"Farmers for Trump!"

Why do farmers keep voting republican? First thing to understand is that farm owners and farm workers are two very different groups. The vast majority of farm owners are part of the wealthy establishment.

Additional illuminating references:
Why Farmers Voted For Trump: Free Government Money
Farmer Politics: Jane Austen Tried to Warn Us
This Farmer Played Himself. The NYT Wants You To Feel Bad For Him 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Welcome back to Death by Doctrine. I'm MJ.

SPEAKER_01 0:11

And I'm Elizabeth. I'm back.

SPEAKER_00 0:13

And you're back with a sibling episode to the episode that we did prior, because they're very similar, as we're about to get into.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Yeah, I'm pretty sure you bring me back whenever you're like, I know someone who will want to dig into this very specific question a hundred years ago.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

Yes. Last time we talked about coal miners and how they seem to vote against their own interest. Today we're talking about another group that is also very similar in that they also seem to vote against their own interest. Do you remember the conclusion that we reached during the coal miners episode?

SPEAKER_01 0:46

Uh, we thought they had swung to Republican because of bad timing, because their mono economy sort of collapsed at the time when the Democrats were in power, right?

SPEAKER_00 0:56

Yeah, it was timing for sure. My theory is that it sort of got cross-contaminated. Yes. After they swung to the Republicans. The Republican platform and their ideology cross-contaminated each other, and they sort of evolved into this right-wing block, even though traditionally, as we said, they're not a right-wing block prior to the 90s and 80s.

SPEAKER_01 1:18

Yeah, and I think there's quite a bit in neuroscience research that backs that up. Once you adopt a team identity, you are more likely to have faith in your team's viewpoints, even if you didn't originally hold those viewpoints.

SPEAKER_00 1:33

Yeah. Kind of scarily easy it is for people to ignore their own identity. This is something that the right-wing identity politics do very well.

SPEAKER_01 1:41

Oh, yeah. And it's crazy. Like it doesn't even have to be anything important. You could be grouped based completely randomly and then given a shirt, and suddenly that shirt colors your personality.

SPEAKER_00 1:51

It's wild. You don't even have to go into the academic research, just look at sports.

SPEAKER_01 1:55

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

The amount of people attached to their sporting team, which is, I'm just gonna say, arbitrary. Did you grow up in that city? Is a relatively arbitrary thing that happens to people sort of unwillingly.

SPEAKER_01 2:07

It binds you together when they're terrible.

SPEAKER_00 2:09

Yeah, I suppose, like a Bill's character is what some people say. So today we're talking about another group that is similar with the coal miners. We're gonna talk about farmers. I forgot how this came up, but we were talking about the coal miners, and then I think we saw some current event stuff, and we're like, this is also another group that seems to vote against their own interest.

SPEAKER_01 2:29

If I remember, we were talking about it, and you asked me, well, why do you think they are so strongly Republican? And I started answering, and then you're like, no, no, you know what? We're gonna do an episode about this.

SPEAKER_00 2:41

It fits perfectly with the theme of death by doctrine. That's the whole premise of the show, people. How do people's ideology end up harming themselves? So without further ado, let's start with the doctrine part. We're gonna answer or attempt to answer the question: why do farmers vote Republican?

SPEAKER_01 2:58

Yeah. Okay, so I don't know if you remember back when we very first started talking about this. You asked me something about farmers, and I believe I said, well, which farmers? Because although there's kind of a tendency to think of farmers as a sort of monolithic group, they're not a monolith. There's lots of different types of farmers, and I think it's a mistake to assume that farmers from the Northeast, so like New England, the farmers in maybe Vermont or New Hampshire, are going to be exactly the same as the farmers out in the Midwest. They have different priorities, they're in different areas, and unfortunately, there's this sort of tendency to in the media to be like, yes, farmers, all farmers are the same.

SPEAKER_00 3:44

Yeah, the media tends to do that with a lot of groups.

SPEAKER_01 3:47

Right. And additionally, they also have a tendency to equate all rural voters with farmers, and I think that's a mistake. I looked it up, and only about six percent of rural people do agricultural work. There are far more people who work in shops or in healthcare or I guess warehouses now than there are who work on farms.

SPEAKER_00 4:08

Just because farms are in rural areas doesn't mean all of rural areas farms.

SPEAKER_01 4:13

Yeah, and the other thing to keep in mind is that not all of that six percent of people working on farms are eligible to vote. Based on undocumented immigrants and also people who have green cards, about 53% of the people working on farms, they're not eligible to vote based on their immigration status. So we're talking about a very, very small percentage of the US populace.

SPEAKER_00 4:39

Yeah, and I think it's important to point out the eligibility to vote thing because one of the biggest things that I came across when I started doing my own digging into this is there's a big difference between farm owners and farm workers.

SPEAKER_01 4:53

100%, yes.

SPEAKER_00 4:54

You think farmer, you have that stereotypical image of like, oh, farmers are the people who work in the fields. They're farming, they're actively farming, but oftentimes those are farm workers, people who the farm owners hire to do the actual labor. And they, again, are often migrant workers. Yeah, when we say farmers for Trump, we almost by definition excluding the farm workers because a lot of them are simply not eligible to vote.

