Triumphant, Broken America

Foreign Affairs is one of those publications for those who think that managing the world is their calling in life. They've published a piece by Michael Beckley, a Tufts University professor who is also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute -- famously right-wing, AEI, but hardcore pro-immigration because robust immigration boosts American power (as well as suppressing American wages in ways that are helpful to their rich donors). There's a lot of talk about the virtues of immigration in this piece. That's not what I want to talk about. 

His basic thesis is that, in spite of all the problems facing America, the USA is still far and away the most powerful state and likely to remain so. There's a lot of pieces at work in that analysis, most of which I'm going to leave as exercises for the reader. What I want to discuss is his analysis of the rural/urban divide in America, which I think is the most important thing going in determining the future and character of the nation. He also sees it as a crucial problem.

I'm going to quote quite a bit of his analysis of this one problem and discuss it, leaving out the rest of his work, after the jump.

[T]hese same strengths also create two major vulnerabilities. First, they deepen the divide between prospering urban hubs and struggling rural communities, intensifying economic disparities and fueling political polarization. Although cities have largely benefited from an increasingly globalized, knowledge-based economy powered by immigration, many rural areas have been left behind as manufacturing and public-sector jobs have dwindled, breeding resentment and fraying national unity.... Yet despite this declining economic base, rural regions still wield political power disproportionate to their population and economic output through the Senate and the Electoral College. The U.S. system has thus impoverished rural areas and empowered them politically, threatening the stability of American democracy....

Urban centers have largely reaped the benefits of globalization, immigration, and the shift to knowledge- and service-based industries. In contrast, most rural areas have been left behind. Many still rely on shrinking sectors such as agriculture, manufacturing, and public-sector jobs. Yet despite this declining economic base, rural regions still wield political power disproportionate to their population and economic output through the Senate and the Electoral College. The U.S. system has thus impoverished rural areas and empowered them politically, threatening the stability of American democracy.

This urban-rural rift, the widest among rich democracies, has roots that reach deep into the United States’ past. In the nineteenth century, a schism between the industrial North and the agrarian, slaveholding South culminated in the Civil War. The New Deal and World War II temporarily lessened these divisions by spreading manufacturing across town and country. But in the late twentieth century, globalization and technological change sparked a divergence in fortunes. The North American Free Trade Agreement of the 1990s and what academics call the “China shock” in the subsequent decade, which both sent jobs overseas, hollowed out American manufacturing towns. From 2000 to 2007, the United States lost 3.6 million manufacturing jobs, followed by another 2.3 million during the 2008 financial crisis and the recession that followed. Rural towns, often reliant on a single factory for commerce and tax revenue, were hit hardest. As jobs disappeared, blue-collar workers were forced into lower-paying fields, such as construction, agriculture, warehousing, and retail. In these industries, immigration reduced the earnings of the least-skilled native-born workers by 0.5 to 1.2 percent for each one percent rise in immigrant labor supply, according to an exhaustive review by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Making matters worse, rural areas depended heavily on local government jobs, which accounted for around 20 percent of employment, compared with ten percent in urban areas, and more than 30 percent of rural Americans’ earnings. As tax revenues fell, local governments eliminated many of these public-sector positions, such as those at schools and police departments, to balance the books. Whereas urban areas with diversified private-sector economies were able to recover within a few years of the financial crisis, nearly half of the country’s rural counties still hadn’t regained pre-recession employment levels by 2019: from 2000 to 2019, 94 percent of new U.S. jobs were created in urban areas. Rural Americans have also suffered in other ways. Because rural Americans must drive longer distances to reach even limited options for food and health care and are thus more exposed to high fuel prices and local monopolies, costs for such goods and services rose nine percent faster in rural areas than in urban ones from 2020 to 2022.

The toll of these hardships is highly visible. All across rural America, there are empty main streets, closed schools, and shuttered hospitals. Rural counties have fewer births and more funerals. In 1999, urban and rural regions had similar mortality rates. By 2019, however, prime-age adults (aged 25–54) in rural areas were 43 percent more likely to die from natural causes such as chronic diseases. By 2018, rural Americans were 44 percent more likely to die from suicide, and by 2020, they were 24 percent more likely to die from alcohol-related causes. Today, life expectancy in rural areas lags two years behind that of urban areas, and 41 percent of rural regions are depopulating as young, educated workers relocate to cities in search of better opportunities.... Working-class men have been hardest hit by reductions in decent-paying blue-collar jobs and wages over the past two decades. As the economist Nicholas Eberstadt has shown, prime-age men currently suffer unemployment levels comparable to those of the Great Depression, with even higher rates among the least educated men.

