. On a percentage basis, Glenn Youngkin won rural areas with even a bigger share of the vote in the 2021 governor’s race, but that didn’t have the same shock value nationally that Trump’s election did.
In the aftermath of Trump’s election, some on the left dared to suggest that maybe, just maybe, Democrats should pay more attention to rural areas. They were often hooted down. The liberal commentator Frank Rich wrote a piece in the New Yorker headlined “No Sympathy for the Hillbilly,” which is one of those words that we might use among ourselves, but when used by an outsider constitutes a slur. He said some on the left were suffering “an outbreak of Hillbilly Chic.” More specifically: “Let them reap the consequences for voting against their own interests … They’ll keep voting against their own interests until the industrial poisons left unregulated by their favored politicians finish them off altogether.” The national Democratic Party even tweeted out a link to an op-ed that said rural voters “must disavow white supremacy.” I’m not naive enough to think there’s no white supremacy going on, but to equate voting Republican with white supremacy seems just a tad far, don’t you think? (Here’s where I feel compelled to point out that in 2021 rural voters in Virginia voted overwhelmingly for a Black woman for lieutenant governor and a Latino for attorney general. Those candidates were also Republican, but nuance is often lost on some.)
The Green New Deal — at least the legislative version introduced in Congress — further showed how out of touch Democrats were with rural America. In concept, the Green New Deal seems quite appealing; the basic notion is that the transition to renewable energy can be a job creator. As reduced to legislative prose, however, the proposal paid scant attention to rural realities, particularly in Appalachia. The only mention of coal communities was a single line: “Transition assistance for affected communities, including unemployment and healthcare.” If coal’s going away, coal counties aren’t looking for unemployment checks, they’re looking for new jobs to replace the old ones. No wonder the right has been able to turn the phrase “Green New Deal” into a powerful rhetorical weapon.
The Biden administration, along with Democrats in Congress, have actually devoted an unusual amount of attention to economic growth in rural America — I call your attention to the program to route federal research dollars to “tech hubs” in heartland communities (which has generated multiple proposals from Southside and Southwest Virginia); to the Recompete program, which targets economic development money to the most economically distressed regions; to the designation of certain “energy communities” for special tax incentives. Biden has tried to tie all this together until the heading of “Bidenomics” but is one of the poorest communicators I’ve ever seen in the White House, so has not connected these dots in a way that the public can see. Of course, these are also all programs that might someday have an effect; the first two programs are still in the application phase, so there are no wins for anyone to celebrate yet. Even when there are, these programs are so geographically limited that most rural localities won’t benefit from any of them — even if they might be generationally transformative for the few who do.
Now comes a new effort from the left to craft an economic program for rural America. It comes from a group called the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative, which “invites liberals and progressives to think differently, talk differently and act differently in order to understand the causes of the rural-urban divide and then do something to repair it.” One of the group’s co-founders is Anthony Flaccavento, a farmer and consultant from Washington County who has twice run unsuccessfully for Congress against Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, in 2012 and 2018. He lost both times but also has run better than any of the other Democratic challengers to Griffith (topping out at 38.6%). One other board member also comes from Virginia: Jolicia Ward, most recently an unsuccessful Democratic candidate against state Sen. Richard Stuart in a strongly Republican district from Spotsylvania County to the Chesapeake Bay.
That group has recently issued its program, a 25-page document called “A Rural New Deal.” Given its origin, and its political orientation, there are certainly things here that conservatives would not find much interest in — for instance, the parts about a “guaranteed living wage” and “eliminate barriers to unionization.” However, in reading this program, I’m struck by how much of this liberal-genenerated platform overlaps with many of the things I’ve heard conservatives talking about lately. I’d invite conservatives to read this “Rural New Deal” — skip over the parts you can’t stomach — and let’s find the parts where both left and right can agree. These days if we can get left and right to agree on anything, it’s considered progress, and it’s quite possible here that a distinctly liberal group has put forward things that even many conservatives could happily run on.
I’m thinking, for instance, about the part that calls for “concrete support of essential occupations not requiring a college degree.” As a country, we seem to be going through a long-overdue course correction where we’re elevating the value of the trades. Not everyone needs to go to college, and those who pursue a credential in the trades should be celebrated as much as those who pursue an academic degree. That’s often seen as a conservative reaction to academia, but this Rural New Deal shows it to be otherwise. Many communities bemoan a local “housing crisis” — namely, a lack of housing — but one of the obstacles to that is often said to be a lack of tradespeople to build that housing. This seems to be something that both left and right can unite on. (In fact, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Virginia, has been one of the leading proponents among Democrats of career and technical education.)
One offshoot of that is this proposal: “Make community college free to all and invest in community college infrastructure and faculty.” Conservatives naturally recoil at the word “free.” Nothing is free. Somebody’s got to pay for all that “free stuff.” However, there are quite a few conservative states that have made community college free, one way or another — among them Montana, Oklahoma and Tennessee, none of them exactly hotbeds of socialism, but all states with significant rural populations that don’t want to be left behind economically. I’d suggest a word other than free, but the rationale for free community college seems to be in line with something that conservatives historically have embraced: the free market. Put another way, we currently have a K-12 educational system that’s free to students because at one time that’s what was deemed necessary for participation in the workplace. Now the marketplace is increasingly demanding at least a K-14 education (or K-12 plus a credential from a community college). Virginia has developed the FastFoward program that makes community college effectively free for those going into certain high-demand professions. More curiously, the community colleges in the most conservative part of the state — Southwest Virginia — have cobbled together locally funded scholarship programs that make many of their programs tuition-free. There are philosophical questions to be asked about whether the least affluent localities in the state should be funding something that maybe ought to be the state’s duty, but here’s another place where left and right could find some consensus. Getting more students into community college for job training programs — particularly students of nontraditional college age — would be a good thing for the whole state, but especially for rural communities where educational attainment rates are distinctly lower.
There are other proposals that would seem ripe for common ground:
- “Reclaim mined and degraded land for productive use, as appropriate to the landscape, including for grazing, crop production, reforestation, trails and recreation and renewable energy production.”
- “Reverse the decline of small to midsize community banks.”
- “Require state and federal agencies and institutions to meet significant local procurement targets for the food, materials and services they utilize.”
- “Reduce ‘economic leakage’ by incentivizing local businesses to source the materials and services they need from other local businesses.”
And then there’s this one: “Work for state constitutional amendments that require funding equity in public education.” That’s something a Republican legislator — state Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Franklin County — proposed a few years ago, only to see it voted down, partly by Democrats.
We just finished a campaign (one that’s still going on in two special elections across Southside). However, once those final votes are counted,perhaps someone of a bipartisan bent should convene a reading group to see just how many things here both sides can agree on. Conservatives may pleasantly find that a liberal group has already done a lot of its research for them.