[This is my second post from the road while on vacation, so, same disclaimer: sorry there’s no cool ball point pen drawing, or good copy editing. I’ll be home soon.]
A couple of days ago, a friend of mine sent me a link to a recent exchange on the platform formerly known as Twitter, in which two users with substantial audiences go at each other over the question, essentially, of who are the “makers” and who are the “takers” in the American economy. The first user referenced the fact that Biden voters represented 70% of the GDP in 2020, and how Democrats pay most of the taxes and Republicans get most of the benefit. The second user said, among other things:
I wish Brian Allen [the first user] understood the history of textiles in a city like Knoxville Tennessee…I wish Brian Allen understood that his policies destroyed the livelihood of millions of Americans before he decided to mock what they brought to the table…. I think Brian Allen should understand that the vegetables he eats aren't grown in liberal cities. I wish Brian Allen understood the beef he eats isn't raised in liberal prairies. I wish Brian Allen understood that the chicken and pork he consumes aren't raised in liberal strongholds. I wish Brian Allen understood the fish he eats isn't caught by liberal snowflakes that think men can get pregnant.
The argument was relevant to my interests because, just a few days earlier, I’d had a remarkably similar conversation with a liberal family member (minus the shitty little transphobic crack at the end, obviously) who told me she thought my balance of payments argument was misleading because the parts of the country that receive the most advantageous balance of payments — the ones that get the most tax dollars in compared to the taxes they contribute — are actually the most materially productive. She specifically mentioned that these places produce most of our food, and that the tax revenues generated by those rural jurisdictions don’t necessarily represent their value. So I was interested to see a similar kind of thing playing out online.
Neither person on not-Twitter is arguing entirely in good faith. For one thing, Brian Allen chose to use the older Biden numbers in part because the newer Harris numbers aren’t as impressive. His interlocutor, TheJeffersonianObserver, wrote a much longer post, and therefore committed more of these sorts of sins. For example: the beef, chicken, pork, and vegetables most of us eat aren’t grown in liberal cities — but neither are they harvested by rural conservatives. TJO can blame Democrats and city-dwellers if he wants, but Walmart, the largest company in the world by revenue, is based in Rogers, Arkansas, is family-owned by deeply conservative Southerners, and sells more cheap shit from China, is responsible for destroying more small town Main Streets, and eats up more taxpayer dollars with their inhumane human resources policies, than pretty much anyone.
I admit to finding these kinds of arguments emotionally confounding. Because I know, intellectually, that we can stage cage matches between our battling revisionist histories until the cows come home, and nobody will ever win. Nobody can agree about the past, even when most of the facts are known. Dig around in the sewer long enough, you’ll find plenty of people who will say, “Hitler had some good ideas.” Hell, nobody can agree about the present. The IDF is literally machine-gunning starving people at food distribution centers, and we can’t get it together to call that a war crime, let alone a genocide. That’s happening now. We can all see it. Yet intelligent people with the best information available to them still have fundamental disagreements about what we’re looking at. I don’t always respect those kinds of differences of opinion, but I understand that they’re inevitable and I try (most of the time, not always successfully) not to let myself get too spun up about them. Then I bump into something like TheJeffersonianObserver and, I must admit, my attempts at circumspection become much harder to maintain.
When I was talking to my family member about this, I started to argue about conservative political positions on taxation and spending — that conservatives supposedly hate taxes, and government, but that they benefit so hugely from both — and she pointed out, quite correctly, that I was conflating rural people and Republicans. TJO does the same thing above, and I only realized after I started writing this essay that I’d bought into his argument without really examining it. Because I actually do know some of the people who catch my fish in Alaska, and they are liberal snowflakes. They’re also some of the toughest, smartest, most ethical and resilient people I’ve ever met. So they aren’t really snowflakes except insofar as they would (almost certainly) acknowledge that trans-men are men and that some of those men can get pregnant. TJO thinks believing that makes them weak and stupid. But their entire family subsists on commercial fishing in a place where leaving the house without the right clothes on can kill literally kill you, and if the weather doesn’t get you a bear might. They work their asses off, they catch a lot of fish, and, while I haven’t actually asked, I’m 100% certain they voted for Harris. As far as that goes, I also get nearly all my meat from a CSA based out of a farm in Trump country that flies a rainbow flag, voted for Harris, and put up pro-Harris signs before the election — because, again, not snowflakes. And the same is probably true, in a general sense, for a not insignificant percentage of the farmers I shop with at the farmer’s market. Some of them might be closet conservatives. But most of them are intelligent, highly skilled, pragmatic hippies who grow excellent broccoli. So, yes, my mistake. I was generalizing, and I was doing it against my actual lived experience.
But this is also, in a lot of ways, the heart of the problem. Policy should run on facts — but politics will always run on narratives. Farms are important, and the people who grow our food should — through profits or subsidies — get paid a good living wage. Pretty much no Democrat actually has a problem with that idea. The New Deal started with soil conservation. Fifty years later, we had Farm Aid, organized and run by liberal, pot-smoking, long-haired hippies and rock stars — Democrats all. The reason I, at least, keep bringing up the balance of payments isn’t that I don’t think anyone in rural America deserves help. The reason I keep bringing it up is that a large majority of people in rural America — not my fishing friends, or my meat-growing friends, and not most of the people I buy from at the farmer’s market — but a large enough majority to put Donald fucking Trump in the White House, twice, believe that nobody else should get any public spending, ever. And for decades, their narrative around that was, “work harder, millions of people on welfare are depending on you.” But the lie of that narrative has become too obvious to ignore (except by lovers of retro bumperstickers). The graph of Biden voters as a share of GDP makes that clear. So, now that the old narrative is untenable, here comes TheJeffersonianObserver, and his argument (hilariously, sickeningly, ironically) is essentially, “you didn’t build that.”
