Last week, we shared a 1984 speech from Hightower at the DNC, and it garnered a few comments from our readers who don’t understand why people in rural areas—and specifically farmers—vote Republican. Here’s what Hightower has to say in response:
I certainly share the frustration with groups that vote Republican, seemingly against their own interests. But have groups like farmers abandoned Democrats, or has Democratic Party Policy abandoned them?
As Lyndon Johnson used to say, “You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit.” Yet that’s exactly what our party started trying to do on farm policy in the 1970s.
While Democratic leaders praised family farm values, they were busily empowering the bankers, global grain traders, big meatpackers, seed monopolists, and other agribusiness giants to grow bigger and squeeze the economic life out of family farms. The American Ag Movement’s huge tractorcade rebellion in the ‘70s and early ‘80s (see this issue of the Lowdown from May 2019) went after Earl “Get Big or Get Out” Butz, but it was especially outraged that the Democratic Party of Carter-Mondale used fiscal policy (high interest rates) and global trade hokum to impose Butz’ plutocratic dictum on them.
The hard truth is that Washington’s Democratic leadership intentionally chose in the 1970s to abandon the Farm-Labor coalition of the New Deal in pursuit of corporate campaign cash from agribusiness. As Texas Agriculture Commissioner, I was part of these tractorcade protests, and both publicly and privately, I kept trying to convince Democratic congressional leaders to get back to our family farm roots. Are we going to push a bold, grassroots farm program, I asked the House Ag chairman, or just tinker around the edges of the corporate status quo? “Oh,” he said, with a condescending smile, “I imagine we’ll just tinker around the edges.” They did.
Around 1980, a US senator, who was my friend and ally, suggested to Vice President Mondale that they “ought to bring in Hightower on the farm issue.” He told me that Mondale responded: “Isn’t he a little hot?”
So there’s the problem. Farmers are not fooled that Republican ag policies are any good, but they do see that the once proud-and-true farmer party sold them out, abandoning the rural electorate to GOP charlatans who at least show up to campaign for the farm and rural vote.
I supported Mondale in his 1984 run to prevent another four years of the God Awful Reagan regime. Talking with Mondale late that year, he knew he was losing and was frustrated by it, and he snapped accusingly at me: “Your farmers are voting for Reagan.” First, they weren’t “my” farmers. Second, he didn’t seem to realize that his corporatized farm platform was the same ol’ status quo all over again. If we Democrats don’t stand unequivocally for family farmers, why do we they think they should stand with us? We have to get hot, or we’ll never win them back.
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Oh, wow! This fits in exactly with what we having been hearing from political analysts (on CNN and MSNBC) - that Democrats are now the party of urban and suburban, well-educated people. We have indeed abandoned farmers, the very people who feed us. We personally know some Dems who look down on farmers as hicks and yokels, and they (farmers) are anything but. Time to regroup and rethink, or we all lose. Thanks for pointing out the obvious, Jim, we needed that!
Jim is right again. The Democrats have abandoned Main Street in favor of Wall Street and the corporate funders. At least the Republicans talk a good game about helping the average American, even if they really don't mean it. You get back what you give out, and most people understand that neither party really cares about the interests of the average folks. The current Agriculture Secretary is no different from his predecessors and the family farmers see that clearly.