LIVE with Hightower: Author Cory Haala
Come join us at happy hour online: Tuesday, May 26th at 6pm CT
Get your cold ones ready, we’re gearing up for a happy hour together that you don’t want to miss! On Tuesday, May 26th at 6pm CT, Hightower will sit down with historian Cory Haala for a live conversation about Haala's new book, When Democrats Won the Heartland — and paid subscribers can jump in with questions by leaving them here in the comments.
Haala spent a years in the archives — including Hightower’s own papers at UT Austin — building the case that the Democrats who held onto rural America in the 1980s did it by going harder at the corporate class, not softer. And wouldn’t you know it, Hightower turned out to be a central figure in that story.
Which brings me to the piece below, first published here a few years ago—a reader asked why farmers vote Republican. Hightower’s answer is essentially the argument Haala’s book makes, sourced from Jim’s own experience living it, including the moment Walter Mondale called him “a little hot.”
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.
That was the 1980s. Haala’s book asks what it would have looked like if the party had listened. Join us Tuesday to find out — and to ask Cory your own questions.
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I'll read the Haala book this weekend in preparation for the Tue. discussion. I remember the Butz declaration; his Big Biz orientation plus loathsome class prejudice and outright racism. I'm from the labor side of the old Farmer-Labor Populist movement; veteran of the fight to stop the neolib Dems from abandoning the New Deal and the majority working class. We lost. I know next to nothing about farm issues, but hey, we all eat! And I'm smart enough to know who does know.
The story Jim tells from the farmer side is achingly familiar. "Your farmers are voting for Reagan" is an early version of "your workers are voting for Trump." The D party elite and their upper middle class loyalists simply denigrate the desperate, never asking WHY votes in places like Mingo Co. WV went from 69.7% for the D presidential candidate in 1992 to 13.9% in 2020. Direct correlation with mass layoffs that fund stock buybacks benefitting only CEOs and banksters. Stats from Les Leopold's 2024 book /Wall Street's War on Workers./ The response to Leopold when he tried to advise D leadership was the same as to Jim--they didn't listen. We workers reacted like the farmers: "not fooled R policies are any good, but they do see the once proud-and-true farmer party sold them out..." Similarly, we see what was our New Deal party as neolib mutation sold us out; we're not stupid nor fooled by Rs, either.
That old Farmer-Labor coalition must be revived!!!
Q: 1.) Am I right about the similar experiences of farmers and labor? Although very different groups, aren't we both absolutely necessary for a healthy economy yet irrelevant to 1%ers, multinational corporate interests, and the financialized extractive econopathy now dominant? If the Ds want to win, shouldn't they be on our side, not serving the rich and powerful?
And ever since the farmers started to believe in the Republicans the Republicans continued the Democrats "play book". More and more corporate farms. Now those family farms that managed to get by thru these years may be getting squeezed out again. Maybe for more corporate take over, or, could this be a "land grab" to get large parcels of land to build the AI Data Centers? There are already signs of possible pollution as a result of data center construction. For example in GA and WI.