Mississippi Miracle

 Can Christmas come twice in one year? That's what it felt like yesterday, when the Associated Press and others called Mississippi's Senate race for Democrat Scott Colom, making him the first Black Senator-elect from the state since Reconstruction, and the first Democrat to hold the office in decades. 

This midterm election cycle has already been a season of miracles: Texas, South Carolina, Kansas, Iowa... Part of me on election night thought that asking for Mississippi too was maybe just getting greedy. How much luck can you ask for, after so many years of devastating electoral setbacks? 

But now that it has happened, the miracle in Mississippi already seems somehow inevitable too. Let us count the ways in which—surprising as this transformation seems—it actually makes all the sense in the world. 

One: Mississippi is a rural and agrarian state. And as anyone who has read the historian V.L. Parrington will know—one consistent fact throughout American history is that farmers hate tariffs. Mississippi has a lot of farmers. Trump imposed a lot of tariffs. Need I say more? 

In seeking to explain why farmers revolted in the Populist movement of the 1890s, Parrington at one point describes some of the social preconditions that led to agrarian unrest: "[w]hen [the farmer] bought implements or groceries or household goods he was at the mercy of a non-competitive market, protected by patent-rights and tariffs[.]"

Well that sounds an awful lot like the themes of this election. Mississippi voters were angry above all about prices. And they had no trouble at all connecting these prices to Trump's trade policies. In his victory speech yesterday, Scott Colom cited one Mississippi soy bean farmer he spoke to on the campaign trail, who had lost all orders for his produce that year thanks to the tariff wars. 

As Oliver Goldsmith put it in "The Deserted Village"—his great poem of social protest about the plight of England's small farmers during the enclosures era: "trade's unfeeling train / Usurp the land and dispossess the swain." 

Goldsmith contrasts the suffering of England's poor farmers with the luxury and opulence of the great landowners—one of whom, in the case Goldsmith describes in the poem, is pushing the peasantry off their land in order to make way for a private park. 

Here, too, it's hard not to note parallels with Trump. American voters—in Mississippi as elsewhere—were not only outraged that Trump's trade policies were making life harder and more expensive for them. They were especially furious that he was spending all his time and taxpayer dollars in office not on trying to address these problems, but on trying to build monuments to himself and pleasure-grounds for his use. 

Goldsmith writes: The man of wealth and pride 

Takes up a space that many poor supplied;

Space for his lake, his park's extended bounds,

Space for his horses, equipage, and hounds;

The robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth

Has robb'd the neighbouring fields of half their growth,

His seat, where solitary sports are seen, 

Indignant spurns the cottage from the green [...]

One almost feels like Goldsmith could have had Trump's proposed "Garden of Heroes"—or perhaps his new D.C. golf course (which he is trying to built on public land, and which is currently tied up in litigation in federal court) in mind. 

And to the extent that people are mad about prices, they are also mad about Trump's wars. This is both because these wars are directly raising the costs of food and fuel (since so much oil and fertilizer have to transit through the Strait of Hormuz) and because Trump is imposing indirect taxes on consumer goods (through his tariffs) in order to pay for these wasteful military campaigns. 

As James Russell Lowell said of tariffs in his book The Biglow Papers—which he wrote in opposition to the Mexican-American war: If we could know that a part of the money we expend for tea and coffee goes to buy powder and balls, and that it is Mexican blood which makes the clothes on our backs more costly, it would set some of us athinking. 

Replace "Mexican" here with "Iranian," and the point still stands today. 

Finally, Colom's victory makes sense because he managed to unite people across racial and demographic groups around their shared experience of these economic pain-points and frustrations. People like William Barber have been saying for years that such a "fusion" politics of economic populism is possible, even in the deep South, and in many ways Colom just proved the test case for it.

Even in long-troubled and long-suffering Mississippi, then, with its cruel history of slavery and racial terrorism and Jim Crowism, it turns out that in an electoral climate like this one, voters could manage to see past race long enough to recognize the interests they all share in common as farmers and workers and ordinary consumers. 

Here again, James Russell Lowell's words in the Biglow Papers prove relevant. As he put it there: 

Laborin' man an' laborin' woman

Hev one glory an' one shame,

Ev'y thin' thet 's done inhuman

Injers all on 'em the same.

'Taint by turnin' out to hack folks

You 're agoin' to git your right,

Nor by lookin' down on black folks

Coz you 're put upon by wite;

Slavery aint o' nary colour,

'Taint the hide thet makes it wus,

All it keers fer in a feller

'S jest to make him fill its pus.