Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.

E.F. Schumacher

As we have covered many times in this blog, American political and cultural polarization is almost completely a rural-vs-urban split. As the sophistication and cost of political operations have expanded over the last few decades, aided by the explosion of media technologies, our two major parties have basically settled into a full-scale weaponization of the City Mouse-Country Mouse rivalry, a geographic dynamic that has existed everywhere on earth, whenever city centers emerge to exploit and dominate the hinterlands.

This goes far beyond the fancy electoral touchscreen maps that show small islands of blue bobbing in an ocean of American red. What Trump and MAGA have done, building on and completing the efforts of the Three Horsemen of the Polar-pocalypse (Rupert Murdoch, Newt Gingrich, and Rush Limbaugh), is to spin a grand narrative about how the ungodly, traitorous cities have plundered the virtuous, patriotic rural areas, destroying jobs and funneling all the country money into the undeserving pockets and mouths of urban parasites, dark people with darker souls who have raped white rural America and left her for dead — all in the cause of dismantling our Judeo-Christian civilization, in order to establish Sharia Law, cannibalism of infants, massive gay and trans grooming, or a communist globalist world order. (or maybe all those things, depending on which podcast you listen to)

For urban and suburban liberals, the ridiculousness of this tale is exasperating, resulting in a lot of head and fist shaking, along with the eternal muttering of, “What will it take for these rubes to get it?” Or to put it a different way, how can so many millions of Americans embrace a foundational belief that, above all, the world is a battleground of good-vs-evil, with all other considerations — like human rights, the Constitution, and even Christian morality itself — mattering much less than the basic symbolic testimony, largely unverifiable, that you and your heroes are on the side of the angels? As we have described it before, even Trump himself only derives power from his utility as a weapon against the evildoers, who are unquestionably liberal, urban, dark, and sexually deviant.

The durability of Trump’s base has been explained in many ways. Some studies demonstrate that conservatives crave paternal and hierarchical relationships due to deep biological/psychological brain structure. Other findings target different brain architecture, finding evidence that conservatives have a much stronger disgust reflex over novel stimuli, while liberals feel less threatened by the strange, unusual, and unexpected.

And then there are the more common socioeconomic explanations, which contain mountains of truth. White people are threatened by their loss of status, especially white men. And then men in general don’t like their declining educational and labor market dominance, especially in those job sectors that don’t require college or other advanced degrees. Their old jobs have been automated away, globalized away, and immigrant-replaced away. Christians feel besieged by the increasing visibility and acceptability of alternative lifestyles and sexualities, thus seeing a grand conspiracy to make their traditional lives seem like the weird ones.

Then from the right, there is the usual cultural replacement and collapse explanation, where too many foreign influences have destroyed our Judeo-Christian, Anglo-Germanic Western Civilization, turning us away from Christian piety and towards the false gods of secularism, communism, socialism, Ismalo-fascism, globalism, woke-ism, atheism, and other unholy isms.

[Of course, Western civilization’s defenders, like JD Vance and Furious Squidward (Stephen Miller), rarely mention that all the “Masters of Suspicion,” the dudes that swept away centuries of Christendom dominance, were all squarely out of that vaunted Western Civilization itself: Marx, Freud, Darwin, Adam Smith, David Hume, etc. And for sure the defenders of the West won’t acknowledge the great Max Weber, the towering German sociologist who traced the Iron Cage of modern capitalism and the disenchantment of the world to the very contradictions and irrationalities at the heart of Christianity.]

Sorry, strayed a bit there. Suffice it to say, there are plenty of convincing theories on the durability of Trumpism and of the broader MAGA culture. And as diagnosis, there’s much truth and value in these economic, cultural, and psychological theories. The problem is, “How do we go beyond diagnosis to prescription?” And this is where a lot of these convincing explanations run aground or fall silent, because they’re not quite Marxist enough, in the sense that they don’t look at the simple, material conditions on the ground that drive the MAGA-verse.

Sure, libs may be battling psychological preferences for authority, cognitive aversion to diversity and novelty, theocratic aspirations for a Christian America, and a generally delusional view of the world as a cosmic battleground of angels-vs-demons. But the answer to all these diagnostic observations cannot just be a huge laundry list of policy-wonk and other ‘expert’ proposals, things that try to convince rural people that urban problems and perspectives matter. Nor is the solution to be found in an attempt to create disembodied virtual spaces where conservatives and liberals can become desensitized and then re-sensitized to our differences in the right way, which will then enlighten us all. And for sure, the mainstream media, which is completely owned and controlled by the plutocracy, cannot just “find common ground” with focus groups and warm, fuzzy conversations between libs and conservatives, to demonstrate that we’re all basically the same.

Nope. The answer is simpler but also harder than that. To put it plainly, we need to acknowledge, as a fundamental starting point, that rural places really have been ravaged — not by the Deep State, or trans high-school swimmers, or by Critical Race Theory profs, but by capitalism itself. The horrid ideology of Trumpism grows out of and thrives on the desperate and highly-constricted conditions of rural America, huge swaths of land and population that were abandoned and forgotten, not just by Democrats, but by the hyper-concentrated corporate entities that grew out of Reaganism and its neoliberal programs. Trumpism will endure as long as this rural stagnation persists.

The answer to this Trumpian durability is not to try and change conservative minds, to get them to think better and believe the right liberal stuff. Rather, we must simply [!] remake the countryside itself, those vast oceans of red on the maps, by de-populating cities and suburbs, and flooding rural areas with huge influxes of people, refugees and settlers from urban and exurban areas that have become unaffordable, over-sprawled, ecologically unsustainable, and profoundly isolating and lonely.

Trumpism, MAGA, reactionary theocracy, systemic sexism and racism, and all other manifestations of the Polarization Industrial Complex, which itself is just a tool of the plutocracy to keep regular people angry at each other — these can all be dried up and blown away by a massive exodus out of the cities and into the hinterlands, creating a new, hybrid culture of conservatism and liberalism. Something beyond, and better — more connected to place, and to each other.

How do we do this? Well, if you’ve read this blog before, you’re probably already rolling your eyes, cuz you know what’s coming. But hey, consistency is the hobgobl….. wait, bad quote, never mind that.

I won’t rehash here how I think we can repopulate rural areas. Long story short: Universal Basic Income, Bigger Home Bases, and Modern Money Theory. Check out lots of earlier posts for more background on these.