The disappearing small family farm

Jeff Uhler in his 1980s vintage harvester that 

he cannot afford to replace so keeps repairing himself

The New York Times writes about the impossible economic situation that many small and medium sized farms face. The economics are just not there to support small or midscale farming. The NYT writes about a struggling farm family in Nebraska:

In his earliest memories of his family’s farm, Ethan Uhlir rides in an old truck with his grandfather Arden, feeding cattle and mending fences.

Before Arden’s death five years ago, he “reminded me that I was a good cattleman,” Ethan said, and “I have to keep it like that.”

Ethan, now 17, still notices his grandfather’s wiring technique in fence posts scattered across the farm in the rolling plains of northeast Nebraska, along the South Dakota border. He walks along the same paths as six generations of Uhlirs, but Ethan may be the last to work the land.

“There’s enough labor for four people but not enough income for one,” his father, Jeff, said.

Like most farmers, Jeff sells his cattle, corn and soybeans at prices set by a global commodities market, but only large farms can absorb the narrow profit margins.

Though the family’s small farm is valuable — its 880 acres [1.375 sq. mi.] are assessed at $1.3 million — property taxes eat up most of the money it does make.

Even in a good year when the farm grosses $60,000, Jeff feels lucky if he has money left over for savings. [what constitutes a bad year, ~$40,000?]

“I’ll have to work an hour before my funeral,” Jeff, 51, said. “I have no retirement.”

For families like the Uhlirs, farming is increasingly unsustainable, as drought and extreme weather, fluctuating commodity prices and rising costs alter the economics of running a small- to midsize operation. Hundreds of family farms file for bankruptcy each year in the United States, with the largest share routinely coming from the Midwest.

Nebraska’s high property taxes, which it collects from its 93 counties and reapportions, are compounded by Knox County’s shrinking population.

About 8,400 people live in the county, down 26.8 percent over the last 40 years. With fewer taxpayers, farmers who own hundreds of acres must shoulder the cost of schools, roads and other public services. After paying for necessities like fertilizer, seed and pesticides, Jeff must cover a $15,965.68 property tax bill.

Nebraska’s agricultural land property taxes are 46 percent higher than the national average, according to a 2019 report by the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and most farmers pay 50 to 60 percent of their net income in taxes [that seems too high].

Sixty percent of Nebraska property taxes pay for schools.

Next fall, Ethan hopes to pursue an associate degree in nursing. “I don’t think that I would be able to financially support myself just living off the farm,” he said.

On a crisp, bright afternoon in early October, Ethan watched his father weld their broken 1980s combine harvester head, which cuts and threshes corn.

Most of “the equipment we have, my grandfather bought,” Ethan said.

Ethan had once hoped to be named the Future Farmers of America’s “Star Farmer,” just like his grandfather Arden in 1960.

During the 1980s farm crisis, Arden nearly lost the farm. He took on debt and worked to pay it off up until the last few years of his life. His wife, Karen, worked for 16 years in an Alzheimer’s unit at an assisted-living facility in Verdigre.

“They never went to the dentist. They couldn’t afford to,” Jeff said. “They never went on vacation. They never spent any money on each other.”

Seeing his parents struggle, Jeff has avoided debt.

“I’d love to be able to buy land close to me and expand what I do, but there ain’t no way at 51 years old,” he said. “I’d have to live to 160 to be able to pay it off.”

Jeff’s financial situation is worse than previous generations, he said. “Every year, the property valuations get higher and everything else don’t keep up.”

The family has farmed the land for 151 years, he said. “How do I sell it?”

Knox County classifies four soil types when taxing agricultural use of land, and much of Jeff’s soil received the highest rating and a higher tax rate, despite lower yields than farms in other counties with less sandy soil. “We're taxed based on sales and soil composition,” he said. “At no point does rainfall become a factor.” [F]or more than two months, “we didn’t get a drop” of rain. Drought yielded short ears of corn and tiny, pea-sized soybeans.

Farming becomes more challenging as he ages, Jeff says, and he wonders what it will be like without Ethan next year, when he’s at college. “As my helper goes away, things get tougher.”

“At some point, the people raising your food are going to be dead,” Jeff said. “Once we’re gone, we’re not coming back.”

Karen and Jeff Uhler

This story resonated because my dad worked on farms all over Eastern Nebraska years ago. He probably worked on the Uhlir farm at some time or another. I might have worked there with him. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the farm economy was better and small to medium sized farm operations generally did better. The little towns still had some life in them. Now many small towns are withering away. The economy is forcing many family farmers to sell, sometimes to agriculture giants like Cargill ($115 billion revenue in 2020) and ADM ($64 billion).

When the economy does not support something, it has to eventually cease operating or be independently supported somehow. What, if anything, should be done? 

