News and Media
“The three things Democrats must do to regain rural America’s trust"t
RUBI’s Anthony Flaccavento in The Guardian on decades of alienation faced by working-class and rural voters from the Democratic party and how to now bridge that divide.
Virginia’s ninth congressional District, where I ran in 2018, had long been politically competitive, even slightly Democratic. Running as one wasn’t a political death sentence.
The “fighting ninth”, as it’s often called, was represented by Democrat Rick Boucher from 1982 to 2010. Known as a friend of working people – farmers, coalminers, small business owners – he focused relentlessly on using federal resources to build prosperity, helping constituents navigate everything from Black Lung benefits to small business loans.
But over time, rural Americans didn’t just experience different problems, they began living in different economic worlds.
When I launched my campaign, our reality had already been fraying at the seams for a long time. The “trickle down” economics unleashed by Ronald Regan in 1981, in combination with the investor-driven trade policies of the ensuing four decades, made people in the top 0.1% fabulously wealthy.
During the same period, Republican and Democratic administrations alike punted antitrust enforcement, crushing family farms and independent businesses and facilitating extreme corporate concentration. To top it off, changes in labor law and enforcement made it easier for large corporations to crush union drives and punish or fire the workers leading them, helping drive private-sector unionization down from more than 30% to single digits.
Winners and losers: that’s what decades of bad policies in trade, antitrust and economic development have led to, as author Michael Sandel has pointed out.
Read the Full Piece Here
Rethinking Rural: RUBI’s Column in The Nation
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#RethinkingRural
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