Where is the rural left?

The left in the US has historically ignored the rural population. If small town workers were industrialized then they were swept up in essentially urban political movements that would apply to factory workers in Ohio as well, but for the most part the left has sought to ignore the middle of the country, a bias that I share with most academics as well. The historical legacy of the coastal scorn for the middle of the country has meant that a mutual resentment has grown since the time of Andrew Jackson between the port cities and the country laborers. The Jeffersonian fear of the urban masses has become a stable of the poorest country voter.

This problem faces the left in Europe as well, it has been a factor in nineteenth-century politics, the 1848 revolution turned against the Viennese bourgeoisie and in favor of the Habsburg monarchy when the peasants received their concessions from the Emperor and went back to their farms, leaving the revolution in the hands of the poor. This brilliant move was repeated by Bismarck who sought to bind the rural classes to the Prussian monarchy in alliance against the socialist urban working class. Today as in the nineteenth century, the invocation of Christianity operates to binds the rural population to the ruling elite. This is a problem that Marx saw as just manipulation by Louis Napoleon. The mistake is to rely too strongly on the belief that left-wing politics needs to connected with the social conditions created by industrial and technological change, or progress as it used to be called. So many political decisions are made independent of economic transformations. Globalization, for all its importance, is simultaneously the ideology of corporations justifying their shifts from one industrial region to another, and it is the justification used by governments to explain why they cannot replenish lost industrial jobs. Yet, no matter how well contemporary crises can be defined as global, the constitutions of the United States and most other nations reflect an agricultural, nineteenth-century society. Technological advances were not written into the US constitution as a factor that could alter the election system. Thus we are faced with an outmoded distribution of voting power that does not reflect the last hundred years of economic growth inside and outside US borders. The trouble for the left is that it concentrates on the economic distribution of power without incorporating the very population that has been made irrelevant by these transformations, but which nevertheless holds considerable voting strength. The weaker this group has become economically, the more it has allowed itself to become organized into a conservative religious class. The left analysis has been to focus on the economic relations that disenfranchised industrial workers rather than thinking about the constitutional structures that continue to split the rural population from the economic elite on the coasts.