His narrative is that the financial prosperity of blue jurisdictions is the result of trickery, or theft. It has to be. Because urban Democrats are weak, stupid snowflakes who’ve never done an honest day’s work in our lives and believe something as ridiculous as the idea that men can get pregnant. Since we’re inferior, but we’re winning anyway, we must be cheating. Which makes it okay to take our tax dollars in compensation for our theft (just don’t call it reparations). It’s okay to keep us from voting. It’s okay to gerrymander our districts. It’s okay for Republican administrations to pass laws as they’re leaving office that that keep Democratic administrations from being able to govern — or to send federal troops in to occupy our cities. It’s okay to do all that because, in their minds, we didn’t really beat them. We cheated. It’s straight out of the myth of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.
Honestly, if the MAGA position were even a misinformed quest for economic justice, I could probably still work with it. Because the financial services industry is, in my opinion, a giant scam. The corporate model of monopoly and rent-seeking that feeds much of the tax base of America’s most expensive cities is a drag on the economy; it stifles competition, drives up costs, limits choice, and concentrates too much market power in too few hands. I think it’s bullshit that a bank loan officer can make six figures and the guy who picks my tomatoes gets sixty-five cents a bucket (to be clear, my position is that the tomato guy should make more, not that everyone should be equally poor). Half of Americans spend over 30% of their income on housing; meanwhile the average American household spends about 11% of their income on food. If you were to look at a graph of percentage of income spent on housing versus the percentage spent on food (or clothing, or furniture, or pretty much any durable good), over time, you’d see the housing line going up, and the food/things line going down. And commercial real estate in most cities is literally too expensive for private individuals to purchase. Bricks and mortar retailers are more or less required to rent at exorbitant rates. All those trends are the result of an intentional shifting of the center of economic activity from valuing subsistence and durable goods industries to the finance and service sector; it’s about the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, and the insurance industry, business loans for small farms, zoning, artificial scarcity, and elitism. It’s about the fact that U.S. labor laws carve out a specific exception so they don’t cover agricultural workers. I’m not unreservedly on Team Burn-the-Rich, but I could play on that court if that was actually where MAGA’s at .
Unfortunately (or, given how they go about things, maybe fortunately), overcoming or destroying the inequities of post-industrial capitalism is absolutely not the MAGA agenda. They don’t give a shit about farm labor, or fair wages, and they buy their shirts from the same Vietnamese sweat shops the rest of us use. The economic populism of people like TheJeffersonianObserver is a smoke screen. It disappears when you get close to the real Republican Party. I could go into a lot of detail about it, but the main thing is that pretty much the entire MAGA movement, and the populist part in particular, opposes raising taxes, or creating new taxes. They absolutely want government spending that helps them, because they’re Real Americans; they’re God’s chosen people. But they violently resist any and all attempts to increase taxation to pay for services in their own districts, let alone to provide commensurate services in blue jurisdictions. They fight against capital gains taxes. They fight taxes on inheritances — not just over a million dollars, but on estates worth tens of millions of dollars. They fight against the whole idea of an income tax. They want socialism for themselves — government healthcare, government-funded religious education, government-funded roads and freeways, government contracts to keep their factories and farms working. But they want the money for all that to come out of spending in blue states, counties, and cities. Their ideal world is one where taxes are set to the absolute minimum that allows MAGA voters to live their heavily subsidized, small-town lives in the exurbs, without wasting a single dime in the blue dens of sin where we believe men can get pregnant, and the only reason we have any money at all is because we cheated by being better at capitalism.
TheJeffersonianObserver talks a good game about valuing essential services and workers, but his username is pulled from a guy who enslaved, raped, and had six kids (whom he also enslaved) with his dead-wife’s half-sister. She was 14 when he started raping her, and TheJeffersonianObserver still thinks Thomas Jefferson was a hero. He talks about fish, meat, and food crops, but he predicates his respect for the people who supply those things on his mistaken belief that they all agree with him politically. And it’s all bullshit. If 90% of commercial fisherman vociferously supported trans rights, he’d say eating fish is gay and real Americans should eat beef. If 90% of American cattle ranchers supported trans rights, TJO would say beef is gay and bad and they get too many subsidies. It’s like when Taylor Swift said something bad about Trump and suddenly blond country singers who date football players were un-American. None of these people give a fuck about poor people, or the working class, or country music, or even their supposed favorite beer. They’re fully prepared to hate all of it, if it goes against their agenda.
I have no problem subsidizing rural voters. The thing I’m done with is doing it at the expense of the mentally ill, substance-addicted, and just plain poor people who are living in tents in the greenbelt near my house. I’m done subsidizing rural voters at the expense of urban teachers, and urban daycare workers, and urban kids. The core MAGA conviction is that THEY deserve to be taken care of, and WE don’t, and I’m done with it. The point of the balance of payments argument — the point of the graphs that show that Democrats generate most of the revenue — is just that spending more on city-dwellers and Democratic enclaves is fair. That’s it. Speaking in the crudest possible terms, without nuance or historical context, it’s our fucking money, and we should be able to keep enough of it to keep people from shitting all over our sidewalks. And if that means we have to tax rich people, then rural voters should not only stop giving is shit about it, they should help us. And if they don’t want to help us — if they insist on blocking new taxes that distribute the financial burden of social programs more evenly, and if they insist on making it impossible for us to take care of the poor and disadvantaged in our own cities, then, yes — we should cut their programs to pay for ours.
The reason we don’t have enough money to fix some of this stuff is because we’re sending it to support people who hate us, and those people don’t get to be on country-welfare and whine about urban-welfare — even if some of the people who believe in urban-welfare also believe a man can get pregnant. They just don’t get to give us a hard time about that. Sorry.