American democracy gets downgraded as it drifts into right wing authoritarianism

American fascists exercising their right to

speech and assembly

“We need to make sure that we're getting to the bottom of some very abnormal, anomalistic, strange or irregular things that happened, so that we don't have a repeat of that. We've got to have confidence in our election.” --- Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX), House Freedom Caucus, 2021

After the 2020 US presidential election Donald Trump refused to concede, alleging widespread and unparalleled voter fraud. Trump’s supporters deployed several statistical arguments in an attempt to cast doubt on the result. Reviewing the most prominent of these statistical claims, we conclude that none of them is even remotely convincing. The common logic behind these claims is that, if the election were fairly conducted, some feature of the observed 2020 election result would be unlikely or impossible. In each case, we find that the purportedly anomalous fact is either not a fact or not anomalous. --- A.C. Eggers, H. Garro, and J. Grimmer, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Nov. 9, 2021, 118 (45)  e2103619118;   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2103619118  

One group of democracy watchers has downgraded America's democracy to "backsliding" status as anti-democratic authoritarianism continues its relentless attacks on democracy. The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance writes: 

Perhaps the greatest blow to democratic ideals was the fall of the people’s government in Afghanistan, which has seen war being waged for the sake of preserving democratic principles. Significantly, the United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale.

This is a story in which democracies are being weakened because the underlying polis—without which no set of democratic institutions is durable—is being rent asunder by different forces, from the polarization nurtured by social media and disinformation to grotesque levels of economic inequality. It is also a tale in which democracies are hollowed out by the citizens’ loss of faith in the ability of democratic institutions to respond to social demands and solve problems, as well as by the toxic disease of corruption, which demolishes any semblance of trust. Add to this the credibility-sapping blunders performed by leading democratic powers over the past two decades—from the invasion of Iraq to the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 and to the violently contested elections in the United States—and the simultaneous emergence of credible alternative models of governance, and we have the equivalent of a witches’ brew for the global health of democracy. The pandemic has simply made that brew thicker and more poisonous.

The Global State of Democracy 2021 shows that more countries than ever are suffering from ‘democratic erosion’ (decline in democratic quality), including in established democracies. The number of countries undergoing ‘democratic backsliding’ (a more severe and deliberate kind of democratic erosion) has never been as high as in the last decade, and includes regional geopolitical and economic powers such as Brazil, India and the United States. 

More than a quarter of the world’s population now live in democratically backsliding countries. Together with those living in outright non-democratic regimes, they make up more than two-thirds of the world’s population.

Electoral integrity is increasingly being questioned, often without evidence, even in established democracies. The former US President Donald Trump’s baseless allegations during the 2020 US presidential election have had spillover effects, including in Brazil, Mexico, Myanmar and Peru, among others.

Democratically elected governments, including established democracies, are increasingly adopting authoritarian tactics. This democratic backsliding has often enjoyed significant popular support.

Authoritarianism is deepening in non-democratic regimes (hybrid and authoritarian regimes). The year 2020 was the worst on record, in terms of the number of countries affected by deepening autocratization.

Disputes about electoral outcomes are on the rise, including in established democracies. A historic turning point came in 2020–2021 when former President Donald Trump questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election results in the United States. Baseless allegations of electoral fraud and related disinformation undermined fundamental trust in the electoral process, which culminated in the storming of the US Capitol building in January 2021.

Over the past two pandemic years, different groups’ varying levels of enjoyment of civil and political liberties have also become apparent. In many of these cases, these inequalities are longstanding; the context of the pandemic, however, has refocused attention on them. In the United States, for example, research indicates that some states’ voter registration and voting laws, either recently approved or currently under discussion, end up disproportionately affecting minorities in a negative way.

CBS News comments on the report:

The United States has joined an annual list of "backsliding" democracies for the first time, the International IDEA think-tank said on Monday, pointing to a "visible deterioration" that it said began in 2019. Globally, more than one in four people live in a backsliding democracy, a proportion that rises to more than two in three with the addition of authoritarian or "hybrid" regimes, according to the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.

"This year we coded the United States as backsliding for the first time, but our data suggest that the backsliding episode began at least in 2019," it said in its report titled "Global State of Democracy 2021."

International IDEA bases its assessments on 50 years of democratic indicators in around 160 countries, assigning them to three categories: democracies (including those that are "backsliding"), "hybrid" governments and authoritarian regimes.

"The visible deterioration of democracy in the United States, as seen in the increasing tendency to contest credible election results, the efforts to suppress participation (in elections), and the runaway polarization... is one of the most concerning developments," said International IDEA secretary-general Kevin Casas-Zamora.

Questions: 

1. Although Republicans claim their new election laws are not intended to suppress votes or rig elections and instead just attack the massive vote fraud that made the 2020 election invalid, is their explanation credible based on facts available to the public and unbiased reasoning?

