If change is to come, it will have to come from the margins.

Wendell Berry

You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

Buckminster Fuller

Before we get into what could be called a “rural strategy” for de-Trumping our non-urban areas in America, let’s do a quick recap of the overall scheme that I have been writing about in this blog for the last few years. I would encourage people to go back and read older posts for a deeper sense of what we’re talking about here, but for those who may just be stopping by for the first time, here is my proposed project in a (bloated) nutshell.

• The overarching problem of our time is that human impact on the planet is much too large, the result being that every major natural support system on earth is in decline, mostly steep.
• As such, we, as a species, must drastically and rapidly reduce our planetary impact — period. We need to quickly and massively downscale the damage we are doing, and steer onto a completely different path, where our societies and economies are actually healing the earth instead of destroying it, in a manner that also allows human and non-human life to flourish in a sustainable way.
• This change is not going to be facilitated from above, as countries are locked into the exact opposite of what is necessary to start healing the planet. Instead of looking to reduce production, consumption, labor, and other industrial outputs, our current economic and political philosophies stress endless growth as the only way to achieve success. Change will not come from above, but from below.
• To that end, I have proposed a 3-pronged strategy for creating a new way of life that combats all of our ecological, economic, political, and psychological crises at the same time: a combination of Universal Basic Income, Bigger Home Bases, and Modern Money Theory.
• To jumpstart this project, I envision a privately-funded project with the goal of creating 15-20 communities around the country, what I call “Bigger Home Bases” (BHBs). Each of these communities would be roughly 150-175 people, and they would be established in geographically diverse areas of the US.
  • The project funders or patrons would be non-partisan, drawn from all parts of the political/social spectrum.
  • Similarly, each BHB would consist of people drawn from all walks of life, just regular folks of all types, committed to a common purpose.
  • BHB members would sign on for a five-year commitment, and each community would have a basic charter laying out fundamental goals and rules: e.g., prohibitions on violence and exploitation, a commitment to reducing environmental impact, a pledge to work for the good of the community, etc.
  • Each BHB resident would receive a monthly basic income, anywhere from $1200 to $1500, depending on the overall resources of the project.
  • Aside from the basic income, the only other assistance provided to the BHBs would be logistical help in navigating local zoning laws, finding local financing options, connecting with building contractors, etc. Otherwise, the BHB members themselves are responsible for organizing their communities: locating vacant land or developed real estate, deciding between building, upgrading, or retrofitting properties, choosing a form of internal decision-making, managing financial issues, etc. The goal here is to replicate as closely as possible what a Universal Basic Income policy would look like at a national level. Scale-thumbing should be kept to a minimum with the model BHBs, to show a wider audience what it could look like to them in real life.
  • From the outset, each model BHBs would have a robust social media presence, and would push for as much traditional media exposure as they can get. The goal here is to create as much buzz and online virality as possible, to get people tuned in to the project development, and to get them thinking about how they would translate these changes to their own lives.
  • LITMUS TEST: with basic income, logistical assistance, and the residents’ long-term commitment to living in the BHBs, my prediction here is that these communities would thrive, and would accomplish a whole suite of positive objectives: sharply reduced consumption, purposeful withdrawal of many from outside work, internal economic stability, reduced debt, better physical and mental health, greater self-sufficiency, reduced stress and anxiety, lower obesity rates, better gender relations, and so on.
• The undeniable success of the BHBs would then generate overwhelming popular will for a Universal Basic Income at the national level, as well as logistical assistance from the federal level. Because of the non-partisan nature of the BHBs (as well as the likely erasure of political polarization inside the BHBs themselves, as people come to see that our differences are only manufactured by our leaders to keep us angry at each other), support would be robust across the political spectrum.
• In this setting, a new political party (or much less likely, one of the existing parties) would take up the fight, explicitly endorsing UBI and BHBs, and also introducing Modern Money Theory at the federal level, rounding out the 3-pronged platform mentioned at the beginning of this recap. (MMT is not really applicable to the model BHB project itself, but only connects in later on, when applied at the national level)
• Popular will gets expressed through the ballot box, putting plutocrats and their water-carriers on the defensive.
• An expanded platform makes Smart Contraction official policy, also making it clear that this agenda puts people back in charge over markets, corporations, and plutocrats.
• BHBs defuse the culture wars, by demonstrating and dramatizing that all kinds of different people can work together to achieve seemingly impossible goals.
• After UBI-BHB-MMT become commonplace in the US, we can then export the new American model around the world, showing a path to reduced ecological impact while drastically increasing people’s well-being.
• Domestic effects would include downsized markets, passive wealth redistribution from plutocrats to the middle and lower classes, reduced labor-pull for illegal immigration, the dwindling of fuel for political polarization, and a reimagined national infrastructure, designed for the very different needs of a purposely-contracting economy.
• The political, cultural, and economic space opened up by UBI and BHBs would allow the country to devote itself to a new moonshot: undoing the damage done to the planet and starting a healing process that lets humans beings thrive along with the rest of the biosphere.

So what does this lengthy recap have to do with the de-Trumping of rural America, the tease that I had in the title? Where would that fit in the long-term project plan detailed above? Well, a rural strategy would theoretically become possible right after a UBI-BHB-MMT party takes charge in Washington and implements its policies. UBI and BHBs have the potential to create a mass migration from urban to rural areas. People would move away from cities, to locations where space is more available and land is cheaper. There is a vast rural landscape that could serve as a blank canvas for BHBs to design incredible new approaches to ecologically rehabilitating lifestyles.

Right now, many rural areas are suffering. What growth there is, is highly concentrated in a few select areas, heavily dependent on dirty extractive industries, high-intensity recreation, or retiree money. Otherwise, the rest of rural America is suffering from the usual suspects: lack of opportunity, depopulation, and general economic contraction. As of 2023, the rural share of GDP was down to 7.8%. This rural suffering fuels the toxic facets of political polarization, which is then exploited by the Polarization Industrial Complex to keep people blaming their fellow citizens instead of looking upward.

But if UBI and BHBs create a massive urban exodus, this could re-ignite economic vitality in the hinterlands, but NOT via unsustainable economic growth and JOBS-JOBS-JOBS, but rather by the widespread establishment of diverse communities that are economically stable and vibrant. BHBs could reinvent rural areas, bringing back population and cultural dynamism, injecting a new ethos of cooperation and sustainable living into the countryside.

The entrenchment of Trump is largely a product of the continued stasis of rural America. What Trumpism is doing is taking rural-urban split and using is as a vector to amplify a host of other resentments and prejudices: racism, misogyny, jingoism, religious bigotry, and generational animosities. The portrayal of cities as out-of-control hellholes is reinforcing the sense among conservatives that everything urban is liberal, which means that cities are filled with dark-colored thugs, godless heathens, castrating cat ladies, sexual deviants, and book-readin’ beta males. The increasingly unhinged nature of Trump, Miller, Vance, and other MAGA-nurturers comes from a desperate attempt to preserve and expand rural resentment against all things urban, which is synonymous with traitorousness, godlessness, amorality, and all other manner of debauchery and corruption.

But as described in my last post, this is all just theatrics, stagecraft designed to cancel midterms elections or at least sharply suppress urban voter turnout, as well as to fan the flames of city-mouse/country-mouse rivalries (which go back many millennia, all around the world), so that all MAGA people become rural at heart, no matter where they actually live.

A rural strategy, implemented through UBI and BHBS, and buttressed by a federal MMT spending platform, could strangle out this rural Trumpism at its roots, by showing that government really can work to make people’s lives better, while also tackling the huge meta-crises that we’re facing as a nation and a planet.