poblacht-na-n-oibrithe:

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.

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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.