2. The think tank analysis claims that American democratic deterioration became visible in 2019, but were there earlier signs of decline such as how the Republican Party ignored political norms, e.g., with the Merrick Garland nomination, refusal to compromise and refusal to exercise power in good faith? Or, has the GOP been exercising power in good faith all along, including in its messaging?

The elite conservative Republican mindset: Authoritarian, deceived and enraged

Some of the speakers at the conference

“The left’s ambition is to create a world beyond belonging,” said Hawley. “Their grand ambition is to deconstruct the United States of America. .... The deconstruction of America depends on the deconstruction of American men.”

“The left’s attack is on America. The left hates America,” said Cruz. “It is the left that is trying to use culture as a tool to destroy America.”

“We are confronted now by a systematic effort to dismantle our society, our traditions, our economy, and our way of life,” said Rubio. -- Republican Senators speaking to the National Conservative convention in Orlando, Florida, Oct. 31 - Nov. 2, 2021

A Nov. 18, 2021 article by New York Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks in The Atlantic, The Terrifying Future of the American Right, conveys some direct evidence from the mouths of hard core conservatives about perceptions of reality and other things that are driving them and their toxic brand of politics. These people are terrifying, authoritarian and shockingly deceived. And they are seething with anger and resentment.  TA writes:

Rachel Bovard is one of the thousands of smart young Americans who flock to Washington each year to make a difference. She’s worked in the House and Senate for Republicans Rand Paul, Pat Toomey, and Mike Lee, was listed among the “Most Influential Women in Washington Under 35” by National Journal, did a stint at the Heritage Foundation, and is now policy director of the Conservative Partnership Institute, whose mission is to train, equip, and unify the conservative movement. She’s bright, cheerful, and funny, and has a side hustle as a sommelier. And, like most young people, she has absorbed the dominant ideas of her peer group.

One of the ideas she’s absorbed is that the conservatives who came before her were insufferably naive. They thought liberals and conservatives both want what’s best for America, disagreeing only on how to get there. But that’s not true, she believes. “Woke elites—increasingly the mainstream left of this country—do not want what we want,” she told the National Conservatism Conference, which was held earlier this month in a bland hotel alongside theme parks in Orlando. “What they want is to destroy us,” she said. “Not only will they use every power at their disposal to achieve their goal,” but they’ve already been doing it for years “by dominating every cultural, intellectual, and political institution.”

As she says this, the dozens of young people in her breakout session begin to vibrate in their seats. Ripples of head nodding are visible from where I sit in the back. These are the rising talents of the right—the Heritage Foundation junior staff, the Ivy League grads, the intellectual Catholics and the Orthodox Jews who have been studying Hobbes and de Tocqueville at the various young conservative fellowship programs that stretch along Acela-land. In the hallway before watching Bovard’s speech, I bumped into one of my former Yale students, who is now at McKinsey.

Bovard has the place rocking, training her sights on the true enemies, the left-wing elite: a “totalitarian cult of billionaires and bureaucrats, of privilege perpetuated by bullying, empowered by the most sophisticated surveillance and communications technologies in history, and limited only by the scruples of people who arrest rape victims’ fathers, declare math to be white supremacist, finance ethnic cleansing in western China, and who partied, a mile high, on Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express.”  

The atmosphere is electric. She’s giving the best synopsis of national conservatism I’ve heard at the conference we’re attending—and with flair! Progressives pretend to be the oppressed ones, she tells the crowd, “but in reality, it’s just an old boys’ club, another frat house for entitled rich kids contrived to perpetuate their unearned privilege. It’s Skull and Bones for gender-studies majors!” She finishes to a rousing ovation. People leap to their feet.

I have the sinking sensation that the thunderous sound I’m hearing is the future of the Republican Party.  

This is national conservatism pursued to its logical conclusion: using state power to break up and humble the big corporations and to push back against coastal cultural values. The culture war merges with the economic-class war—and a new right emerges in which an intellectual cadre, the national conservatives, rallies the proletarian masses against the cultural/corporate elites. All your grandparents’ political categories get scrambled along the way.  

The NatCons are wrong to think there is a unified thing called “the left” that hates America. This is just the apocalyptic menace many of them had to invent in order to justify their decision to vote for Donald Trump.

They are wrong, too, to think there is a wokeist Anschluss taking over all the institutions of American life. For people who spend so much time railing about the evils of social media, they sure seem to spend an awful lot of their lives on Twitter. Ninety percent of their discourse is about the discourse. Anecdotalism was also rampant at the conference—generalizing from three anecdotes about people who got canceled to conclude that all of American life is a woke hellscape. They need to get out more.

Brooks points out that there are three groups in the NatCon authoritarian movement. The old guard of conservatives over 50 who have been radicalized by liberals and their rhetoric and behavior. Liberal rhetoric about race radicalized one of these people, a Brown University economist. The second group consists of mid-career politicians and operatives who adapting to the populist rage. This group includes Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard), J. D. Vance (Yale Law), and Josh Hawley (Stanford and Yale).