So, rural areas have been ruinously affected by the policies of the national leadership especially since Clinton. That's not news to readers here, who have read me talking about this for two decades now. Still, it's striking to me that he can see the problem. It's not that he's not aware of the harm policies like those advocated by AEI have done -- he is aware. He regards it as one of the key fault lines that hampers American national unity, and therefore its ability to project power abroad, which is his key interest.

What's to be done, then, about this fault line? Change policies? Less immigration leading to higher domestic wages, or restore domestic manufacturing through tariff protections? Oh, no. That's all definitely to be avoided: the problem with this division is that it is causing problems for the Agenda, which includes all of those things as well as international power projection. The rural Americans are a problem that needs solving, not a citizenry that deserves loyalty from the government that has been betraying their interests for decades.

Fearing decline, the United States might lean toward protectionism and xenophobia, walling itself off rather than competing internationally, which would undermine its core strengths. The country has thrived on the free flow of goods, people, and ideas, soaking up foreign talent and capital like a sponge and building a global commercial order that attracts allies. But if the United States embraces a false narrative of decline, it risks becoming a rogue superpower, a mercantilist behemoth determined to squeeze every ounce of wealth and power from the rest of the world. Tariffs, sanctions, and military threats could replace diplomacy and trade, alliances might become protection rackets, and immigration could be sharply restricted. This nativist turn might yield short-term gains for Americans, but it would ultimately hurt them by making the world they inhabit poorer and less secure. 

So, again, protectionism might lead to "short-term gains for Americans" at the cost of making "the world... poorer and less secure." The piece is wholly set against all that. American international power is the goal, even if it costs Americans everything -- wealth, stability, culture, their very lives through suicide or turning to drugs.

What, then, is the solution that he favors?

...policies aimed at helping working-class communities and bridging the urban-rural divide, such as expanding high-speed Internet in rural areas to enable remote work, building roads and clinics to boost commerce and health-care access, offering tax incentives to attract businesses, and establishing job-training centers tailored to local industries. But the urban-rural divide itself remains a powerful obstacle to reform, because it fuels political polarization and gridlock. 

This sounds suspiciously like his solution to "bridg[ing] the urban-rural divide" is eliminating the rural and making everything urban. More roads, more commerce, more businesses, more industry, more 'training centers' to change what rural people do to something more like what city people do. 

One of the things that we are looking at coming down the pike, though, is a relatively rapid loss of population worldwide. Demographic decline is coming, and with it a more rural world. Meanwhile the environmentalist policies in Europe and Canada (and California!) that require us to all de-farm and import food from the Third World are frankly insane. This is true even from an environmentalist perspective. They're worse for the environment because they require that food be shipped around the globe -- sometimes fruit from South America is shipped to Asia for canning and then back to the USA for eating, thus crossing the Pacific Ocean twice rather than simply being grown locally. Too, those Third World countries don't have significant controls on pollution anyway. If we step outside of environmentalist considerations, having your food supply grown in foreign lands is a huge and obvious weakness -- a near invitation to extortion and starvation by foreign powers. With vastly decreased demographics, there will be fewer people to do all that shipping about the world anyway.

So we're going to need rural America, it turns out, even if it's just to feed what's left of urban America in a few decades. Maybe an alternative policy would be wise, one that treats rural America as worthy of loyalty from its government for its own sake.

Meanwhile, the point of a polity -- ours or anyone's -- is to enable the good life for its citizens. This entails above all protecting their natural rights; it might reasonably also entail protecting cultural stability, so that all the institutions through which citizens have their interactions that give life so much of its meaning are not washed away. Borders don't suffice for this -- internal migration can destroy a culture and its institutions too -- but they are surely at least a necessary condition.

Americans don't exist to give the American government the power to govern the world. Rather, the American government exists to protect the natural rights of Americans. We often talk of the loyalty that Americans owe America, but loyalty is always a two-way street. Rural America is hurting because it has been shown disloyalty by its governing class and institutions for decades. China didn't hurt rural America, not directly. Mexico didn't. Congress and several Presidents did. The State Department did. NAFTA and similar treaties did. 

I would propose not bridging the rural/urban divide, but finding ways to treat each of those parts of America as important in its own right. The government should show loyalty to its people. It hasn't, not for a very long time. The loyalty shown by so many rural Americans in spite of that -- how many of those who died in the wars of the last decades were farm boys, from communities in which military service was still seen as highly honorable? -- has been repaid with disdain and betrayal by the governing elites. Right wing or left, they have not kept faith with the people. From where I sit, that's the core problem that needs to be solved.