SPEAKER_01 5:19

Yeah, so a farmer could be a farm worker, as you said. It could be a small family farm owner, someone who owns a ranch or like a dairy farm, someone who does organic farming or artisanal farming, or you could talk about big agribusiness. All of these fit within this definition of farmer, but the voting narrative tends to focus around the Midwestern plains farmers who grow things like corn and soybeans. Or I guess you could also say like the Western Plains farmers who grow wheat or raise cattle, and those people tend to own their own farms or they tend to work these gigantic farms. And this group is largely conservative and votes Republican, often probably because of economics. But I do think it's important to remember that there are farms in other places, and like if you have very small organic farms, those particular farmers are more likely to lean left or libertarian than they are to lean Republican. And like you said, the farm workers themselves often lean progressive, and they have a much bigger interest in labor rights and immigration policy, and that's gonna drive them more than say the economics.

SPEAKER_00 6:30

Right. So immediately we are addressing the underlying premise of this doctrine, which is oh, farmers vote Republicans. Well, the question is what kind of farmers, and definitely whether they are farm workers or farm owners. That makes a big difference.

SPEAKER_01 6:45

Yeah, and I think the real question is why do plains farmers and farm owners vote Republican?

SPEAKER_00 6:51

Why do the big four farmers, the soybeans, corn, wheat, and cattle? Yes.

SPEAKER_01 6:56

Okay, so do you know when farmers actually became a political block, like a block that people started focusing on as a political group?

SPEAKER_00 7:04

I don't know, but I'm gonna hazard a guess that they probably didn't emerge as a political group until other industry became the dominant industry. Because if everyone was a farmer, then there is no group. Like that's just everyone.

SPEAKER_01 7:19

You're fairly close to correct. It's around the same time that we talk about with greater industrialization of the US. So there's actually a period of time called the farmers' movement, which I did not know until I started looking into this. And it's between 1867 and 1896. So right after the Civil War towards the end of the century. And it was basically a major agrarian protest where farmers organized to fight for farmers' rights and economic reform. And it actually had three major stages. The first one being the Grange Movement, followed by uh what they call the Farmers Alliance, and then resulting in the Populist Party, which I definitely heard about as being more of a labor party.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

So, what are their political leanings at this point? Like, why did they organize?

SPEAKER_01 8:09

Okay, so in the 19th century, like you pointed out, there were actually quite a few farmers. Land was relatively cheap and the number of farmers sort of boomed. Lots of people were going out west to become farmers. And this worked pretty well through the Civil War, but after the Civil War, it became very difficult to make a living as a farmer. If the weather were bad, you had bad years, you accrued debt because your crops failed, or you didn't make enough crops to cover your expenses. In good years, you were able to grow plenty of things, but so was everyone else. So there was overproduction and you didn't make the money you thought you would because there was no one there to buy it. There was no demand. And it also cost a lot to transport your goods and to store the goods. And that is because the railroads kept charging a lot for it. They had a monopoly over it, so they could. So the Grange movement was started by a USDA official who noticed that there was a need for education so that people could manage and work their farms using more modern methods so they were less likely to be affected by bad years. So they didn't build up this debt. And it really focused on advancing the welfare of farmers through education, social opportunities, and also economic benefits. The Grange got into politics sort of as an afterthought because they used it as a way to get ag classes in schools or free rural mail delivery or better roads. Things that were very practical that would make farmers' lives better on a daily basis.

SPEAKER_00 9:53

So it seems like it started out pretty reasonable. Right. And it seems like it started out as almost like a way of like, okay, that's advocate for the farmers where they live. All these things make very logical sense. We want to make sure that the farmers are not booming and busting because that's bad for everyone involved because they grow food, food that everyone needs. So we want to make sure that they are riding on a more or less stable trajectory so they don't suddenly all of a sudden have no corn one year, right? Very reasonable. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 10:23

Right. It makes total sense. And then they also started getting involved in like regulating the prices railroads could charge, advocating for legislative control of that. They actually won a couple of court cases about it. And so all of these, I think nowadays we'd look at this and be like, those are pretty progressive things, right?

SPEAKER_00 10:42

Yeah, pretty liberal policies.

SPEAKER_01 10:43

Right. And the other thing to add is that women could be full members.

SPEAKER_00 10:47

Now, back in the 19th century, that was a lot.

SPEAKER_01 10:49

Yes. They couldn't vote in the United States elections, but they could be full members of the Grange.

SPEAKER_00 10:55

Okay, very progressive so far.

SPEAKER_01 10:56

So the Grange actually continued. It started in 1867, and I found references to organizations called the Grange in the 1908, I think it was. The Grange didn't stop. It kept going on, but their interest was very much education. The Farmers Movement, which sort of took over and is what people seem to think of this middle period, it was also not originally a political movement. The Farmers Alliance is not really one thing. It's a, or it was a loose alliance of smaller regional alliances, like the Alliance of Southern Farmers or the Alliance of Farmers in this particular area. And so it was sort of like just this loose conglomeration who had a shared purpose, which was the political education of farm families so that they could pressure for government regulations and also pressure for a plan that allowed farmers to use crops as collateral for government loans. That was particularly of interest for Southern farmers. So they wanted to be able to get a government loan against the crops that they had or the crops that they were going to get.