The third and largest group is young Republicans who grew up with Facebook, MSNBC and identity politics. Brooks writes that this group went to “colleges smothered by progressive sermonizing.” That experience turned them into radicalized authoritarian Republicans. Brooks writes that he disagreed with most of what he was hearing at this national conservatism conference in Florida, but he disturbingly mused, “If you were 22, maybe you’d be here too.” That is really frightening. 

NatCons (national conservatives), as they call themselves, see a world in where corporate, media, political and academic elites are all bound together into an axis of evil. According to the NatCon narrative (propaganda and lies), the liberal axis dominates all institutions and it controls the “channels of thought.” One can only wonder, if the channels of thought the that liberals control include Breitbart, Fox News, The Federalist, and the like, these NatCon folks are seriously deluded and way beyond radical extremist conservatism -- they are pure dictator material. 

These people are serious about all of this. And, they are resentful, enraged and organized.

NatCons see big tech companies as part of the enemy axis, despite being long-term major donors to Republicans. Ted Cruz summed the NatCon anti-big tech mindset up for the Florida crowd: “Big Tech is malevolent. Big Tech is corrupt. Big Tech is omnipresent.” The NatCons see America as a surveillance state, with every move monitored in the name of liberal control. The propaganda holds that big tech czars secretly decide what ideas and stories get promoted, what get suppressed as part of how “surveillance capitalism” works day-to-day. 

NatCon martyrdom propaganda includes sad stories of how evil big tech companies like Twitter and Facebook suppressed a New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s laptop. In the minds of NatCons, radical right lies and propaganda are reality and reality is lies and propaganda. That state of affairs is what Hannah Arendt warned the world about in 1951. Brooks writes that NatCon narrative is one where “profiteers of surveillance capitalism see all and control all.” That is the kind of terrifying deep surveillance state that China has made itself into and uses to monitor and control and shape reality, thought and behavior. 

Questions: 

1. Is American big tech and liberal politics really as pervasive and all-powerful as the NatCon narrative says? Do liberals routinely arrest conservative dissidents?

2. If what Brooks writes is basically accurate is it reasonable to see the NatCon movement, or whatever one calls this thing, as authoritarian, mostly deceived by propaganda and lies and/or enraged and resentful?

3. Does this article evince what appears to me to be massive projection by what the the radical right believes and does onto the left, e.g., Ted Cruz arguing “It is the left that is trying to use culture as a tool to destroy America”?  

4. Is there a liberal axis of evil among big tech (which tends to donate to Democrats), liberal academics, etc., that operates in the name of surveillance capitalism with the aims of destroying America and imposing some form of atheist or socialist liberal tyranny?  

Nostalgia: A human emotion that can be manipulated

Nostalgia marketing

The NPR program Throughline broadcast a fascinating 58 minute program, The Nostalgia Bone, on the origins of nostalgia, what behaviors it can lead people to engage in and how it can be manipulated for profit and power. The program description is this: 

The global pandemic has spawned a different type of epidemic, one of an entirely different nature: a nostalgia outbreak. Longing for 'simpler times' and 'better days', many of us have been turning to 90s dance playlists, TV sitcoms, and sports highlights. We're looking for comfort and safety in the permanence of the past, or at least, what we think the past was. But, when it first appeared, nostalgia itself wasn't considered a feeling; it was a deadly disease. This episode traces the history of nostalgia from its origins as an illness to the dominating emotion of our time. And in doing so, we wrestle with its eternal paradox to both hold us back and keep us going.

A couple of points merit mention. In early written sources, nostalgia was described in Homers' ~8th century BC poem Odyssey. Although Homer described nostalgia, the concept had not crystallized into a discrete disease. It was a state of mind. A later Portuguese writer described it as a pleasure you suffer and an ailment you enjoy. Nostalgia has been described in essentially all cultures.

10:00 Centuries later, it was identified by an inquisitive 19 year old medical student, Johannes Hoffer, in the 1680s as a serious disease after he became aware of a strange new set of previously unrecognized symptoms. Nostalgia had appeared in a group of Swiss mercenaries with symptoms that included fainting, voice and visual hallucinations, serious depression, lack of appetite, inability to fight and intense homesickness and longing for home cooked food. The symptoms were contagious and more mercenaries succumbed to the disease as time passed. The symptoms appeared to be triggered by the onset of autumn. 

Hoffer wrote his medical dissertation on this new disease and he named it nostalgia, based on the Greek words nostos and algia, roughly 'the ache for home.' Hoffer described one symptom as "stupidity of the mind based attending to nothing hardly other than the idea of the fatherland." This arose in mercenaries in foreign countries with alien customs and Hoffer believed that the afflicted simply did not know how to accustom themselves to local culture, foods, manners and other customs. Some of the afflicted mercenaries may have died from nostalgia (some death certificates named nostalgia as the cause of death). 

