A Nation of Anger & Distrust

Back when this nation was created, the very system of legislative governance was founded on distrust. Farm states with less population density feared political domination by manufacturing and trading states with urban population centers. America then was, after all, primarily a nation of farmers – 94% of the economy was agricultural – farmers who never trusted those urban elites. 

 

“The New Jersey Plan (also known as the Small State Plan or the Paterson Plan) was a proposal for the structure of the United States Government presented by William Paterson at the Constitutional Convention on June 15, 1787. The plan was created in response to the Virginia Plan, which called for two houses of Congress, both elected with apportionment according to population. The less populous states were adamantly opposed to giving most of the control of the national government to the more populous states, and so proposed an alternative plan that would have kept the one-vote-per-state representation under one legislative body from the Articles of Confederation.” Wikipedia. The New Jersey plan became critical to what we became.

 

Since farm power outweighed city power, we evolved what has become an archaic form of government – where two US Senators are allocated to each state regardless of population –  in an era where the nation is today well more than 85% urban, and farming employs relatively fewer people and contributes a smaller share of our GDP. Thus, a rural vote carries with it 1.8 times the federal ballot power of an urban vote. Even as the true power of farming and rural communities should have contracted.

 

According to the US Department of Agriculture (looking at 2019), “Agriculture, food, and related industries contributed $1.109 trillion to the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) in 2019, a 5.2-percent share. The output of America’s farms contributed $136.1 billion of this sum—about 0.6 percent of GDP… In 2019, 22.2 million full- and part-time jobs were related to the agricultural and food sectors—10.9 percent of total U.S. employment. Direct on-farm employment accounted for about 2.6 million of these jobs, or 1.3 percent of U.S. employment.” 

 

None of this seemed to matter much until the earning power distance between those with a college degree – today around 60% of Millennial have at least some college education – and those without forked widely apart, beginning in the 1970s and exploding exponentially ever since. Mechanization, automation and globalization redefined economic value. Old business and industrial structures became obsolescent fast. Old skills rapidly devalued. Entire regions, built on what became contracting industrial centers, fell on hard times. The rules changed. We were now in the information age. All this before the pandemic.

As history has witnessed such radical changes before, it useful to remember how difficult the social and economic transitions can be, especially for those who feel left behind by change. Writing an OpEd for the November 26th New York Times, David Brooks, opines: “Over the past decades the information age has created a lot more people who make their living working with ideas, who are professional members of this epistemic process [the logic of knowledge and idea]. The information economy has increasingly rewarded them with money and status. It has increasingly concentrated them in ever more prosperous metro areas.

“While these cities have been prospering, places where fewer people have college degrees have been spiraling down: flatter incomes, decimated families, dissolved communities. In 1972, people without college degrees were nearly as happy as those with college degrees. Now those without a degree are far more unhappy about their lives.

“People need a secure order to feel safe. Deprived of that, people legitimately feel cynicism and distrust, alienation and anomie. This precarity has created, in nation after nation, intense populist backlashes against the highly educated folks who have migrated to the cities and accrued significant economic, cultural and political power. Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center calls this the ‘Density Divide.’ It is a bitter cultural and political cold war.

“In the fervor of this enmity, millions of people have come to detest those who populate the epistemic regime, who are so distant, who appear to have it so easy, who have such different values, who can be so condescending. Millions not only distrust everything the ‘fake news’ people say, but also the so-called rules they use to say them.

“People in this precarious state are going to demand stories that will both explain their distrust back to them and also enclose them within a safe community of believers. The evangelists of distrust, from Donald Trump to Alex Jones to the followers of QAnon, rose up to give them those stories and provide that community. Paradoxically, conspiracy theories have become the most effective community bonding mechanisms of the 21st century.

“For those awash in anxiety and alienation, who feel that everything is spinning out of control, conspiracy theories are extremely effective emotional tools. For those in low status groups, they provide a sense of superiority: I possess important information most people do not have. For those who feel powerless, they provide agency: I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals. As Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School points out, they provide liberation: If I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want…

“In a recent Monmouth University survey, 77 percent of Trump backers said Joe Biden had won the presidential election because of fraud. Many of these same people think climate change is not real. Many of these same people believe they don’t need to listen to scientific experts on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

“We live in a country in epistemological crisis [understanding knowledge], in which much of the Republican Party has become detached from reality. Moreover, this is not just an American problem. All around the world, rising right-wing populist parties are floating on oceans of misinformation and falsehood… Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set. He and his media allies simply ignore the rules of the epistemic regime and have set up a rival trolling regime. The internet is an ideal medium for untested information to get around traditional gatekeepers, but it is an accelerant of the paranoia, not its source. Distrust and precarity, caused by economic, cultural and spiritual threat, are the source.”

If we do not pay attention to these disenfranchised Americans, give them a greater stake in our future and wrap them in a blanket of better understanding and financial security, they will continue to attempt to erode what is clear and logical to the rest of us… and that’s the problem. They really need to be a part of “the rest of us.” We need to care.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if there is one overriding challenge to Joe Biden and our other elected representatives, we must know that uniting all of us requires rekindling hope even for those who, at first blush, have lost the most in our American transition.