What are we supposed to do
with rural America? This is a question that keeps Paul Krugman up at
night. It bothers him because he’s both a liberal and a true believer in
capitalism. He sees deindustrialization—capitalism’s logical
consequence —leaving people behind in rural areas, but he doesn’t have a
way to square this troubling fact with a worldview that ostensibly
honors the rights and dignity of all people. So he half-asses a few
articles every now and then about expanding the social welfare state and
increasing governmental spending in rural areas.
Krugman has been on this kick for years. In 2015, he wrote about
how the only solution for the deindustrialized wastoids still living in
places like Puerto Rico and Appalachia is better social security
payments, healthcare, and public services. His reasoning was that some
places are sacrificed every now and then to the “shifting tides of
globalization.” As a pragmatic economist, Krugman understands that it’s
not wise to entirely throw these people away; indeed, you have to
preserve some semblance of a labor force in the event that the tides of
globalization shift back in their favor.
…
The only thing capable of breaking the conservative stranglehold on
rural communities—and of breaking the power of their foot soldiers in
the local school boards, chambers of commerce, and churches—is a
nationwide political movement based in the actual interests of the
working class: the service industry employees and care workers, the
teachers and tenants. That’s because the right wing has their own
institutions, programs, and forms of ideological preservation in rural
areas. They have invested heavily in them for the last thirty years, and
they will not stop until rural America is a useless ecological
graveyard. Conservatives see their beliefs gradually losing support, and
they have entered death cult mode. They want to squeeze as much profit
and as many resources out of rural areas as possible, until we, too,
have gone to the graveyard.
The result is a rapidly deteriorating economic landscape that stumps
writers like Krugman. When he writes about the economic forces
contributing to rural America’s decline “that nobody knows how to
reverse,” the “nobody” he’s referring to is himself. Krugman’s
liberalism, with its focus on slow incrementalism and social tinkering,
has become incompatible with rural economies that are beholden to the
whims of increasingly embattled industry. In the days when America’s
economy was booming after World War II, when regulations meant to
safeguard the financial interests of ordinary people didn’t necessarily
threaten the immense wealth that was being produced throughout society,
it was feasible that pro-business ideas could coexist with liberal
doctrines like human rights and social welfare policies. But in the era
of post-industrial capitalism, as wages decline, jobs are relocated, and
the social safety net shrinks, it’s become impossible to square that
contradiction.