The only treatment of the time was to send the afflicted person back home for a while to recover. Army generals of the time found that treatment to be unacceptable, so they tried to suppress the rise and spread of nostalgia in their soldiers by banning things that reminded the troops of home, e.g., popular songs from home were banned and the afflicted were put in isolation, which tended to make the problem worse. 

18:00 Written records show that nostalgia spread with the rise of imperialism. It was seen in British soldiers in India and in French troops outside France. One aspect of being a soldier, usually a young person, is experiencing a loss of control relative to life before the confines of military life asserted itself. 

Some American soldiers in the US Civil War experienced serious bouts of nostalgia, so they were encouraged to write letters to fend off the disease. Soldiers in the Civil War who did not experience nostalgia were observed to be ones who tended to be solidly ideologically committed to their cause. Slave owners came to believe that their slaves captured in Africa were incapable of forming any attachments to their homes or families and thus could not experience nostalgia or homesickness. Emotions could not apply to property, including slaves. 

The 1800s medical establishment shared that false belief and thus did not even consider it or write about it, leaving very little written record on the subject. Signs of nostalgia were categorized to conform with the false belief. Thus slaves who tried to run away in hopes of getting back home were diagnose with a slave disease such as "the madness to flee the plantation" or a pseudoscientific label. The prescribed treatment of such slave diseases was regular whippings for slaves. Similar White-centric responses arose when Indians were forced off their lands, their feelings were trivialized, e.g., American Indians forced off their land would feel no different from White settlers leaving the East to settle in the West. President Andrew Jackson saw no difference subjugated Indians forced off their land against their will to places with no prospects, and White folks deciding to move West to seek their fortune. 

{Comment: The point of this state of denial for slave owners and Whites who displaced American Indians is obvious now but was unknown then (more accurately, unacceptable then), namely defense against cognitive dissonance. Slave owners and Indian abusers needed to believe that slaves and Indians were not partly or fully human and therefore not either susceptible to human emotions and feelings or came from causes no different that what ordinary White people would experience. The power of motivated reasoning is on display in that blast of blatant social self-deception. The contrary evidence was obvious and undeniable, yet it was unseen and thus there was no need for White people in power to deny anything.}

23:00 It turned out that sending people home to cure nostalgia usually did not work. Sometimes, home had changed. Sometimes people had false memories of what home was really like. Feelings of nostalgia spread from soldiers who returned home to local residents. The medical community was baffled. The idea that slowly seemed to make more sense was that nostalgia was associated more with time than longing for a home or place. Change was what was triggering nostalgia. The medical community stopped looking for Hoffer's postulated broken "nostalgia bone" (physical cause) and started to believe that nostalgia had a mental cause that arose in reaction to modernity itself and the constant changes it imposed on people. 

More and more people were moving to respond to more rapidly changing conditions and opportunities, and a loss of control tended to accompany the changes. Rural people moved to towns and worked in factories under a boss instead of working for themselves on farms. Even people who did not move were also facing significant changes, e.g., mechanization of agriculture. Modernity forced time itself to be viewed differently to adapt to the demands of industrialization and the ever more intrusive global economy.

The backlash to industrialization was the rise of romanticism, sentiment and emotion in literature, art and philosophy. It was a backlash against the enlightenment, reason and rationalism. Nostalgia was absorbed into the romanticism movement. The poetry of English poet William Wordsworth fostered the integration of nostalgia into the backlash movement, e.g., in his nostalgic unattainable thing (the fictional woman Lucy) poems. This backlash movement was global, not just Western. In view of impending uncertainty from modernity, people were grasping for the past by latching onto the certainty in (sometimes false -- usually?) memories of how life and they themselves used to be. 

35:30 It took until the 1960s for the medical community to finally accept the idea that nostalgia was a mental state of mind, not a physical malady. Science was starting to accept the idea that nostalgia was a mood or emotion. Once nostalgia came to be seen as not serious or pathological, the business community immediately started asking, how can we use this for profit? How can marketers direct those normal human feelings to generate sales and profit? 

In 1974, the TV series Happy Days came on the scene as a nostalgia marketing vehicle. It was all about growing up in the Midwest in the 1950s, with the drive-ins and hair gel and leather jackets, i.e., the Fonz. Ads sold homes linked to the 1950s, a time when jobs were more stable and homes more affordable. The appeals were directed to White middle class Americans. Product life cycles were extended by appealing to nostalgia to sell products at the end of their run of consumer popularity. The "nostalgia tail" was added to marketers' conception of the product life cycle. (Anyone up for a "classic" pet rock? Hula-hoops anyone? Re-runs of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air?) Marketers were laser focused on how to milk profit out of this new found source of human manipulability. A whole new area of the human mind to sell to. Exciting times for sure. 

