There is necessarily a strain of the Pavlovian in electoral politics - I'm not going to call it democratic politics, because elections by themselves don't produce a democratic society. A case in point is North Dakota. Since the Trump administration, bowing to the senile leader's every neural spark, put insane tarrifs on China, China - which has a bigger economy than the U.S. - has played its own hand. For instance, soybean sales to China have dropped this year by half, and as the September harvest comes up, that drop is getting close to zero.
North Dakota is one of the soybean farming states. Soybeans are third, behind wheat and corn. And as the sales to China evaporates, so does the wealth of the farmers in this particular sector. This is the NYT story about it.
However, this seems to have had no effect on the affection of North Dakotans for Donald Trump. In a state that would not be a state in a better managed republic - it would have been merged with surrounding states by now - Trump gets some of his highest approval numbers.
These numbers are not going to budge even after a chain of bankruptcies rips thorugh North Dakota's farm country.
At some point, the politics here could shift. It did shift in 1914, when A.C. Townley, a former socialist, started a progressive party that took over the Republican party in the state. He started the Non-Partisan league, and this league Like Mamdani advocating for publicly held grocery stores, the NPL demanded state ownership of banks, grain mills and elevators, thus taking the middle man out of the farming process and rewarding the farmer. The North Dakota Mill and Elevator is still state owned, and it is the largest flour mill in the U.S.
The democratic party establishment today is far more regressive than the progressive wing of the Republican party was in the 1910s. They would find it intolerable to demand state control of banks - heavens!
But maybe getting their asses handed to them on a plate by Trump will eventually concentrate their minds, or weed out the gerontocratic neo-libs and their pups.
1 comment:
You had me until the last paragraph. I wish I had even that much faith in Democrats. Good cop/bad cop (every 4 or 8 years) is the only routine they know.
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