SPEAKER_00 12:07

Okay. Still on the progressive side, like wanting government regulation, wanting government support for themselves, still very much on the liberal side.

SPEAKER_01 12:15

Yeah, and they also still had a pretty strong educational bent. We talked about how they were interested in political education of farm families, but also just education of farming techniques. So they organized lectures on scientific farming, but also business methods and basic economic theory. And they were teaching the practical techniques, but they were also teaching political activism. So educating their people and turning them into this political force. And if you've ever wondered about education for rural children or like cooperative extension offices, this is where it comes from. It comes from the lobbying of the Farmers Alliance. This also is where the ag colleges that we see come from. They have their roots here. I should mention that just like the Grange, women were allowed to join. And interestingly, the Farmers Alliance also included the Colored Farmers Alliance. So this was a group that was formed in Texas after they weren't allowed to join the White Farmers Alliance. So they formed their own. But they became members of the Farmers Alliance.

SPEAKER_00 13:21

That is again incredibly progressive. They're advocating for very reasonable things. They want education, they want more resources in rural areas. They allowed women to have a say in something. They also have this color farmers alliance. So I think we're on the same trajectory as the coal miners episode. Like we're starting out very progressive.

SPEAKER_01 13:42

Yeah, I noticed that too. And you know, with the coal miners, it started as sort of this labor movement, but it's kind of a labor movement here. They're advocating for better techniques for their farmers. And then from there, it sort of builds into this political movement. And that's actually we're seeing this increased political activism. And the farmers alliance is directly responsible, well, at least partly responsible for the formation of the populist party. It was the lobbying work of the Farmers Alliance that allowed the Populist Party to exist. And this was very much political. I mean, it was a political party. And it didn't actually last that long. It formed in Kansas in 1890, and it had a handful of really stunning political victories. Okay, tell me. So they actually uh they were able to have electors for a third party in the 1892 election, the presidential election.

SPEAKER_00 14:42

Okay, so long ago.

SPEAKER_01 14:44

The first time it had happened. And I think that's probably a good indication of how much anger there was at legislators and at the government because they weren't addressing the desperate economic situation of this rural population.

SPEAKER_00 14:59

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

SPEAKER_01 15:01

And so because this is a political party, their platform is more than just educating farmers or uh protecting farmers' economic interests. What are they advocating for? I mean, they had that, but they also advocated free silver, okay, interesting. The income tax, eight-hour days, reclamation of land grants, government ownership of railways, telephones and telegraphs, this is and popular election of federal senators. Because remember, at this point, the uh senators were not directly elected by the population, they were appointed by state governments.

SPEAKER_00 15:36

This is so different than how we ended up here today. Like, this is some of the most progressive advocacy of their days, I'm sure.

SPEAKER_01 15:47

Yeah, and I read a description that said it was a fascinating combination of both progressive and reactionary beliefs, that it wasn't fully progressive, but it wasn't fully reactionary either, or conservative either. It was populist. They were all about protecting the unprivileged. I think this is where we can race a lot of the roots of the idea of fighting against the privileged in the US history.

SPEAKER_00 16:14

Yeah, there's leftist populism and there's right-wing populism. And this is, I think, a very clear example of left-wing populism. The United States does have a strong history of just saying no to authorities. And it makes sense. Like it seems like they were kind of struggling, so makes total sense.

SPEAKER_01 16:32

Yeah, they called it ethical gains through legislation.

SPEAKER_00 16:35

Good slogan.

SPEAKER_01 16:36

Yeah, I know, right? That's amazing. And I'm a little surprised someone hasn't stolen it for today. But you can actually see their influence all throughout some of the regulatory framework of this country, some of them which we've actually discussed, like the pure food laws of 1906, the interstate commerce law of 1887, railway rate laws in the early 1900s, Bureau of Commerce and Labor, and also the antitrust laws of 1903 and later. So some really aggressive regulatory framework. They were fans of it.

SPEAKER_00 17:11

Yeah, honestly, this to me makes sense. These are people who are seeing the first wave of what capitalism can do at a nationwide scale, and they're realizing that without government regulations, they will always lose to the large corporations, for example, railways, whatever the powers that be. All of this makes very logical sense. Like I'm starting to dread what is about to come up because we know where this is going. Like, we we live in this current timeline, and I can't wait for the pivot. So, what happens after this era of progressive policies supported by farmers?

SPEAKER_01 17:48

Well, the populist party actually fused with the major political parties by the 1900s. In parts of the North, the Populist Party largely fused with the Republicans. In the South and the West, they swelled the ranks of the Democratic Party.

SPEAKER_00 18:02

But it's important to note that at this point, the Republicans and Democrats are not the same as the Republicans and Democrats of today.

SPEAKER_01 18:09

Correct. Even though they were still a political party for the 1896 presidential election and the 1900 presidential election, the populist party supported the Democratic presidential candidate who man by the name of William Jennings Bryan. Have you heard of him? We don't have time for that, but you should look him up. So although the populist party sort of disappeared, we still see farmers swinging hard towards progressive policies and politics in the 1930s and 1940s, and particularly the Democratic policies. And this is because of the New Deal.

