Are Rural Areas In Unavoidable Economic Decline?

In 2103, the New York Times published an article, The Russia Left Behind: A journey through a heartland on the slow road to ruin. The article noted that there were hundreds of towns shrinking into villages and villages decaying into forest. That was intentional Soviet Union policy. The Soviets cut off support during efficiency drives in the 1960s and ’70s. Towns and villages were categorized as “promising” or “unpromising.” The unpromising ones were cut off from support and left to shrink or revert to primeval forests with roving packs of wolves.

In 2017, the New York Times published a related article, Russia’s Villages, and Their Way of Life, Are ‘Melting Away’, indicating that Russia's population is declining. Many small towns and villages are simply going extinct in terms of people living there. After restrictions on movement relaxed after the fall of the Soviet Union, many young people fled resource-starved parts of the countryside for big cities. Researchers estimated that out of 8,300 area villages in 1910, 2,000 no longer have permanent residents.

In 2016, the National Review published an article by Kevin Williamson that ferociously attacked the allegedly self-inflicted misery, immorality and self-deceit about life in rural areas slowly dying from lack of economic activity. Williamson's article pointed to the immorality of belief in Trump's campaign promises because it masked reality:

It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces. It hasn’t. The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about “globalists” and — odious, stupid term — “the Establishment,” but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.

If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that.

Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down.

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

If you want to live, get out of Garbutt.

In 2018, the New York Times published an article, The Hard Truths of Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy, that asked if economic rural decline is inevitable. The NYT wrote: "There are 60 million people, almost one in five Americans, living on farms, in hamlets and in small towns across the landscape. For the last quarter century the story of these places has been one of relentless economic decline. ... the United States has grown by 75 million people since 1990, but this has mostly occurred in cities and suburbs. Rural areas have lost some 3 million people. Since the 1990s, problems such as crime and opioid abuse, once associated with urban areas, are increasingly rural phenomena."

It may be that unfavorable economic trends make it impossible to sustain many rural populations in the US and elsewhere. Rural decline is underway in Canada. Agriculture continues to automate, so that is probably not a major source of rural job growth.

The political ramifications aren't clear. Rural population loss suggests there could be a decline in republican party affiliation as urban areas tend to be more democratic and independent than rural areas. How to deal with economic decline is not clear either. Some evidence shows that urban areas tend to subsidize rural areas, although most conservatives vigorously dispute that. Regardless, rural economic decline seems to be real and it seems to be a major source of social and political antagonism. This problem just might not be fixable by anyone. Economic trends have a way of going where economic forces make them go, politics and ideology be damned.

Evidence of Trump's Obstruction in the Mueller Report

Writing for Lawfare blog, Quinta Jurecic published a great analysis of evidence of President Trump's obstruction of justice in the Mueller report. The analysis looks to be sufficient to support at least indictment of Trump for obstruction of justice on four different occasions. Since impeachment is a political process, not a legal process, the level of evidence needed is possibly lower. Here's Jurecic's analysis, which shows four instances of obstruction of justice:




Ms. Jurecic writes on Trump's effort to fire Mueller, item E in the table above: Obstructive act (p. 87): Former White House Counsel Don McGahn is a “credible witness” in providing evidence that Trump indeed attempted to fire Mueller. This “would qualify as an obstructive act” if the firing “would naturally obstruct the investigation and any grand jury proceedings that might flow from the inquiry.”

Nexus (p. 89): “Substantial evidence” indicates that, at this point, Trump was aware that “his conduct was under investigation by a federal prosecutor who could present any evidence of federal crimes to a grand jury.”

Intent (p. 89): “Substantial evidence indicates that the President’s attempts to remove the Special Counsel were linked to the Special Counsel’s oversight of investigations that involved the President’s conduct[.]”

She also points to a similar analysis by another expert another legal expert, Richard Hoeg, which shows five instances of obstruction of justice.