44:30 The 1970s were the start of a massive nostalgia-based marketing wave. It or successors to it continues today. But there is a new nostalgia wave going on now, starting about 15-20 years ago. Recent chaos and demographic and social changes have instilled another wave of nostalgia in many Americans. The pandemic is part of the current wave of chaos, crisis and change. Crises and loss of control foster nostalgia. COVID has done that. We get endless Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Law & Order reruns. Nostalgic people tend to spend if they believe they can buy some little sliver of something that are linked to a past they want to hold onto.

48:15 Not surprisingly, playing on nostalgia has oozed into politics. Now things get ugly. The program highlights the ex-president as the prime example of direct appeal to nostalgia in a ruthless political quest for power and money. Make America Great Again is a direct appeal. The origin was with Ronald Reagan and his use of the exact same tag line in the 1980s. That resonated with a lot of people in the 1908s and again in 2016. 

Of course, Biden does the same with Build Back Better. The question is what are the goals and underlying morals behind the appeals? 

Depending on how it is used, nostalgia can hold individuals, groups of people and even whole societies back. That is something that both marketers and politicians can and do use to their advantage. By fostering an ongoing low-level state of nostalgia, corporations and politicians keep people engaged and buying or supporting. Nostalgia is used to cloak or fog the past much more than it is used to reveal past reality. Nostalgia in the hands of emotional manipulators is more about the present than the past. It is used to deceive and manipulate.

Nostalgia can also be use to help people cope with loneliness, sadness, anger or grief if that is one's intention, e.g., grief over what is happening to the environment. The Throughline hosts postulate that as political, social and environmental concerns intensify, feelings of nostalgia will become more prominent. People will become more susceptible to nostalgia-based deceit and manipulation. They warn that society needs to become aware of this aspect of the human mind to help ward off people who use dark arts on feelings of nostalgia to achieve their self-serving ends.

Nostalgia, like all other aspects of the human mind that can be appealed to, will be used for both good and bad. The question is how well will society cope in the face of (i) intensifying environmental and social concerns, and (ii) ongoing efforts by bad people to divide, deceive and manipulate using nostalgia as their weapon.

Pay-to-play politics: It's bipartisan and the public interest takes the hits

The New York Times writes:

Over the summer, as he was working to scale back President Biden’s domestic agenda, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia traveled to an $18 million mansion in Dallas for a fund-raiser that attracted Republican and corporate donors who have cheered on his efforts.

In September, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who along with Mr. Manchin has been a major impediment to the White House’s efforts to pass its package of social and climate policy, stopped by the same home to raise money from a similar cast of donors for her campaign coffers.

Even as Ms. Sinema and Mr. Manchin, both Democrats, have drawn fire from the left for their efforts to shrink and reshape Mr. Biden’s proposals, they have won growing financial support from conservative-leaning donors and business executives in a striking display of how party affiliation can prove secondary to special interests and ideological motivations when the stakes are high enough.

Ms. Sinema is winning more financial backing from Wall Street and constituencies on the right in large part for her opposition to raising personal and corporate income tax rates. Mr. Manchin has attracted new Republican-leaning donors as he has fought against much of his own party to scale back the size of Mr. Biden’s legislation and limit new social welfare components.  

This month, the billionaire Wall Street investor Kenneth G. Langone, a longtime Republican megadonor who has not previously contributed to Mr. Manchin, effusively praised him for showing “guts and courage” and vowed to throw “one of the biggest fund-raisers I’ve ever had for him.”  

John LaBombard, a spokesman for Ms. Sinema, rejected any suggestion that campaign cash factored into her approach to policymaking. She was a lead negotiator on the bipartisan infrastructure deal that Mr. Biden signed last week, and during her time in the Senate, she has positioned herself as an ideologically flexible centrist willing to buck her party in representing a purple state.

“Senator Sinema makes decisions based on one consideration: what’s best for Arizona,” Mr. LaBombard said.  

Nelson Peltz, a billionaire investor who brought a Republican-heavy group of chief executives to have lunch with Mr. Manchin in Washington a few months ago, said the senator “understands that you can’t spend, spend, spend and feel there’s no recourse for it.”

Mr. Peltz, who donated to Mr. Manchin in 2017, has not given to Ms. Sinema, but he said that she had requested a meeting, which will take place in a few weeks.

Yet again, the fact that the business of business is business (profit), not concern for the public interest, makes itself clear. And, the fact that money looks out for itself, not the public interest, is also clear.

Questions: 

1. Is it fair to see American politics as mostly a contest between political, economic, social and religious forces that fight for power and wealth concentrated at the top against opposing forces that fight for more distributed power and wealth?

2. Should all taxes and regulation be eliminated and everything privatized, as the radical right Republican Party and soulless business community want, while people who can't survive are ignored and allowed to just go away?