SPEAKER_00 18:44

Yeah, New Deal, FDR, Dust Bowl, they desperately needed some help. So makes sense. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 18:50

And so by the end of the 1940s, they weren't 100% Democratic, but the Democratic Party had quite a bit of support. But by the end of the 1970s, this had changed quite a bit. There was a study published in 1977 that looked at whether farmers were as equally conservative as other rural voters, and they actually found that no, farmers were more conservative and more likely to be Republican than other rural voters.

SPEAKER_00 19:18

Okay, so this tells me two things. One, something happened between the New Deal era and the 1970s. So we're looking at the window of the 1950s to 60s to 70. We're looking at that 20-year window.

SPEAKER_01 19:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:31

And two, they benefited from progressive policies per the New Deal era, and something happens to them that led them to abandon ship of progressive policies.

SPEAKER_01 19:42

Yes. Very much so. And I should say that this particular trend has continued. A uh 2015 study found the same result. Farmers tend to be more conservative than their other rural voters.

SPEAKER_00 19:54

Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 19:55

And also, there was between the 1950s and 2008, the number of farmers who identified or self-identified as liberals or moderates had decreased. And there was a sharp decrease in the amount of trust people had in the government, or the amount of trust that farmers had in the government. This was matched by an increase in the belief that people like me, people like me the farmer, have no say and no power.

SPEAKER_00 20:22

It does seem like it's not just a turn against liberalism and progressivism, but also like a continuous polarization towards the right.

SPEAKER_01 20:31

Yes. So something happened between 1950 and 1970 that caused this split, and the split has just kept growing. And so I would like you to dive back into the depths of your memory to think about what the 1970s and the 1960s, what things were happening then. And I don't know how much you know about this era on the farm.

SPEAKER_00 20:52

I don't know a lot about this era on the farms, but I think my guess would be we are post-war. Yep. The thing I remembered about the post-war era is that a lot of servicemen came back and realized that in a very weird way that they had more rights fighting a war abroad than they had rights at home, particularly people of color. And that obviously spurned the civil rights movement. And this was the reversal between uh Democrats and Republicans, kinda. I mean, it sort of started before the New Deal, kinda, but this is the hard pivot. Yes. Hard swap between the who votes for Democrats and who votes for Republicans. But I don't know what's happening on the farm in this era.

SPEAKER_01 21:33

Yeah, well, I do think it's important to keep in mind that there was the civil rights movement and this split where the Southern Dixiecrats became Republican. And I think it is important to remember that that was something happening in the South. And that's gonna drive part of it, I think, because people tend to vote similarly to the people they're around. And farmers aren't necessarily an exception to that fact. They may be more conservative than their native. Neighbors, I mean, that's relative to their neighbors. So if their neighbors are very conservative, then the farmers might be very, very conservative. Now, specifically what was happening on the farms is that agribusiness was becoming big. In the 1970s and the 1980s, people started leaving agriculture. We lost a lot of farmers, and a lot of farms, like family farms, were lost. And instead, the farms that survived became these very big farms that we now refer to as the sort of agribusiness. And so the people running them started acting more like CEOs than the laborers or the labor party.

SPEAKER_00 22:39

That makes a lot of sense. And that's matches with the stuff that I found on my end. A lot of the farms got consolidated, and sort of by virtue of that winnowing, most of the farms that are left are large farms because all the small farms got bought up.

SPEAKER_01 22:56

Yeah, and people felt pretty betrayed by this. In the 1970s, the end of the 1970s, Jimmy Carter was a farmer and he was president, and he wasn't doing anything to solve this. And there was something called the tractor cade protest. Um and this happened in 78 and 79. And in 1979, there were nearly 3,000 farmers who drove their tractors to DC. And it caused a lot of difficulties and trouble. I mean, they're tractors on the streets of DC. It's very slow. Yes. And the Carter administration agreed that the farmers' home administration would stop foreclosures on these family farms. The family farms people had gotten into debt and they couldn't pay the debt. And so the farms were being seized and sold.

SPEAKER_00 23:40

Or pennies on the dollars often.

SPEAKER_01 23:42

Yes. And this is what they said to stop the rally or at the rally. But then the farmers left. And soon after the home administration resumed foreclosures on their farms. So why would they trust the government?

SPEAKER_00 23:55

That is an interesting piece of history that I am not aware of. Okay, so a very open betrayal by a Democratic president, Jimmy Carter.

SPEAKER_01 24:05

Yeah, and the Texas Agricultural Commissioner of this time, who also became the head of the DNC's Agricultural Council in the 1980s, uh, his name is Jim Hightower. He's written a lot about why farmers, he thinks farmers vote Republican. And one of the quotes I found from him is 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. I mean, I am not an expert on farming history or farm political history, so he definitely knows more about this than me. And that was something he said in the 1980s. That's not something he said now. That was something he said back then.

