The Impact of COVID-19 on Changing Red-Blue Attitudes

 

Although many of my left-of-center “blue” friends might not like to hear this, there is a beauty to a conservative rural culture of self-reliance, belief in local community, patriotism, freedom from government interference and deep and abiding faith in God. Accepting God’s gifts and working the land. It is part of our DNA, and like it or not, these values are what had defined the United States from its inception. No rain. Drought. Flooding. Catastrophic natural disasters and cycles. Unpredictability. God. 

All of these factors push souls to reach for a connection to a higher power, one that man and science just might not comprehend. “One nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.” And that ubiquitous: “In God we trust.” Farms separated by distances united on Sundays for church service. Protecting oneself, alone with no visible and immediate neighbors, against marauders and predators gave rise to our connectivity with guns. It was about survival, learning and cherishing survival skills and passing that knowledge from generation to generation. 

When the United States was formed, the economy was 94% agrarian. Even as Alexander Hamilton sought regions with waterfalls (like Great Falls in Paterson, New Jersey) to power a strong and growing manufacturing sector, President George Washington admonished him that the United States was and would always remain primarily an agricultural economy. Hamilton was undeterred. Today, significantly less than 5% of our total workforce works the land. 

Those of our Founding Fathers who owned massive agricultural estates, and that includes slave owning George Washington and Thomas Jefferson for sure, were suspicious of traders, manufacturers, bankers and those who work was not linked directly to farming or mining. Hamilton was on the wrong side of that belief. Benjamin Franklin was charged with helping design a democratic system that would prevent urban-dominated states – where vast concentrations of people could grow on relatively smaller tracts of land – from overwhelming the political system and drowning out the voices of sparsely-populated farmland. 

The resulting New Jersey Compromise gave each state, regardless of population, two US Senators. Today, California with around 40 million residents has the same Senate vote as Wyoming with around 600,000 residents. Two each. Ratification of treaties and confirmation of federal judicial and other high-level governmental appointments were relegated solely to the Senate. A Senate term was six years. The House of Representatives, elected every two years, was based on population. Individual districts and presidential electors – determined by state processes – were treated as separate political units as they sent representatives to the House. All appropriations bills were required to emanate from the House. 

The net effect of these allocations and the relegation of establishing voting districting to the states themselves has today given those rural states amplified voting power; effectively one rural vote carries about 1.8+ times the weight of one urban vote. Yet the nation rallied as one, urban and rural, when the United States was attacked by a foreign power. Uniting to fight wars was one of the contributing factors to bringing America back together after the Civil War. Civil rights and southern power began to change in a dysfunctional sea of political transitions a century after that great internal struggle. 

Starting from the late 1960s onward, the Republican Party (which had become the party of big business) realized that without a huge additional constituency, they faced the likelihood of never being able to elect any national office. By challenging the assumed iron grip of the Democratic political machine in the South with a religiously driven effort that embraced those rural values, Republicans slowly pushed Democrats down and out of that vast and socially conservative part of the nation. That rural appeal traveled west as well. 

Socially conservative constituents were slowly coopted into a blurry and non-sensical merger of patriotism, religious values and the notion of governmental laissez faire whereby the rich were taxed and regulated less. Even as government benefits, from healthcare to Social Security, were powerful contributions to the daily lives of those social conservatives. Faith-based constituents were willing to vote against their own self-interest in the name of God and American patriotism. That seemed to be an unbreakable bond. 

Even before the pandemic, the tide among Millennials and younger was turning. 59% of Millennials have at least some post-secondary education. Not having been raised during the era of anticommunism, the Cold War and the Red Scare, these younger and rising political voices were faced with unaffordable housing, absurd costs of higher education (a credential that replaced high school graduation as the entry level requirement for a good job) with horrific levels of student debt, and a series of economic collapses that tanked both opportunity and pay levels for entry level employment. 

“Socialism” and governmental support for tuition and housing were not scary concepts to this group. Racial, gender, religious and ethnic intolerance was not the going-forward value for most young people. A few extremists, sitting on the outside looking in, may still harbor those anachronistic “old person” values, but the tide was turned. There was a generational schism, a chasm that was cracking just based on age. Older, diehard anticommunists and vehement social conservatives were beginning to die off, but those who remained dug in their heels, encouraged to maintain uncompromising divisiveness by a new populist political force: Donald Trump. Those undereducated elements among the young realized that time was not their friend… maybe the President would fix that. He didn’t. 

Then came the pandemic. Everything that pushed federal power against local control hit a wall where only a centralized federal response could stem the medical and economic damage that COVID-19 was wreaking. Countries that embraced a unified nationwide governmental response to contain the pandemic were faring substantially better than those without solid, centralize guidelines and direct mandates to limit social contacts. Donald Trump’s marginalizing the severity of the pandemic, posing “cures” with unknown or horrible side effects, pledging a rapid fading of the disease, his shifting responsibility for a national and international crisis to individual states, pressing for a “who cares who dies and gets sick” reopening of the economy to make pre-election numbers look better and his belittlement of doctors and scientists were welcome at first. 

But when the elderly seemed to bear the brunt of the disease – disproportionately dying in huge numbers – and when what rural constituents believed was a “city/blue state” disease began to penetrate the rural reaches of the deepest red states, something changed. The Trump ethos, simply, had failed. Dramatically. Not too many studies have sampled demographics in conservative districts to measure these changes, but the Farrell Lab: North American West Initiative from the Yale School of the Environment took a statistical look at conservative pockets in the Western third of the United States. Over a thousand polled in 278 rural Western counties. The survey, released on August 20th – IMPACTS OF COVID-19 ON THE RURAL WEST Material Needs, Economic Recovery, Political Attitudes – reflected some of those attitudinal changes.

Some of their basic findings:

·         Covid Experience: Nearly 30% of residents in the rural West have had direct experience with Covid-19 either personally or through family, friends, or acquaintances.

·         President Trump in a Conservative Region: In 2016, President Trump won 75% of counties in the rural West. Approval for his handling of the pandemic was split, with 43% of respondents approving and 44% disapproving.

·         Support for More Government Spending: There was strong bipartisan support for government relief spending on healthcare, housing, infrastructure, small business, and direct payments to individuals. The only exceptions to this broad support for spending were for oil and gas companies and large businesses, for which rural Westerners wanted a cut in spending.

One of the leading authors of this study, Associate Professor (Sociology at YSE) Justin Farrell, added (in YaleToday, August 26th): “Rural Westerners have always had a convoluted love-hate relationship with the federal government, but the pandemic may be breaking down some of these historical political patterns… We are only beginning to understand the social, economic, and environmental impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, but our new survey suggests that a realignment of political preferences is taking place… If these patterns hold – and we’ll know more after our second wave of the survey with the same people in Spring 2021 – it will have far-reaching policy impacts.” Will these changes impact the political messaging from Republican candidates? Can they afford to alienate Donald Trump base and his core platform? 

“While rural communities in the U.S. West have historically relied on federal government programs, they also have tended to express attitudes of self-reliance and anti-federalism. According to the authors, the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted these attitudes, revealing that rural Westerners openly support sustained — and/or increased —government spending. In somewhat of a reversal of traditional regional attitudes, the only areas where rural Westerners want to see a decrease in government spending is for large businesses and oil and gas companies.” YaleToday. Will these changes stick? If the GOP does not respond to this shift, is it doomed… sooner or later? Are the Democrats remotely in a position to take advantage or is the polarization just too severe to correct?

            I’m Peter Dekom, and there is no way for any social structure to endure in rigid inflexibility in the face of massive social, environmental, economic and demographic change.