Since impeachment is a political process and not a legal one, the standards of evidence that apply can be different. The House can decide that there was enough evidence of impeachable obstruction on more than five occasions, each of which constituting a separate impeachable offense. Given the evidence in Mueller's report, if the House decides to start impeachment proceedings on the grounds of obstruction, they would choose whatever evidence in the report they wish. The House could also decide there was an illegal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, but the evidence for that may be less solid.

If these analyses are reasonably reliable, the evidence shows that Trump actually tried to obstruct justice more than once. Only the adults in the room, e.g., his counsel Don McGahn, kept him from stopping Mueller's investigation.

Can the Radical Right Destroy the Democratic Party From WIthin?

Then, sounding almost as if he were taking aim directly at the corporate plutocrats like those gathered in Indian Wells, Obama declared that "the nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous." . . . . The enterprise started small but exploded as antagonism toward Obama built among the 0.01 percent on the right. While they largely hid their ambitious enterprise from the public, avoiding all but the minimum legally required financial disclosures, the Kochs portrayed their political philanthropy inside their circle as a matter of noblesse oblige. "If not us, who? If not now, when?" Charles Koch asked in the invitation to one such donor summit . . . . .

As the Washington Post's Dan Balz observed, "When W. Clement Stone, an insurance magnate, gave $2 million [about $11 million in 2016] to Richard M. Nixon's 1972 campaign, it caused public outrage . . . . . In contrast for the 2016 election, the political war chest accumulated by the Kochs and their small circle of friends was projected to be $889 million . . . . The clout of the participants at the retreats served to burnish the Koch's reputations, conferring a new aura of respectability on their extreme libertarian political views . . . . 'We're not a bunch of radicals running around and saying strange things, David Koch proudly told Continetti. 'Many of these people are very successful and occupy very important, respected positions in their communities!'" Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, discussing the secrecy of the radical right movement and its capacity to buy political influence with money, 2017

In a long article, The Intercept discusses the politics of 2nd term New Jersey democratic congressman Josh Gottheimer. In some respects, Gottheimer sounds very much like the kind of person in congress that radical right authoritarians and its extreme libertarian mercantilist ideology can get behind. Gottheimer is leading opposition to the progressive wing of congressional democrats and he opposed Pelosi as House Speaker. He is vehemently pro-Israel and he is paid by lobbies that represent Israel and Saudi Arabia.

The Intercept writes: "His definition of too progressive is startlingly broad. As the Democratic chair of the so-called Problem Solvers Caucus, he led a push against Nancy Pelosi as she ran for House speaker last year. He has consistently voted against the party even on procedural motions, threatening to hand control over the House to the GOP. This spring, he was one of just a handful of Democrats at a private retreat on Sea Island, Georgia, hosted by the conservative American Enterprise Institute, mingling with Vice President Mike Pence, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and other Republican heavyweights.

Gottheimer’s intervention in the effort to end the Saudi-led war in Yemen takes on new resonance in the context of his longstanding links to Saudi money. Gottheimer is a protege of Mark Penn, a notorious Democratic operative who has become a leading Trump cheerleader on Fox News. Penn’s companies, where Gottheimer has held senior positions over the years, have long been on Saudi Arabia’s payroll.

But Gottheimer is showing no signs of receding into the background. In the first quarter of 2019, he raised an astounding $830,000, almost none of it from small donors, giving him some $5 million cash on hand. Aside from the campaign cash he rakes in from the pro-Israel and pro-Saudi lobbies, he cultivates Wall Street openly."

Is the democratic party vulnerable? -- No DINO hunts: Seeing how both the radical right movement and Gottheimer operate, the always shrewd and patient Koch brother radical movement would not hesitate to try to flip democrats to the radical libertarian mercantilist cause. The cause the Kochs founded, funded and built dates at least back to the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision that tried to desegregate public schools. The radical movement is patient, ruthless, anti-democratic and authoritarian. For the movement, the ends justify the means.

According to historian Nancy MacLean, the radical right movement the Kochs built has succeeded in overpowering and controlling the GOP. They instituted RINO hunts that successfully executed an ideological cleansing movement, leaving the GOP far more ideologically narrow and intolerant than the democrats. To the extent that former GOP moderates and conservatives are unhappy with the always vulgar and offensive President Trump, their only place to go is the democratic, libertarian or Green parties, or they are consigned to the relative wilderness of independent status.

