ERPI 2018 International Conference Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World Was it rural populism? Returning to the country, "catching up," and trying to understand the Trump vote Was it rural populism? Returning to the country, "catching up," and trying to understand the Trump vote (original) (raw)
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Journal of Rural Studies, 2020
Highlights • Discursive geographic divides inhibit shared politics across country and city chasms. • Agrarian histories and unspoken whiteness hide the color line in the Midwest. • Trump-style ethnonationalism is an unstable articulation of stories and experience. • Rural precarity rarely understood as connected to broader processes of capitalism. • Sympathetic geographic scholarship can help dis- and re-articulate rural stories.
The 2016 election of Donald Trump as US president came as a surprise to many people – but generally not to farmers and rural communities. In this paper, we interrogate the politics of rural places in generating both support for and struggle against authoritarian populism. We ask: Why do the politics of the rural US seem so regressive at this current moment? What explains the rise and growth of white supremacist language, organization, action, and power? Looking to histories of small farmer and farm labor organizing in two key agricultural regions – California and the Midwest – we find some answers. California, we show, has been a principal site for honing the discourses, strategies, and tactics of consolidating right-wing power in the US. From 'Associated Farmers' front groups of the 1930s through Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, we follow the roots of authoritarian rural populism now re-emergent with Trump. The Midwest, in turn, sheds light on a rich tradition of rural organizing. Though often considered a bastion of right-wing sentiment, Heartland politics have successfully linked rural peoples to contest low crop prices, exploitative labor conditions, and regional disinvestments. In synthesizing lessons across cases, we provide a functional lens through which to understand contemporary prospects for emancipation. How can Othering and similar racialized constructs that have long been used to divide the working class and undermine rural organizing be dismantled? Can we meaningfully confront authoritarian rural populism without confronting the political-economic foundations of its development: notably, capitalism, its current manifestation in hegemonic neoliberalism, and failed approaches for reform? From these kernels of inquiry, we build towards a second paper focused on contemporary efforts to define and practice emancipatory change.
Emancipatory rural politics: confronting authoritarian populism
A new political moment is underway. Although there are significant differences in how this is constituted in different places, one manifestation of the new moment is the rise of distinct forms of authoritarian populism. In this opening paper of the JPS Forum series on ‘Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World’, we explore the relationship between these new forms of politics and rural areas around the world. We ask how rural transformations have contributed to deepening regressive national politics, and how rural areas shape and are shaped by these politics. We propose a global agenda for research, debate and action, which we call the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI, ww.iss.nl/erpi). This centres on understanding the contemporary conjuncture, working to confront authoritarian populism through the analysis of and support for alternatives.
Journal of Rural Studies, 2019
The 2016 election of Donald Trump as US president came as a surprise to many-but generally not to farmers and rural communities. We interrogate the politics of rural places in generating both support for and struggle against authoritarian populism. We ask: Why do the politics of the rural US seem so regressive today? What historical forces underlie the recent resurgence of reactionary politics? How does resistance emerge from and produce authoritarian power? Looking to histories of small farmer and farm labor organizing in two agricultural regions-California and the Midwest-we find some answers. California has been a principal site for honing the discourses, strategies, and tactics of consolidating right-wing power in the US. Though often considered a bastion of right-wing sentiment, the Midwest sheds light on a rich tradition of rural organizing that at times led Heartland politics in emancipatory directions. Synthesizing our cases offers the following lessons: First, capitalist growers and business allies in both regions developed new strategies to assert class power through authoritarian populist ideologies and tactics, paving the way for national right-wing successes. Second, socially conservative cultural norms and alliances have been central to organizing this incipient authoritarian populist hegemony. Third, radicalism, liberalism, and liberal policy changes have often fueled the rise of conservative populisms. Fourth, working towards emancipation among non-elites has required working across differences. These lessons provide a roadmap for intersectional and cross-sectoral organizing in contemporary times.
Rural Conservatism or Anarchism? The Pro-state, Stateless, and Anti-state Positions
Popular discourse today so weds rurality and conservatism together in the United States that one does not seem quite at home without the other. But what is it really about the rural that beckons slapjack labels of conservatism? Scholars and practitioners, only a handful of them rural sociologists, have suggested a variety of explanations: antigovernmentalism, religion, lack of education, manual labor, poverty, primitivism, and a culture of poverty, among others. Each of these approaches, though, misses a sustained agent of rural dispossession and depopulation: the state. This article theorizes rural politics through pro-state, stateless, and anti-state positions. I bridge literature that documents the state as an agent of industrialization, extraction, exploitation, consolidation, and corporatization in rural America and literature on politics and the rural. In the process of my review, I suggest anarchism can help explain the significance and potential of the stateless and anti-state positions in rural politics.