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The Ley of the Land [1]

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Date: 2022-11-07

The view from my house. No, really.

Here we are, less than a day from learning the fate of democracy in our nation. Some days, it looks bleak, then we hear news that it’s trending towards the Democratic candidates. I’m strangely optimistic, and I’m going to share my thoughts as to why this is so.

First up, I am a lifelong Iowan, most of that in a rural area. It’s 7-8 miles to the nearest small towns, and about 20 to towns with a reasonable access to shopping options. However, in 45 minutes, I can reach Des Moines, the state capital, which is a nicely cosmopolitan city, in a metro area of a half a million people, and my hometown.

For too many years, the government has had a trifecta of Republican Party rule, and there’s a single Democrat representing us in Congress, Cindy Axne.

Why this is important is, there are 9 counties in the state, out of 99, that tend to have high Democratic turnout, relative to the total number of voters. So, a statewide Democratic candidate has to run up huge numbers in those counties to win, against all the Republican-majority counties.

Lately, I have been chasing a feeling around in my head, an intuitive analysis of the political situation here, and I have seen a change in the wind: that the geographic advantages exploited by the Republicans to gain and hold power (and yes, they have made efforts to ban abortion and fight the typical culture war issues as in other states) are about to start slipping away.

I’m old enough to remember farming practices that are no longer used, and even though my family has not been farmers (though my parents, born during the Great Depression, grew up on dairy farms), we lived next to farms, and I used to watch the farm reports on the occasional early morning when I awakened at an unholy early hour. I remember well, also, the farm crises in the 80’s and 90’s, and the cultural shifts that resulted. One of these has been the increasing scale of farms, and the industrialization of agriculture. It used to be, in my childhood, though I wouldn’t have understood it then as I do now, a typical “family farm” was around 160-250 acres, and you could make a living from that. Now, I think the break-even point is 800-1000 acres, and a lot of farming operations are quite a bit larger. This means that not only are they fewer and farther apart, but the rural population has significantly decreased. Also, “farmers”, per se, are employing people to do a lot of the work, and many are immigrants, working in the livestock, dairy, and meat processing industries in particular. Iowa is about 94% Caucasian, the remainder being Black, Hispanic/Latines, and Asian. In the old days, farmers had a lot more social interaction, and while certainly had conservative values by some standards, farming organizations were not only quite liberal and progressive, but outright leftist. How far they have fallen; now they’re proponents of Big Ag, and kowtow to corporate interests. As we have seen discussed, the less social interaction you have, the more likely you are to be politically conservative. Driving around in the comparatively populous central part of the state, out between the towns, the land appears to be rather empty, where old farmsteads that used to be situated on a quarter section (a “section” being a square mile), are simply gone. My house is an old farm shack that sits on a bit less than 3 acres.

The other thing that is occurring demographically is that the population is aging, and former Rep. Steve King noted once that “we couldn’t repopulate ourselves with someone else’s babies”, meaning, of course, non-whites. An aspect of this is that, at some point, a generational turnover in rural areas is going to happen, and as has been noted by polling, the younger the generation, the more liberal they tend to be. Rural counties that are now running as much as 90-10 R:D, and mine is about 2:1 R:D, if that shifts just a few points towards the Democrats, it changes the entire political equation here.

There’s another factor that’s a matter of national significance: the Iowa Caucuses. I helped organize a couple of them, in our little township, in 2000 and 2004, and attend if the weather isn’t completely foul. We get national political figures dropping in all the time, and it’s pretty damn obvious that they’re sniffing around to get support from local politicians, and media attention. Basically, we have a never-ending presidential campaign going on.

Frankly, I could live without it, so I won’t be too upset if the DNC decides to change the order of events, though state law requires that the caucuses take place on the Monday of the week before the New Hampshire primary. The Iowa Republican Party has stated that they will hold a caucus in February regardless of what the Democrats do.

I sense a change in the air, and that’s in a place where the Republicans seem to have everything locked up. Don’t give up hope; as they say, it’s always darkest before the dawn, and when the sun rises on Wednesday morning, it will be a new day.

This was my first diary here, after years of reading the quite often excellent journaling on this site, and I hope you enjoy it.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/7/2134181/-The-Ley-of-the-Land

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