it occurs to me that these graphs explain a whole lot about american politics and why so many people are so mixed up, angry and alienated

it’s easy to forget that many millions of people still alive today grew up not just in a different era but with a very different relationship to production. yeoman farming survived en mass until a couple generations ago and its loss still quietly haunts this country

i can personally recall the first Farm Aid in 1985 when a huge concert was held to stop the banks from foreclosing on millions of US farms, but of course under neoliberalism, globalization, capitalist concentration and the late green revolution most lost everything

even though those ruined farmers are mostly gone and the material communities that revolved around that social world are devastated, the succeeding generations survive with the memories and folkways of independent petty proprietorship over the land and all that comes with it

i don’t think it’s possible to understand the great loss at the center of american neoliberal conservatism without the death of farming or the destruction of the great industrial unions in the 80s and 90s. these are scars that reaction cannot fix, but that it can compensate for