>Well, the first thing to note is that farmers are not the majority of voters
>even in farm states. And for those that remain, farming has become an
>incredibly capital intensive-pesticide intensive industry. So slashing
>capital gains and gutting environmental controls can sound really attractive
>to a lot of those farmers. The farm subsidy system is so out of whack that
>poor farmers hardly benefit relative to the bigger ones- it's hard to make a
>big case on farm issues that the GOP is worse than the Dems; the GOP is
>quite socialist-oriented towards their farm constituency when it suits them,
>the temporary market ideological triumph of the Freedom to Farm Act a few
>years ago aside.
>It's not always clear what is progressive about farm subsidies, given that
>they increase the price of food for poor folks in the cities. Once upon a
>time, the cities and rural legislators had a deal where farm Congressmen
>supported welfare for the cities while city Congressmen supported subsidies
>for the farms. As suburban areas have grown, new coalitions have emerged of
>suburbs teaming up with votes from rural areas to kill spending on welfare,
>while to a lesser extent those same suburban votes have teamed up with city
>votes to undermine the farm subsidies for poorer farmers. And with more and
>more votes in farm states being those suburban votes teamed with richer
>farmers, the basis for the old progressive small farmer-city alliance has
>been largely undermined.
>The creation of Food Stamps, teaming Bob Dole and George McGovern with city
>legislators, was probably the last gasp of that older alliance. The current
>city-rural divide is the triumph of Southern conservatism in the GOP
>trumping the prairie progressivism of the past that would support city
>issues, just as neoliberalism in the Dems (even of a more liberal sort) lost
>sympathy for farm issues seen as irrational and marginal.
>If there is a resurgence of progressive voting in a lot of the plains
>states, it is not going to be a producerist alliance, since the number of
>rural "producers" is falling and probably fallening into big or little
>reactionary directions. But as agribusiness grows, from larger-scale farms
>to giant pig production, there is a growing working class in those sectors.
>Latinos are one of the fastest growing groups in many rural areas for this
>very reason. Now, many of them can't vote because they are not citizens,
>so this is not showing up in the political results of those counties. But
>if a real enfranchisement movement addresses the vast underbelly of the
>rural working class in these areas, there is plenty of basis for a
>progressive politics in those states.
>But not on the lines of the Farmer-Labor Party model. That's dead. Dead.
>Dead.
I sez:
Nathan, very astute analysis. What you seem in essence to be saying is that the urban-rural political economy and social structure in grain belt and livestock-raising states is, in fits and starts, coming to resemble that of fruit-and-vegetable growing California, with its large-scale, capital-intensive, wage labor-employing agri-biz. Some notable differences may be (I say "may be" b/c I'm nothing close to an expert on the subject) that in fruit-and-vegetable agribiz the growers' associations have more control over output and pricing, while in the grain-and-livestock agribiz the various players in the vertical chain of merchandising and value-adding (the ADM's and General Foods of the world) have more control -- and the come- lately nature of the ADM's and General Foods makes grain-and-livestock "family farmers" on the Great Plains and elsewhere more susceptible to populisms of the "left" (of the Cullen-Hightower variety) and the "right" (of the ZOG, Posse Comitatus, militia, Christian Identity, etc. variety). Plus the deeply embedded history of evangelical fundamentalism during the white settlement of states like Kansas. Given that CA agriculture was much more capitalist from the very beginning than anywhere else in the U.S. (with the exception of plantation slavery in the pre-war South ?) you don't have too many Armenian-American peach farmers in the Central Valley joining up w/populist movements of the right or left (although they do bash big government while continuing to thrive on water subsidies, university r & d money on automated harvesting equipment, etc.), while you do have a lot of Midwestern farmers doing the same.
Cullen-style "left" populism mainly has appeal in states like California among proponents of niche-market organic farming (operations frequently run by white educated folks who went "back to the land" sometime in the last 30 years, not by descendants of "family farmers") and slow-growth urban environmental liberals who think that a viable (and highly romanticized) farm sector is the last best hope of saving the "green space" surrounding cities like Salinas and Modesto from info capitalist-driven tract home-and-big box store sprawl -- basically affluent professional-technical workers who buy up cheap and beautiful old houses in "quaint" farm towns and then in typical liberal NIMBYite fashion oppose move-ins by other yuppies and the subsequent sprawl, and then posit the virtues of ruralism to give moral credence to their liberal NIMBYite environmentalism. Probably we'll see more of this in places like Des Moines and Kansas City and so on -- urban environmental liberals who've never worked on a farm celebrating the virtues of ruralism in order to keep the peripheries of grain-and-livestock belt metropolises free of Best Buys and McMansions (even though the urban environmental liberals started the gentrification in the first place). So maybe a new and very unesay progressive alliance in some of the Midwestern states will be between Latino agricultural wage-laborers and urban environmental liberals -- as both represent different Dem Party consituencies in CA. Then again, maybe I'm way off.
One problem I have your argument (although I can't support it w/data, maybe someone else can do this) is that in assuming that subsidies keep the price of food artifically high you neglect the fact that from an ecological economics perspective the price of food in a machinery-and-poisons intensive production system is artificially low (since food prices don't take into account the externalities of depleting acquifers, building dams and canals, soil erosion, groundwater contamination, etc.). All cutting-edge capitalistically-produced food (for all social classes, urban minority working classes included) in this sense is artificially cheap and has been subsidized by declining fish and bird populations, human deaths due to ingestion of foods w/pesticide residues, etc. Organic community gardens in inner-cities is the red-green way to go for the urban poor, if you ask me, not cutting subsidies to agribiz (or the cuts in subsidies to agribiz could be used to fund the former). Problem is, many community gardening programs in inner cities become CBO fiefdoms instead of incubators for ecological socialism -- at least that was the case with the overhyped SLUG program in Willie Brown's San Fran (i.e. SLUG was in reality more of a welfare-to-work and political patronage program instead of a genuine attempt to develop more food self-sufficiency in a poor black community).
Anyway, I ramble.
John G.