3. Is it credible for Sinema, Manchin or any other politician to argue that non-trivial amounts of special interest money has no impact on their policymaking, and instead, they only try to do what is best for their constituents? If all the special interest cash has no effect, then why donate it at all because it would be 100% wasted money with 0% return on investment[1]? Which came first, the chicken or the egg, i.e., campaign contribution first, policy stance first, or both affect each other right from the get go?

Footnote: 

1. One site offered an online ROI (return on investment) calculator. Donated special interest money can be the main source of cash for a campaign to spend for an election or re-election. The site comments:

Assessing return on investment is a standard practice within businesses which are very similar to political campaigns in terms of challenges experienced. In political campaigns or in issue campaigns the end goal tends to be a simple win/lose but you can apply an ROI mindset to the running of your campaign by giving a monetary value to a measurable item, for example, votes pledged.

The little figures holding bags of cash

at the top are special interests tossing cash into  

the hopper, but they expect nothing in return?

American men being left behind and feeling unhappy about it

Context

Analysis of the 2016 election indicated that a large majority of White men without college degrees supported the EXP (ex-president). The early analyses in peer-reviewed papers indicated that two things were the top vote drivers for the EXP, (i) fear, anger and resentment over demographic and social changes in the US and its place in the world, and (ii) wage stagnation and job worries. 

Other research independent of the election indicates that boys and men are increasingly facing more difficulties than women for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with politics. However, that research plausibly explains some of what astute opportunistic cynics could play on and manipulate for political gain if they were so-inclined. The modern Republican Party is clearly so-inclined.

Some of that other research was summarized in a New York Time editorial about the situation for men and boy, from last September, ‘It’s Become Increasingly Hard for Them to Feel Good About Themselves.’ The NYT writes:

Is there a whole class of men who no longer fit into the social order?

A decade ago, Marianne Bertrand and Jessica Pan, economists at the University of Chicago and the National University of Singapore, concluded in their paper “The Trouble With Boys: Social Influences and the Gender Gap in Disruptive Behavior”:

Family structure is an important correlate of boys’ behavioral deficit. Boys that are raised outside of a traditional family (with two biological parents present) fare especially poorly. For example, the gender gap in externalizing problems when the children are in fifth grade is nearly twice as large for children raised by single mothers compared to children raised in traditional families. By eighth grade, the gender gap in school suspension is close to 25 percentage points among children raised by single mothers, while only 10 percentage points among children in intact families. Boys raised by teenage mothers also appear to be much more likely to act out.

The effects on boys of being raised in a single-parent household are particularly acute in the development of noncognitive skills, according to Bertrand and Pan:

Most striking are our findings regarding gender differences in the noncognitive returns to parental inputs. Across all family structures, we observe that boys’ likelihood to act out is sharply reduced when faced with larger and better parental inputs. For girls, the relationship between parental inputs and behavioral outcomes appear to be much weaker. As these parental inputs are typically higher and of better quality in intact families, this largely contributes to why boys with single mothers are so much more disruptive and eventually face school suspension.

First, an excerpt from a 2016 paper by David Autor, an economist at M.I.T., and four colleagues:

In the United States in 2016, the female high school graduation rate exceeded the male rate by five percentage points, and the female college graduation rate exceeded the male rate by seven percentage points. What explains these gender gaps in educational attainment? Recent evidence indicates that boys and girls are differently affected by the quantity and quality of inputs received in childhood.

I sent the four references above to Arlie Hochschild, a professor of sociology at Berkeley and the author of “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right,” for her views. She emailed back:

Since the 1970s offshoring and automation have hit blue collar men especially hard. Oil, coal — automating, manufacturing, offshoring, and truck-driving about to go down. Non-B.A. males are in an especially vulnerable place. I saw it in Louisiana, and again where I’m interviewing in Appalachia. It’s become increasingly hard for them to feel good about themselves.

In a 2018 essay in The New York Review of Books, “Male Trouble,” Hochschild described the predicament of less well educated men:

Compared to women, a shrinking proportion of men are earning B.A.s, even though more jobs than ever require a college degree, including many entry-level positions that used to require only a high school diploma. Among men between twenty-five and thirty-four, 30 percent now have a B.A. or more, while 38 percent of women in that age range do. The cost of this disadvantage has only grown with time: of the new jobs created between the end of the recession and 2016, 73 percent went to candidates with a B.A. or more. A shrinking proportion of men are even counted as part of the labor force; between 1970 and 2010, the percentage of adult men in a job or looking for work dropped from 80 to 70 while that of adult women rose from 43 to 58. Most of the men slipping out lack B.A.s.

While many of the men Hochschild writes about see a future of diminished, if not disappearing, prospects, men in elite professions continue to dominate the ranks of chief executives, top politicians and the highest-paying professorships.

