In “Our Towns,” excerpted in “The Atlantic,” James and Deborah Fallows describe a five-year odyssey visiting the American outback — places like Sioux Falls, S.D., Holland,Michigan, Bend, Oregon, Greenville, S.C., Duluth, Minn., Dodge City, Kansas, Allentown, PA., and a dozen more.
According to the conventional narrative, flyover country is in steep decline, but “Our Towns” finds green shoots of innovation and optimism. Maybe the real question is not whether the periphery is doomed, but whether it can succeed if the center falls apart and looses mere anarchy upon the world.
Our history is replete with conflict between the country’s parts — North and South, city and farm, capital and labor, left and right, black and white, native born and immigrant. They have been addressed by Civil War, populist outbreaks, painful compromise, hard-won reforms, but never by gridlock and malign neglect that simply prolongs the agony of the many to benefit the few.
Trump campaigned on the promise to help America’s forgotten places and left-behind people, but most of his solutions have involved the scapegoating of supposed villains — immigrants, minorities, foreign competitors, big government, greedy corporations and bankers fond of outsourcing jobs or foreclosing mortgages. Instead of uniting the country in a search for a solution, he sought to divide.
Yet Trump’s policies rarely matched the rhetoric or benefited the aggrieved victims of changing times. Efforts to reform government programs have concentrated on cutting funding for programs that largely help the disadvantaged or struggling, and repealing regulations intended to protect average people from powerful special interests.
So, the number of USDA food inspectors is being cut and the manufacturers entrusted with policing themselves. Whole cabinet departments have ben turned over to crony capitalists from the industries they are meant to oversee. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created to protect consumers from rapacious banks, mortgage lenders, credit companies, has lost its independence and has had its power to punish malefactors drastically reduced.
Misguided tariffs have annoyed our trading rivals, but more badly damaged the bottomline of our own farmers and manufacturing workers. Aid programs for seniors, poor children, unemployed workers, minorities, and students are on the chopping block. Student loans are being curtailed. Aid to education is not a priority. The list goes on and on.
Conversely, benefits have been showered on those least in need of government assistance. Corporations face less stringent regulation, Protections put in place to protect against another financial meltdown like 2008 are being rolled back. Pharmaceutical companies are free to price essential drugs beyond the means of those who need them.Tax breaks for top earners and large corporations have been greatly increased while the fortunes of middle and lower class workers stagnate.
Government policies, including tax provisions, have often been designed to favor the voters or districts favorable to the party in power, but the blatant efforts of the Trump administration are remarkable. Red states that voted for Trump have been rewarded with favorable tax treatment and blue states penalized. Attempts are being made to jigger the 2020 census to produce similarly favorable outcomes for Republicans in the next redistricting. The man who ran against a rigged system is busily rigging the system in his favor, as the last election was rigged by the Russians.
For several generations the least prosperous states and zip codes have benefitted from government programs designed to ameliorate their suffering and provide a leg up. It is no accident that places like South Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, Kentucky, West Virginia, receive three, four or five times in federal services what these states pay in taxes, while relatively prosperous states like California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Colorado, New York and Minnesota receive less than one dollar from the government in services for every dollar they pay in taxes.
Under Trump, however, the goal appears to be the cutting of government benefits for those who need them most while bestowing government help in the form of tax and regulatory relief on those who need it least. This is oligarchy wearing a populist mask. It will do nothing to create a more equal America or to improve the lives and prospects of small towns, inner cities, disadvantaged minorities, neglected regions or of older, poorer, medically challenged citizens.
This bleak picture doesn’t even touch the question of national security and competitiveness. Trump has systematically turned his back on friends and allies of long standing, scorning Western European democracies, showing contempt for NATO, withdrawing from the Paris Climate regime and the Iran nuclear deal, refusing to join the TPP trade agreement meant to check Chinese economic hegemony. Simultaneously, the administration has fawned over and turned a blind eye to the evil acts of the worst murderous tyrants presently operating, including those in Russia, North Korea, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and China.
If this were all the work of a one vandal it might be laughable, but the supine Republican Party has enabled a man whose entire program is at odds with their historic purposes. They have sold their birthright for a mess of pottage. And the 60 million voters who gave Trump an electoral college victory continue to overlook his policy hypocrisy, not to mention his personal criminality. They will live to reap the whirlwind.
As Yeats memorably proclaimed, when the center doesn’t hold, things fall apart. Anarchy is threatened. When the best lack all conviction and the worst are full or passionate intensity, you do not have a prescription for a successful, competitive, prosperous future, but for a war of all against all, and a life that is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Except for the demagogue and his cronies.