SPEAKER_00 24:49

And I think there's a lot of intersectionality here where so many factors are playing at the same time. Jimmy Carter's betrayal of the farm labor coalition. But also, in a weird way, as the farms got bigger, they behaved more like businesses. One of the resources that I found, a YouTuber called Farm to Tabor, she did a video about like why farmers vote Republicans, or specifically why farmers voted for Trump. And her explanation is rather simple, but I think it explains a lot, which is one, a lot of farmers are not the type that people imagine. They're not like the independent farmers working the field, right? They are largely farm owners and they are agribusiness, as you mentioned, right? A lot of them behave like businesses because they have gone to the size where they essentially are businesses, they're no longer the type of like small family farms that people are uh used to in the 19th century. So essentially it's kind of financial in that which political party is friendlier to businesses, which political party is friendlier to deregulation, which benefits big businesses, which political party loves giving farmers free cash? And if you look at the farmer bailout trend in the past 20, 30 years, the Republican parties have consistently given farmers free cash compared to the Democrats. She cited that as a big reason why farmers voted for Republicans in that they will just get free money, which is incredibly ironic given how the Republican Party is all about like not giving handouts to people. So a lot of the farmers' politics is tied up with big business. So they would advocate for deregulation, which ended up being Republican. So it's a multi-level sort of vortex that's happening here.

SPEAKER_01 26:32

Yeah, and not to make things even more complicated, but I did find an interview with a political scientist who is at the University of Michigan who studies rural voting habits, Michael Shepard. And he actually has another point that he brings up. And for him, he said that politics in general in the 1970s and the 1980s really did start to change. And both parties started focusing on cultural issues. And these cultural issues and how people felt about them became more central to their politics. And that includes farmers. So if you have farmers who are Christian identifiers or believe strongly in traditional gender roles, which were being challenged in this time period, those people are going to gravitate towards the Republican Party and their embrace of the moral majority, how they intertwine themselves with the more evangelical Christian religions. And so if you've got farmers who that is their cultural identity, they are going to gravitate to the political party, not necessarily for agricultural-based reasons. So I think there's probably both of these things going on. You've got some farmers who are feeling betrayed, and some farmers who are feeling as though the Republican Party is culturally their home.

SPEAKER_00 27:52

Yeah, I think it's a similar process as we've discussed with the coal miners. Like there is a cross-contamination between the party platform and their individual ideology. And during that era, identity politics became the dominant form of politics. Instead of advocating for material things and things that are related to your well-being and you know your livelihood, your politics are starting to shift towards more things like who you are as a person, like what's your background, what's your history, what's your gender. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Like how we got to where we are. There's a big shift away from, I don't know, material politics for a lack of a better term.

SPEAKER_01 28:31

Yeah. There's definitely this sort of um party allegiance that it feels like has become more prominent.

SPEAKER_00 28:38

Yeah, more prominent and more important than actual policies. And also there is a very clear shift from the government is going to help us, which is the New Deal era Democrats platform, to a government is bad sort of framework. And I wonder where the switch is it just Jimmy Carter? Like, is all this just squarely on Jimmy Carter's shoulder?

SPEAKER_01 29:02

I don't think it's all on Jimmy Carter's shoulders. There was a lot of resentment that farms were being foreclosed on and the economy wasn't great in general, and the government was focusing on like foreign wars. Probably the tractor cade protest, the fact that they put a farmer in the White House and things didn't get better for farmers was probably deeply disappointing. And at that point, why should we trust? You know, we put someone who said he was one of us in there and he still didn't help us.

SPEAKER_00 29:35

Yeah, but that argument is inherently weak to me because you look at the Republican Party now, they put this guy that say he's one of them, and he didn't help anyone, but they're still deeply loyal to him.

SPEAKER_01 29:49

Yeah, so Jim Hightower actually has talked about this. He has this quote farmers are not fooled that Republican agricultural 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 the rural vote. And I think it's the last part of that that is pretty important. There's a lot of rural places in this country where people vote Republican because they don't actually have anyone else running against them. I mean, maybe their policies are bad, but at least they're showing up.

SPEAKER_00 30:24

That's not true, though. They're not showing up.

SPEAKER_01 30:28

Well, not now, but for the past like 40 years, I'd say it was.

SPEAKER_00 30:33

This is an interesting one. Overall, the theme that I'm picking up is that the Democrats post-war sort of chose their voting block that they're going to align with and made their bed with it instead of doing the big tense strategy of like, no, we want to get everyone, want to advocate for everyone. They chose civil rights movement and the Republicans got a very easy W, picked up all those groups that the Democrats abandoned.

SPEAKER_01 30:59

Yeah, there's a strong argument for that. Again, not a political scientist, but that's what it looks like to me as a public health scientist. They also started embracing like environmental concerns, and this is happening at the time when farmers are already struggling. And additional regulation, when you are already struggling, just makes your life harder.

SPEAKER_00 31:20

Yeah, or at least in the short term.

SPEAKER_01 31:22

Yeah, in the short term. I suspect there's some of that going on.

SPEAKER_00 31:25

Definitely an interesting story. I welcome our listeners to email us and present their own theories because it seems like a very complicated period in time, and a lot of things happen, and there are many layers to this. But at the end of the day, sometime during the 50s and 70s, between that 20-year period with the civil rights movement, the post-war thing going on, Jimmy Carter in this late 70s, during that period of time, the farmers flipped hard from being a progressive populist voting block into a right-wing populist voting block.

SPEAKER_01 31:59

So, what does that mean? How is their doctrine that they've embraced hurting them?

SPEAKER_00 32:04

So the doctrine is farmers for Republicans or farmers for Trump. And we unfortunately have several examples of how that is coming back to hurt them. 2026 is truly the year of the leopard eating people's faces.