Frances E. Jensen, chair of the department of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, taking a different tack, argues that boys’ brains mature more slowly than girls’ brains do, a difference that is particularly striking in the adolescent years. In a 2017 interview with the School Superintendents Association, Jensen stressed the crucial role the still maturing brain plays in the lives of teenagers:

Teens go through a period of increased emotional fluctuation and are like a Ferrari with weak brakes. The emotional center of the brain, the limbic system, which controls emotions, is fully connected, but the frontal lobe that sharpens critical thinking isn’t well-connected. That means the part of the brain that makes them pause and say to themselves, “Bad idea. Don’t post that on Facebook because it might hurt my chances of getting a job in the future” or “Don’t jump in the lake, there may be a rock,” isn’t mature.

The brain also becomes more efficient, Jensen said,

during a process called myelination. This is when a fatty substance called myelin grows slowly and wraps itself around miles of brain cells to better insulate them. Insulation makes the brain more efficient at sending and receiving signals. Myelination is a slow process that finishes in the mid-20s. Our brains have thousands of miles of networks and to insulate all of them with myelin takes over two and a half decades to finish.

Using M.R.I. images, Jensen continued,

you can actually see the brain is laying down a layer of myelin over time when looked at year over year. You can measure those layers and see a dynamic process where the insulation is sharpening the rapidity of our signaling from one part of our brain to another.

And then she added a crucial point:

In adolescence, on average girls are more developed by about two to three years in terms of the peak of their synapses and in their connectivity processes.

In a 2019 paper, “Family Disadvantage and the Gender Gap in Behavioral and Educational Outcomes,” Autor and Wasserman, along with David Figlio, Krzysztof Karbownik and Jeffrey Roth, conclude that:

Family disadvantage disproportionately negatively affects the behavioral and academic outcomes of school-age boys relative to girls. The differential effect of family disadvantage on the outcomes of boys relative to girls is already evident by the time of kindergarten entry, is further manifested in behavioral and educational gaps in elementary and middle school performance, and crystallizes into sharp differences in high school graduations by age 18.

In a 2020 article, “Educational Gender Gaps,” Lundberg argues:

Social and cultural forces linked to gender identity are important drivers of educational goals and performance. A peer-driven search for masculine identity drives some boys toward risk-taking and noncompliance with school demands that hampers school achievement, relative to girls. Aspirations are linked to social identities — what you want and expect depends on who you think you are — and profound differences in the norms defining masculinity and femininity create a gender gap in educational trajectories.

What is going on here?

This kind of research provides some plausible explanations for why White men without college degrees would feel some combination of fear, anger, alienation and/or resentment. Not only is America’s social and economic sand shifting under their feet, their brains develop more slowly and males tend to be treated differently than females in at least some stressed families, e.g., single parent families, low income households, etc. 

All of that provides the raw material, i.e., a pliable mindset, that cynical political opportunists can take advantage of. Thus, instead of suggesting possible actions to ameliorate the situation, opportunists use propaganda to play on the pliable mind for political advantage. Cynics do things such as turning minorities into enemies, elevating wedge issues into moral outrages, vilifying political opposition as the reason for personal problems, and so forth. That is cynical politics.

By contrast, good faith politics would look at the problems and their sources to inform and guide policy. For example, teaching in ways that boys are known to respond to (boys are kinesthetic learners who benefit from hands-on activities where they learn by touch, exploration and manipulation[1]), adding a year to public education and an optional year or two of public service between high school and college would give male’s brains more time to mature. That might leave them at least somewhat better able to succeed in college.

Parents sense there is a problem with the boys

Poll data analysis shows that parents are more concerned about the success of their sons than their daughters. In 2020, the Brookings Institution commented on the results of the American Family Survey. All four groups analyzed, liberals, conservatives, mothers, and fathers, indicated that all are more worried about their sons than their daughters.  

Despite the foregoing, it is still the case that men tend to hold the high level positions and power. Nonetheless, the changes that society is experiencing are complicated. This generates significant psychological discomfort with how society is changing and how that affects people's lives. If some children and young adults are experiencing difficulties government could play a constructive role if it is allowed to do so. To the extent is it not being allowed to act, the reasons for that are pretty clear, e.g., anti-government ideology, etc.

Acknowledgement: This post was inspired by some remarks and links to information that PD gave in this comment.

Questions: 

1. Are the concerns about some men and their mental states that researchers identified mostly real and significant or mostly academic curiosities with little real world impacts in politics, the economy and/or society in general? 

2. Should government try to foster policies directed to reducing the psychological discomfort that many men are experiencing?

Footnote: 

1. That article comments:

The absence of these opportunities during the pandemic when so many students were learning online has had a considerable impact on educational advancement, especially so for boys.

In all-boys schools and classrooms, where teachers are focused on the unique social, emotional and learning needs of boys, young men are thriving. But I’m not issuing a rallying cry to nationalize single-gender education.

All-boys and all-girls schools work well for some students and not as well for others. Exploring different schooling options for your child is just common sense.