To the Editor

The New York Review of Books refused to publish this letter from rural poet, novelist, and essayist Wendell Berry, so he turned to the publication Barn Raiser. The letter has intemperate moments, but is nevertheless a letter whose basic rightness is obvious to me as a fellow rural person with a bent towards reading and writing. 

I believe I have given a fair representation of the plight of rural America, a land of worsening problems that it did not cause and cannot solve, from which urban America derives its food, clothing, and shelter, plus “raw materials.” For these necessary things rural America receives prices set in urban America. For the manufactured goods returned to it, rural America pays prices set in urban America. 

This rural America Mr. Burns treats as an enemy country, “rural and white,” inhabited... by “working-class voters who feel victimized by a distant and dysfunctional government, by wealthy elites, by nefarious foreign regimes, and all-powerful multinational corporations.”

The relationship between urban and rural Americans is much more like a colonial one than many relationships criticized by intellectuals under the heading of "colonialism." 

As he goes on to point out, the only things really keeping it from becoming formally colonial at the Federal level -- and thus intolerable on the original principles of the Declaration of Independence -- are structural features like the Senate that insist on ensuring that rural areas can't just be ignored completely. These are the very features that the New York Review of Books had been advocating to remove. 

At the state level, the relationship is already fully colonial: decisions are made in Capital City, in the interest of Capital City, paid for with taxes and built with resources extracted from the whole state. Similar state-level protections for rural populations were a normal feature of our politics from the Founding until 1964. In that year the Warren-led Supreme Court of the United States ruled such protections unconstitutional, somehow, even though they were formally in both the Federal and state constitutions.