SPEAKER_01 32:19

So true.

SPEAKER_00 32:19

This is in reference to a 2015 tweet, now iconic and enshrined in meme history. You know this tweet, right?

SPEAKER_01 32:27

Oh, of course, yes. It's a glorious tweet.

SPEAKER_00 32:29

It's a fantastic tweet. The tweet is, I never thought leopards would eat my face, sob's woman who voted for the leopard eating people's faces party. Truly iconic tweet because we're witnessing that in real time.

SPEAKER_01 32:42

Yeah, have you seen there's a woman who's actually made a small jingle out of it? She plays like the guitar as she sings it. It's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 32:51

We'll definitely check it out, or maybe link in the description. But uh 2026 is the year of leopard eating people's faces. So let's look at some of the health issues farmers face. Turns out they face many health issues. Living in a rural area, working on a farm is not exactly easy work. They are often exposed to injuries, they are often exposed to illnesses. Injuries can come from farming equipment, electrocutions, there's a lot of loose wires, uh, toxin exposures, wear and tear injuries, like if you work prolonged periods of time doing manual labor, that can cause injuries. So they have a lot of health care needs. However, because a lot of them live in rural areas, there are a lot of barriers to access health care. Rural areas are many times more likely to lack hospitals compared to urban areas. And a hospital being far away may mean that farmers who got injured by farming equipment may not get to the emergency room in time, or they need to be airlifted. And everybody knows airlifting ain't free.

SPEAKER_01 33:51

That costs money.

SPEAKER_00 33:52

The helicopters don't run for free. They're not charity helicopters, even though they should.

SPEAKER_01 33:56

Yeah, I don't know if anyone who's listening has ever had an ambulance bill, but they're shocking.

SPEAKER_00 34:01

Borderline unethical.

SPEAKER_01 34:02

And they're nothing compared to the airlift bills.

SPEAKER_00 34:06

Also, being far away from healthcare means that people tend not to seek out healthcare for small things, they tend to let it fester into serious issues because if it takes two hours to get to your PCP, you're probably going to write out most things and pray that it goes away.

SPEAKER_01 34:20

Right. Or even if you have a PCP within two hours. I mean, we've talked about before how rural areas tend not to have doctors.

SPEAKER_00 34:29

No, they tend not to. And one solution to this is obviously provide more healthcare access in rural areas, particularly to farmers, and to support the farmers' health and well-being by having things like community clinics, for example. And a key part of that effort would be Medicaid.

SPEAKER_01 34:45

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:46

Because Medicaid is not just a health insurance. The way that Medicaid is set up, it's also a large funding source for a lot of these health care resources and infrastructure, like building community clinics. A lot of that is tied to Medicaid funding.

SPEAKER_01 35:00

That's a really good idea, MJ.

SPEAKER_00 35:02

Yeah. I'm not gonna get into it, but Medicaid covers more than just health insurance. Like Medicaid funding is a very complex thing. Now, Elizabeth, which political party is all about cutting Medicaid?

SPEAKER_01 35:15

Obviously, not the Republicans because Donald Trump said so. He said he wasn't gonna cut Medicaid.

SPEAKER_00 35:21

Wow, the sarcasm dripping. Yeah, so the Republicans are have been, I want to say for 10 plus years, very keen on cutting Medicaid, but just healthcare subsidies in general.

SPEAKER_01 35:33

They have been riding that since 2010. Cutting the ACA. Yeah, as soon as the ACA passed, they wanted to start cutting things.

SPEAKER_00 35:42

And this actually happened. During Trump's second term, the Republicans were directly responsible for getting Medicaid. The big beautiful bill, a name that only someone with a limited vocabulary can come up with, slash Medicaid by $900 billion over 10 years. As a result, multiple rural healthcare locations are shutting down because they rely on Medicaid funding to operate.

SPEAKER_01 36:04

Yeah, you know what's fascinating to me is that people who uh voted for Trump and who support Trump, it was pointed out to them that their hospital closed because of one big beautiful bill. And they just point blank refuse to believe it. They just rejected the fact. I don't know why.

SPEAKER_00 36:22

I don't know why either.

SPEAKER_01 36:23

They didn't want to believe the leopards would eat their face, I suppose.

SPEAKER_00 36:26

I suppose. And I will highlight a previous point that we made at the top of the episode that farm workers and farm owners are very different type of people. It is a myth that the Republicans' main supporters are poor rural whites. That is a myth. That is not true. They are overrepresented in media because they are incredibly entertaining to interview and they make for great rage bait content. Oh, that's true. Yeah, but they're not the core of the Republican base. The core of the Republican base are relatively middle class and wealthy white people. And most farmers in the US are millionaires. And that might seem shocking to you until you think about how much capital you need to run a farm. Like if you are actually poor, you can't own a farm. You can work on a farm, and that makes you a farm worker, but you cannot be a farm owner if you are actually poor. My point is maybe they feel insulated because a lot of them have money. Maybe that's one explanation.

SPEAKER_01 37:22

Yeah. Have you ever heard of the show Clarkson's Farm?

SPEAKER_00 37:25

No.