Could the radical right movement take advantage of democratic ideological openness to begin building a radical right movement in the democratic party? The knee jerk response is 'of course not'. But why not?

First, the Kochs can spend vast amounts of money. In all likelihood that money cost them nothing after the republican-Trump 2017 tax cuts for the rich. To the top 0.01% of the right, raising $887 million or even $1 billion is probably just the cost of defending much more than that. The radical right money is not going to go away. In the process of cleansing the GOP, the radical movement used cash to oppose republicans that did not toe their line. They can do the same for democrats, at least in purple states or voting districts.

Second, the radical movement is ruthless and intelligent. There are probably ways of laundering Koch campaign contributions through groups that sound like they are democratic but are really authoritarian and pro-mercantilist. The propaganda the radical movement uses is persistent and effective. Some voters who helped put Gottheimer in office feel they were misled (that is not to say Gottheimer has any connection with the Koch's radical right movement -- yet). The radical movement can mislead voters wherever they choose.

Third, the democrats have not done ideological cleansing, at least not yet. There are democrats who are socially liberal but probably somewhat or mostly sympathetic to the radical movement's vehement anti-government, anti-regulation message. If the Kochs can see potentially useful allies among democrats, why not try to buy them? The movement has an endless stream of staggering amounts of cash to help assuage any moral or other qualms a moderate or conservative democrat might have.

How likely is the radical right movement to make a move on some democrats if the politics is right? Arguably, it is certain if the movement believes it can contain the political fallout and win more than lose. The movement's propaganda machine is superb. If there appears to be a politically viable way to infiltrate and co-opt the democratic party from within, they will probably try. If there is a way to win, not trying would amount malpractice and the Kochs don't do malpractice.

When the Radical Right Coalesced to Control the GOP

After President Obama won the 2008 election, wealthy radical libertarian conservatives held a summit in January of 2009 to decide how to respond to the grave threat that Obama posed to their agenda. They bitterly opposed government, taxation, civil liberties and Obama himself. The Koch brothers called the billionaires together. They had been building the radical movement ever since the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision that attempted to desegregate public schools.

At the summit, two republican senators, John Cornyn (R-TX) and Jim DeMint (R-SC), were invited to speak about what to do to oppose Obama and trends in government that threatened their wealth and power, especially the rise of civil liberties and environmental regulations. For the radical right, Obama's election was the last straw. It was time to fight all out war against the federal government and civil liberties by any means possible.

In her 2017 book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, journalist Jane Mayer writes about two visions of how to proceed as argued by Cornyn and DeMint. Cornyn represented the republican establishment and DeMint represented an aggressive far right, non-compromising anti-government ideology that would not tolerate dissent or ideological diversity. Mayer writes:

"The highlight of the Koch summit in 2009 was an uninhibited debate about what conservatives should do next in the face of electoral defeat. As the donors and other guests dined [...] they watched a passionate argument unfold that encapsulated the stark choice ahead. . . . . Cornyn was rated the second most conservative republican in the Senate . . . . But he was also, as one former aide put it "very much a constitutionalist" who believed it was occasionally necessary to compromise in politics.

Poised on the other side of the moderator was the South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, a conservative provocateur who defined the outermost antiestablishment fringes of the republican party . . . . Before his election to congress, DeMint had run as advertising agency in South Carolina. He understood how to sell, and what he was pitching that night was an approach to politics that according to historian Sean Wilenz would have been recognizable to DeMint's forebears from the Palmetto state as akin to the radical nullification of federal power advocated in the 1820s by the slavery defender John C. Calhoun.

. . . . Cornyn spoke in favor of the Republican Party fighting its way back to victory by broadening its appeal to a broader swath of voters, including moderates. . . . . the former aide explained . . . . "He believes in making the party a big tent. You can't win unless you get more votes."

