I receive email from moveon.org and other such organizations requesting signatures on demanding this and demanding that. I used to sign, but no more, which is good as demanding just seems like a poor word choice, although I have no suggested alternative. Getting all het up in a frenzy over petitions doesn’t seem to have much effect on our amateur Administration of incompetence, as it seems motivated by solely by money, and backed by clerics of Senator Goldwater’s horrified description.
What will? This guy, for example:
[John Bartman, a corn and soybean farmer,] criticized the president for gutting the U.S. Agency for International Development, which historically had purchased billions in food aid from American farmers.
“Right now, there’s 33 million people in Sudan who are suffering severe hunger,” he said. “And if those people at USAID were able to take our grain that we have, that billion bushels of wheat that’s just sitting there in our ending stocks right now, and give that flour to overseas, that would make a huge difference. It would give us a leg up and [help us] be able to make some money as a farmer, and we’d be able to have soft power again.”
Bartman added: “We would be the good guys in the world again — and maybe wouldn’t be in Iran right now.” [MS NOW]
Right there, from a farmer, we see opposition to the destruction of USAID by the arguably illicit DOGE, opposition to Trump’s War, advocacy for soft power, which is an approach to international relations involving foreign aid and persuasion, often loathed by the amateur set on the far right, and empathy for people in a country that our crass, obdurately amateur President calls a shithole country, quite in opposition to the best features of Christianity.
This interview is easily accessible by one of the backbones of the President’s support, the rural communities, and you can bet it’s being passed around. It’ll make people think.
Whether or not this will make farmers vote Democratic is an open question, given the blunders of the left; I could see a new political party appealing for their votes. But I think a substantial portion of the rural communities will realize, if they have not already, that the President, and all his loyal minions, have lost contact with the core concerns of the rural communities, much like the Democrats. Did they ever? Or was the rural community deemed a collection of suckers by the far-right extremists? I don’t know.
Where will this go? Hard to say. Those farmers who’ve found prestige in their Republican membership will stick to it, blinded by that prestige, even as their economic well-being begins to fray, and the central motivation of avarice reveals itself through corruption. Gains in prestige both satisfy and generate hunger for greater increases – and, –ahem– surely what worked before will work again.
But some will figure it out and abandon the Republicans.