SPEAKER_01 37:26

Tell me about it. Jeremy Clarkson buys a farm in England. He's an English personality. He buys a farm, and then this show basically documents what it is like to run the farm. And at the end of the first season, he sits down with his accountant to go over how much they spent and how much they made. And it turns out they made something like I want to say it was a really small amount, maybe a hundred dollars. And Jeremy Clarkson is like, how can anyone do this if they don't have other sources of income?

SPEAKER_00 37:57

And that's it. Like they have other sources of income. That's it.

SPEAKER_01 38:00

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_00 38:01

They have other sources of income, or they have generational wealth, or they have the size, the scalability to be more profitable. But yeah, so maybe they feel insulated because a lot of farmers are not poor by definition. But also, like farmers are not monolith. There are a lot of farmers that an NPR article called land rich cash poor, which is a very real thing. They are wealthy on paper, but they don't have a lot of like liquid cash moving around. Who knows? Right. Farmers are also exposed to infectious diseases. Zoonotic diseases are a significant risk for anyone working with animals, but also things like tick-borne diseases and insect-borne diseases are very common when you work with animals or living in a rural area. Now, Elizabeth, uh, which political party is keen on gutting infectious disease monitoring, I wonder.

SPEAKER_01 38:51

You know, we just talked about this and how uh the Doge ended up cutting a lot of the disease monitoring programs. Yeah, with screw worms. But not just screw worms, also things like various animal influenzas.

SPEAKER_00 39:07

And the thing in the news right now is cyclosporiasis, uh, which is a parasitic infection that causes explosive diarrhea. To be fair, this is more consumer side than it is on farmers, but that my point stands is that these two examples are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the type of like public health monitoring that has been gutted by the Republican Party. There are so many more examples of this. The point being that Republicans are very keen on doing this. They love gutting preventative and monitoring programs.

SPEAKER_01 39:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:37

Good times, not much to say.

SPEAKER_01 39:38

I mean, I don't know what to tell you because yeah, it's a terrible idea. It really is a terrible idea because when you get sick with those, well, okay, you're more likely to get sick with it. And because the animals are sick and you didn't know, and you take care of the animals, and I guess you would go to the hospital, except you don't have a hospital anymore. So where are you supposed to go? I guess you go home and just get really sick.

SPEAKER_00 40:01

Until you can't stay home anymore. Farmers are also exposed to various chemicals and toxins, fertilizers, pesticides, machine fumes from their tractors, and other chemical products aren't exactly good to breathe in. Now, which political party is hostile to environmental regulations, I wonder, Elizabeth. Which one?

SPEAKER_01 40:19

I mean, I can tell you this, but MJ, what about America being healthy again?

SPEAKER_00 40:24

Yeah, tripping with sarcasm right there. The thing in the news is obviously the Bayer Roundup debacle. There's decent evidence that uh glyphosate, which is a major component in Roundup Weed Killer, elevates cancer risk. Very decent evidence. It's not conclusive because we're still in the early stages of studying it, but the signs are there. This is associated with higher cancer risk. And the Republican Supreme Court, I'm oversimplifying this, but it's it's a long drawn-out fight. There's many layers to this, but the TLDR, the summary point is this the Republican Supreme Court sided with Bayer and said, yeah, they are not responsible for putting warning labels or whatever because there is no conclusive proof that glyphosate causes cancer.

SPEAKER_01 41:08

Right. And you can't sue them.

SPEAKER_00 41:10

This, by the way, is the same argument that Big Tobacco used.

SPEAKER_01 41:14

That's right, yes. And I do think we're gonna do um a deeper dive into the Roundup debacle, but it is fascinating. These chemicals, you work on a farm, you're gonna be exposed to these at much higher levels than if you work in an office. They're making money off of these chemicals, and you're getting sick for it.

SPEAKER_00 41:33

If we end up doing that episode about uh buyer debacle, we will definitely get into some of the nuances, but there was a lot of farmer adjacent associations that backed buyer in this Supreme Court case. It's a fascinating story that we perhaps will get into in a future episode.

SPEAKER_01 41:50

Yeah, I mean it's in the short term, it makes your life easier because it is easier to control the weeds and you get a better crop. You're sacrificing your long-term health for the short-term game. But again, I guess if you're just trying to make it year to year, or if it's your workers.

SPEAKER_00 42:05

Yeah, if you're not doing it, like you're a farm owner, you're not a farm worker. Yeah, you uh perhaps have different agendas with stuff like this. Farmers are also at a higher risk for mental health issues. The reason for this is complex, but isolation is a factor. Uh, living and working on a farm, it can feel very isolating. There's financial stressors, physical stressors from farm work, but a big part of it is just anxiety. If you own a farm and your livelihood depends on your yield, you just don't know whether you'll have like a flood or like a storm or whatever that will absolutely wipe out your future income. So that's a big reason. It's nuanced and complicated, but the main point is farmers have elevated risk of mental health issues, and the stats that can show that is that farmers in the United States are 3.5 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population.

SPEAKER_01 42:52

It's such a good thing that this administration wants to de-prescribe SSRIs. It's so good, MJ.

