Farm Populism

 Reading V.L. Parrington's epic three-volume study of the Main Currents in American Thought, it is clear that a persistent theme in the work—indeed, a characteristic obsession of Parrington's—is that American farmers and agrarian interests have long been the source of every progressive, popular, democratic, pacifist, humane, and reformist impulse in American life. 

John Dos Passos's USA trilogy often reflects the same assumption. When Wilson's war in Europe looms, the characters in Dos Passos's epic often talk as if it were a given that the small farmers of the great Midwestern Plains would be one of the surest political obstacles (alongside industrial workers) to this push for war and profiteering. 

Today, we are obviously not accustomed to think in similar terms. Farmers and the agricultural industry have been a reliable voting bloc for conservative Republicans and big business for every election in at least a generation. The small farmers who once made up the backbone of populist movements in the Midwest have nearly all gone out of business and their land absorbed into agribusiness concerns. 

The farm consolidation that prairie populists warned about for generations was essentially completed as a project in the last decades of the twentieth century. And with their disappearance, the few big farmers that remained became conservatives with something to lose—namely, a vested stake in maintaining unfair global trade policies and in keeping income taxes and the price of labor low. 

But now, for the first time in decades, that is starting to change. In Trump's old-fashioned big business imperialism, even the richest farmers are finding a threat to their interests and prosperity. As the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week, Republicans are now facing fierce competition for a Senate seat even in hitherto deep-red Iowa. The reason is simple: Trump's policies are terrible for farmers. 

The Journal counts the ways: Trump's tariffs are driving up costs for farm equipment, fertilizer, and other components for agribusiness. At the same time, these trade wars also invite retaliation from the countries that are ordinarily most inclined to purchase cheap (heavily subsidized) US crops in bulk. 

As the Journal reports: "Trump’s trade war with China halted soybean exports, depressing prices for last year’s crop and costing farmers billions of dollars. Tariffs have also made farm equipment more expensive."

This, one realizes, is almost exactly the position in which the American farmer found himself on the eve of the great populist uprising of the nineteenth century, as Parrington describes it: "[w]hen […] he bought implements or groceries or household goods he was at the mercy of a non-competitive market, protected by patent-rights and tariffs, to which were added extortionate transportation and middleman charges[.]"

Then, we must add on top of Trump's trade wars the effects of his ongoing kinetic war in the Middle East—which is meanwhile driving up one of the biggest component costs of them all for any agribusiness: diesel. 

Thus, today's farmers have as strong a personal stake in ending Trump's disastrous Iran war as the farmers of the early twentieth century had in opposing Mr. Wilson's intervention in Europe. 

The result is that America's farmers are poised for a great political realignment—perhaps even to become once again a voice for social progress and Jeffersonian democracy in our nation's history, rather than for elite plutocracy. "Tariffs and high prices for diesel, gas and fertilizer because of the war in Iran," the Journal sums up, "have soured the moods of America’s farmers and ranchers, giving an opening for Democrats in what are typically solid red states."

May it be so!

For, as Oliver Goldsmith wrote (in a classic poem that obviously meant a great deal to Parrington as well): "a bold peasantry, their country's pride, / When once destroy'd, can never be supplied." For too long "trade's unfeeling train" has been allowed, as Goldsmith goes on, to "Usurp the land and dispossess the swain[.]"

And so, we must hope that our American farmers might reclaim their rightful place as leaders of the popular, anti-war, and anti-imperialist movements. As Vachel Lindsay puts it in his classic paean to the William Jennings Bryan campaign, may we live to see the farmers once again "scourge the elephant plutocrats [metaphorically, that is]/ With barbed wire from the Platte."