In contrast, DeMint portrayed compromise as surrender. He had little patience for the slow-moving process of constitutional government. He regarded many of his Senate colleagues as timid and self-serving. The federal government posed such a dire threat to the dynamism of the American economy, in his view, that anything less than all-out war on regulations and spending was a cop-out. . . . . Rather than compromising on their principles and working with the new administration, DeMint argued, Republicans needed to take a firm stand against Obama, waging a campaign of massive resistance and obstruction, regardless of the 2008 election outcome.

As the participants continued to cheer him on, in his folksy southern way, DeMint tore into Cornyn over one issue in particular. He accused Cornyn of turning his back on conservative free-market principles and capitulating to the worst kind of big government spending, with his vote earlier that fall in favor of the Treasury Department's massive bailout of failing banks. . . . . In hopes of staving off economic disaster, Bush's Treasury Department begged Congress to approve the massive $700 billion emergency bailout known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.

Advisers to Obama later acknowledged that he had no idea of what he was up against. He had campaigned as a post-partisan politician who had idealistically taken issue with those who he said "like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states." He insisted, "We are one people," the United States of America. His vision, like his own blended racial and geographic heredity, was one of reconciliation, not division."

Obama's cluelessness: If one accepts that description of Obama's vision as accurate Obama was full of "wishful thinking" as Mayer put it. He was clueless about what happened to the GOP after his election. The radical right's propaganda and Trump supporters absolutely reject that as Obama's vision and they still hate Obama. To this day they still see him as racist and intentionally divisive while working to enslave the American people under the tyranny of big government.

Koch's raging hypocrisy: Mayer goes on to recount that no one at the summit defended Cornyn's plea for a big tent and cooperation with Obama. Cornyn was met with stony silence, while the billionaires cheered DeMint on. People at the summit assumed that the Kochs opposed the TARP bailout because of their hard core free market ideology. Their political machine, Americans For Prosperity, openly opposed TARP. As it turned out, the Kochs had quietly switched sides and supported the bailout after, as Mayer put it, "the bottom began to fall out of the stock market, threatening the Koch's vast investment portfolio." In this regard, the Kochs were perfectly willing to use government to defend their own interests, but vehemently opposed to government defending other interests if it presented a threat, real or imagined, to their wealth and power in any way.

Koch's hypocrisy ran even deeper than that. One former insider in the Koch machine saw Koch donor summits before Obama's election as a shrewd way to coax others into engaging in political battles that wound up boosting Koch company profits. The aide asserts that the seminars were an extension of the company's lobbying efforts. The summits were, as Mayer put it, "staffed and organized by Koch employees and largely treated as a corporate project." What the Kochs did not anticipate for that January 2009 summit, was overwhelming fear and animosity that Obama and his election generated among the billionaires. That summit morphed from a modest pro-Koch movement into a much bigger radical movement that pushed the Kochs into the leadership role. The meeting planners were overwhelmed. According to one the the planners, "Suddenly they were leading the parade. No one anticipated that."

Where we are today: Essentially no one on the right will accept Mayer's version of events or the authoritarian goal of the radical right to neuter the federal government, gut regulations, quash civil rights and install an oligarchy of billionaires with proclivities to kleptocracy and brass knuckles laissez-faire capitalism. The radical right sees very little room for government spending on social safety nets. Those things just increase their tax burden and they vehemently reject it. Whatever social good may come from that safety net spending, just like contrary public opinion, is of no concern whatever to the radical right. This is crowd has no compassion for anything except the oligarchs at the top.

The radical right propaganda machine has done its work superbly. Most rank and file republicans, populists and Trump supporters (~98%?) firmly believe that getting rid of government will free them and make them better off. They simply cannot see that freeing wealthy special interests from taxes and regulations is not going to free average people because those things do not directly impinge on average people. Most of the freed-up power and wealth (~90%?) will flow from government and the masses to the special interests. Under laissez-faire capitalism as little trickles down as the oligarchs can get away with. A corrupt oligarchy vision of reality is something that rank and file people on the right completely reject out of hand as pure leftist lies and propaganda.

Today, America is in a big mess. Whether the country can get itself back on track is an open question. If the oligarchs gain enough power, they will never let it go without a fight.