neither Mr. Trump nor Mrs. Clinton would be much aware of the economic landscapes of farming, forestry, or mining, or of the people of the land-using economies. The corporations of food, timber, minerals, and energy would have the candidates’ attention and regard, but not nearly so much the people who take the actual risks and do the actual work, and not at all the places where the work is done. The two candidates would either follow or not the longtime political custom of substituting the preservation of “wilderness areas” for conservation of nature, land, and people in the much larger portion of the country that is merely “rural.” Neither candidate could have imagined or dared the economic revisions that would safekeep in good health the land and people of every place.
The best understanding of the election that I have seen so far came to me in a letter from my friend Mark Lawson, a church pastor and professor of religion in Liverpool, New York:
It seems to me that the people who put Trump over the top were largely Rust Belt dwellers whose grandparents were forced to leave the farm for mind-numbing factory work, whose parents made a go of it with one generation of union-negotiated wages, but who were valued only as laborers and only until a cheaper means of production came along. The irony, of course, is that this segment of the population chose as the vehicle of their revenge a Manhattan real estate tycoon who got rich by exploiting bankruptcy laws and refusing to pay his own laborers (many of whom were undocumented workers). But . . . it requires no critical thinking skills to blame Muslims and Mexicans (or any other preferred scapegoats) rather than understand the long-term effects of unrestrained global capitalism.
I think that is accurate, fair, compassionate, and sufficiently critical of Mr. Trump’s supporters.
For me, the ascent of Mr. Trump, a man who indulges his worst impulses and encourages the worst impulses of others, was immensely regrettable, but it was less a surprise than a clarification. His election and his choices of cabinet members (masked as “populism,” whatever by now is meant by that) expose beyond doubt the nearly absolute ownership of our public life by the excessively wealthy, who are dedicated to freeing themselves and their corporate and of-course-Christian peers from any obligation to the natural and human commonwealth. Nothing could have made more clear the featherweight moral gravity, not of his voters, but of Mr. Trump’s rich sponsors and his party.
But the gravitas of the liberals seems to me not much weightier. What did surprise me was the revelation, after the election, of the extent of their ignorance of their actual country and its economic history, and (surely because of that) the intensity of their animus against “rural America” and the “working class” people who voted for Mr. Trump. As a rural American, I was of course fully aware of the prejudice, equally conservative and liberal, against rural America and rural Americans. I knew that “rural” and “country” and “farmer” were still current as terms of insult. But I was not quite prepared for the venom, the contempt, and the stereotyping rhetoric that some liberal intellectuals (so proud of their solicitude for “the other”) brought down upon their fellow humans.
As the fellow humans of their fellow humans, perhaps these liberals should be a little less eager to shake hands with themselves. It is hard not to see Mr. Trump as the personification, even the consummation, of the barely divergent “freedoms” espoused by the two sides: a man, by his own testimony, both sexually liberated and fiscally unregulated, the sovereign and autonomous American individual, the very puppet of his own desires. He, more than anybody else so far, is the incarnation of our long aspiration to do individually as we please.
Meanwhile, agrarianism as I have at least partly defined it has managed to survive, to maintain the loyalty and courage of a good many people, and to keep talking. It certainly is nothing like a third political party, or situated anywhere between the present two. At least, it provides a viewpoint from which to observe and measure the effects of those two and their contention upon the actual country. At most, it is an entirely different way of living, thinking, and speaking: the way of what I am obliged to call economic realism, indissolubly mated to ecology, to local ecosystems, and to the traditions of good husbandry and good neighborhood, starting at home and from the ground up.
VI
Finally, I need to say that the word “order,” as in the title of one of the pieces of this book, now seems to me far preferable to “pattern,” as used in my essay “Solving for Pattern” of 1980. “Pattern” signifies a rigidity of form and a mechanical repetitiousness that I don’t see in nature or respect in human work. “Order,” almost on the contrary, signifies the formal integrity by which a kind of creature or workmanship maintains its identity and remains recognizable even as it varies through time, adapting to difference and to change.
The order of loving care is of human making. It varies as it must from place to place, time to time, worker to worker, never definitive or final. It is measurable by the health, the happiness too, of the association of land and people. It is partly an ideal (remembering divine or natural order), partly a quest, always and inescapably a practice.
The Thought of Limits in a Prodigal Age
Is there, at bottom, any real distinction between esthetics and economics?
—Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac & Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation
I want to say something about the decline, the virtual ruin, of rural life, and about the influence and effect of agricultural surpluses, which I believe are accountable for more destruction of land and people than any other economic “factor.” This is a task that ought to be taken up by an economist, which I am not. But economists, even agricultural economists, farm-raised as many of them have been, do not live in rural communities, as I do, and they appear not to care, as I do, that rural communities like mine all over the country are either dying or dead. And so, only partly qualified as I am, I will undertake this writing in the hope that I am contributing to a conversation that will attract others better qualified.
I have at hand an article from the Wall Street Journal of February 22, 2016, entitled “The U.S. Economy Is in Good Shape.” The article is by Martin Feldstein, “chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Ronald Reagan . . . a professor at Harvard and a member of the Journal’s board of contributors.” Among economists Prof. Feldstein appears to be somewhere near the top of the pile. And yet his economic optimism is founded entirely upon current measures of “incomes,” “unemployment,” and “industrial production,” all abstractions narrowly focused. Nowhere in his analysis does he mention the natural world, or the economies of land use by which the wealth of nature is made available to the “American economy.” Mr. Feldstein believes that “the big uncertainties that now hang over our economy are political.”
But from what I see here at home in the watershed of the Kentucky River, and from what I have seen and learned of other places, I know that industrial agriculture is in serious failure, which is to say that it is not sustainable. Projecting from the damages of the comparatively brief American histories of states such as Kentucky and Iowa, one must conclude that the present use of the farmland cannot be sustained for another hundred years: The rates of soil erosion are too high, the runoff is too toxic, the ecological impoverishment is too great, the surviving farmers are too few and too old. To anybody who knows these things, by witness of sight or by numerical measures, they would appear to qualify significantly the “good shape” of the economy. I conclude that Prof. Feldstein does not know these things, but is conventionally ignorant of them. Like other people of privilege for thousands of years, far more numerous now than ever before, he appears to take for granted the bounty of nature and the work that provides it to the human economy.
In remarkable contrast to the optimism of Prof. Feldstein, the New York Times of March 10, 2016, printed an article, “Who’s Killing Global Growth?” by Steven Rattner, “a Wall Street executive and a contributing opinion writer.” Mr. Rattner’s downhearted assessment, like Prof. Feldstein’s