SPEAKER_00 43:00

Again, dripping with sarcasm. Now, it because farmers are a very important group of people, we should probably address this problem. Like we should at minimum be providing mental health resources for farmers. Now, Elizabeth, which political party is always downplaying mental health issues and keen on slashing mental health funding? Any ideas?

SPEAKER_01 43:19

It's more of that I think the Republican Party wishes the mental health problems would just go away. And then they wouldn't have to worry about funding them. If people would just be happier, then they wouldn't have to fund them, I think.

SPEAKER_00 43:32

Yeah, because actual policy that's evidence-based is not sort of their strong suit. They're more in a wishful thinking sort of policy makers.

SPEAKER_01 43:40

Right. And if you fund these programs, then that is less money that you have to play with that can support tax cuts, obviously.

SPEAKER_00 43:49

During the COVID 19 pandemic, the federal government, specifically the Department of Agriculture, set up some funds for states to operate mental health support, specifically for farmers. When these federal funds ran out. They were not renewed. However, several states dug into their own funds to keep some of these mental health resources from lapsing. Guess which state didn't?

SPEAKER_01 44:09

I'm guessing it's a so-called red state.

SPEAKER_00 44:12

The example that the ProBublica article used is Utah, which is a very red state. And they decided to not continue these resources, and all the funding was pulled, and they interviewed a lot of farmers who depend on these mental health resources, and they were devastated that they no longer have access to these resources, which is very sad. Uh, recommend reading that article. It's very interesting. And those are just some examples. I could keep going.

SPEAKER_01 44:38

I mean, what it sounds like is essentially one of the arguments that Michael Shepard made is that people tend not to vote based on the issue you think that they should vote for. Let me pull what he actually said. He pointed out that a lot of the times people are going to vote on something that is important to them, and that is not always going to be what we think should be important for them. There's a tendency to say that farmers should vote based on agricultural policy. He thinks that that misunderstands the way that humans act. And that many farmers do know that Republican policies have been harmful to their farms, but they have other priorities and other concerns that are more important to them than these say strictly tariff-based policies. So he pointed out like social issues, identity-based politics, cultural considerations, racial politics, immigrations, which is way more than just agricultural policy. But what it sounds like is that just across the board, all of these issues that have anything to do with health, it's just bad. It's just bad. So I don't understand what social issues could be more important than your own health. But then again, I am a public health scientist, so health is really important to me.

SPEAKER_00 46:00

Yeah, it is very confusing. We talked about this in the coal miner episode of how when you vote for a particular party or a president, you don't get to cherry pick what they do, right? And some would call it a feature, some would call it a bug, but whatever you want to call it, that is the reality of our current system right now. You vote for someone, you're essentially sponsoring their entire platform. And maybe they do have other things that they are voting for, like racial politics or cultural politics or identity politics. But at the end of the day, you own the result of those things that you're voting for. And you have to own the entire platform, and you can't just be like, Well, I only voted him because of this, and I don't actually take responsibility for the other stuff that he's doing, right? That's not how this works.

SPEAKER_01 46:47

Pretty naive.

SPEAKER_00 46:48

Pretty naive, pretty childish. Same thing with coal miners. Like, we're seeing this entire block of people get tied up with identity politics, which lead them to care more about things like transgender athletes in colleges that they don't even attend, and things like gay rights or like feminism, and it leads them to vote against these things that are not so much the policies that actually affect their day-to-day lives. And one of the things I wanted to end on is that identity politics will not manifest as material gains. It never will, because identity politics is fundamentally not about policies and material gains. It's about like who we want to punish, who we want to make the outgroup.

SPEAKER_01 47:31

I do think something to keep in mind is that in the 1970s, when the farmers as a group started swinging towards the Republican policies, one reason that has been put forth is that they felt no one in the government cared that they were losing their farms and that they were going bankrupt. And I have to wonder, given that we are seeing a rise in bankruptcy among these small farms again, is this going to trigger a swing the other way?

SPEAKER_00 48:02

I hope it swings the other way, but only time will tell. I can go on with these examples. The Republican platform is deeply unfriendly to rural America and farmers specifically. And they're kind of not being subtle about this. They are all for gutting Medicaid, they are all for gutting environmental regulations, they're all for deregulations, which is not good in the long run. Deregulation may save you money in the near-term future, but as we see with these outbreaks with screw worms, with various issues that are caused by deregulation, we're seeing that it just costs us more money to pay for them in the future. It's bad, folks. The Republican Party's platform is not good for farmers. And yet we are seeing them continuously vote. Hopefully, things will change in the next election. Who knows? Like fingers crossed, but we are seeing them vote for a political party that simply does not care about their health and well-being. All because, I don't know, they're more focused on identity politics.

SPEAKER_01 48:58

As you said earlier, identity politics is never going to result in war for you.

SPEAKER_00 49:03

Identity politics will never manifest as material gains. Another sad episode, but such is this series.

SPEAKER_01 49:11

Such is all your series.

SPEAKER_00 49:12

That's true. Public health is in a dark place right now. There's not a lot of public health wins. Thank you so much for listening to Death by Doctrine. If you like the show, please tell everyone you know about the show. That is the best thing that you can do to help us. I have other podcasts as well, including Everything is Public Health, and Public Health is for everyone. For more information and all updates, please visit everything ispublichealth.com. Thank you so much for listening, and we will see you next time.