The Art of Loading Brush. Wendell Berry
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was dismayed by this innovation, and he said so. He was then told that a plank was being drafted. When he saw the result, he laughed. He asked if he might draft a more meaningful plank. After much resistance, he was allowed to do so. He then “spent the next six hours redrafting the amendment so as to satisfy the Clinton staff.” I am quoting his letter of June 29, 1992, to Dr. Grady Stumbo, chair of the Kentucky Democratic Party. The letter goes on to say that Clinton’s staff refused to permit any reference to
“supply management,” “price support” or any government guarantee of a fair price for farmers. They also refused to permit any reference to agribusiness control of farm policy or the level of agribusiness profits. They also refused to permit any language that could be construed as a commitment . . . to anything specific for agriculture or the rural community. . . .
I had already been advised that Chairman Ron Brown had formed an agriculture task force and sold seats to its members for $15,000** contributions to the Democratic National Committee.
Those seats went to representatives of agribusiness and other interests that have traditionally written farm policy for the Republicans.
The doctrine of “too many farmers” thus had become the established orthodoxy of the leaders of both parties. My brother was then president of the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association, which was still a major life support of our state’s small farmers. By 1992 tobacco had become indefensible as a product, and it bore too great a public stigma to be touchable by a national candidate. My brother understood that, and he did not expect approval specifically of the tobacco program. But he knew that the working principles of that program would protect farmers who produced commodities other than tobacco everywhere in the country—and would also protect our own farmers when they no longer produced tobacco. He knew that Mr. Clinton, if he wanted to, could endorse the program’s principles without endorsing its product. The agricultural plank of the 1992 Democratic platform, as published, gave a general approval to “family farmers receiving a fair price,” to “a sufficient and sustainable agricultural economy . . . achieved through fiscally responsible programs,” and to “the private–public partnership to ensure that family farmers get a fair return for their labor and investment.” And of course it condemned “Republican farm policy.” It committed Mr. Clinton and his party to do nothing. And nothing was what they did.
In 1995 President Clinton spoke to an audience of farmers and farm leaders in Billings, Montana. He acknowledged that the farm population by then was “dramatically lower . . . than it was a generation ago.” But, he said, “that was inevitable because of the increasing productivity of agriculture.” Nevertheless, he wanted to save the family farm, which he held to be “alive and well” in Montana. He believed we had “bottomed out in the shrinking of the farm sector.” He said he wanted to help young farmers. He spoke of the need to make American agriculture “competitive with people around the world.” And so on.
He could not have meant what he said, because he was speaking without benefit of thought. And why should he have thought when he was not expected to do so? He was speaking forty or fifty years after politicians and their consulting experts had abandoned any effort to think about agriculture. “Inevitable” is a word much favored by people in positions of authority who do not wish to think about problems. When and why did Mr. Clinton in 1995 think that the inevitable “shrinking of the farm sector” had ceased? In fact, “the farm sector” had not bottomed out in 1995; there is no good reason to think that it has bottomed out, at less than 1 percent of the population, in 2016. And how could he have helped young farmers except by giving them the protections against the free market that my brother had recommended three years before? Mr. Clinton was talking nonsense in Billings in 1995 because he did not have, and could not have had from his advisers, the means to think about what he thought he was talking about. The means of actual thought about the use and care of the land had been intentionally discounted and forgotten by people such as themselves.
It appears to be widely assumed by politicians, executives, academics, public intellectuals, industrial economists, and the like that they have a competent understanding of agriculture because their grandparents were farmers, or they have met some farmers, or they worked on a farm when they were young. But they invoke their understanding, which they do not have, only to excuse themselves from actual thought about actual issues of agriculture. These people have found “inevitability” a sufficient explanation for the deplorable history of industrial agriculture. They see the reason for the present discontent of “blue collar” voters as low or “stagnant” wages. They don’t see, in back of that, the dispossession that made many of them wage-workers in the first place. The loss everywhere of small farms and small towns and the respectable livelihoods that they provided was ruled “inevitable” and thus easily explained and forgotten. In their perceived worthlessness and dispensability, at least, the people of the farms and small towns were in effect racially equal. If, for instance, black small farmers were helped to prosper, as some liberals would have liked, then white small farmers would have had to be helped to prosper, which would have pleased neither liberals nor conservatives.
It was, then, “inevitable” that the independent livelihoods in the old economies of the countryside and the small towns should be replaced by the mainly subservient livelihoods in industry, or by unemployment. But if the “working class” counted for nothing and were dispensable as small farmers or farmhands or as small independent keepers of shops and stores or as independent tradespeople and craftspeople, why then should they count for something and be more than dispensable as “blue-collar workers”? In the corporate and urban economy the blue-collar workers were just as “inevitably” replaceable by technologies as they had been before. They were then notified that they were losing out because they were “uneducated.” They needed “a college education,” in default of which they were offered “retraining” and “job creation.” But these were only political baits, which left the blue-collared ones to their “inevitable” fate of low or stagnant wages or unemployment.
This doctrine of inevitability, also known as technological progress, is in fact a poor excuse for an economic and technological determinism, as heartless as it is ignorant, which has belonged about equally to the political establishment of both parties. Realizing that they were the broken eggs of an omelet that others would eat, the blue-collar workers became angry. Their anger turned them to Donald Trump, who at least recognized their existence and the political usefulness of their anger.
In the pre-Trump version of the history of progress, determinism and inevitability overruled any need for actual knowledge and actual thought. But with the ascendancy of Mr. Trump, at least some of the determinists seem to be reverting to free will. While the conservatives, who have strained at a gnat and swallowed a camel, endeavor to digest their dinner, the liberals talk of “connecting” with the blue-collar workers of rural America, to whom they have given not a substantive thought since Ezra Taft Benson, Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture, pronounced to their grandparents the political death sentence, “Get big or get out.”
Let us remember also the workers, white and black, who in their thousands became simply obsolete at the instant when “efficient” machines were brought into the coal mines, the factories, and the fields of sugarcane and cotton. I thought of them when I read in a column by Roger Cohen in the New York Times of November 19, 2016, that “the very essence of the modern world” is “the movement of people and ever greater interconnectedness, driven by technology.” Mr. Cohen approves of this “essence” and is afraid that Mr. Trump will stop it. What he has in mind surely must be the voluntary movement of people. The movements of people actually “driven by technology” are outside Mr. Cohen’s field of vision, surely only because of his political panic. Millions of people, as we know, have been driven away from their homes in the modern world by the similarly imperative technologies of industrial production and industrial war.
I am uncertain what value Mr. Cohen assigns to “interconnectedness,” but he cannot be referring to the interconnectedness of families in their home places, or of neighbors in their neighborhoods. How the loss of those things can be compensated by movement, driven or not, is far from clear. The same obscurity clouds over any massive “movement of peoples,” as over the arguments by which these movements are excused or justified. It does not require a great refinement