What to do about the coup? The Finale: When Governing Classes Fail
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Betting the Farm
My aunt Clarice grew up on a family farm in Shell Lake, Wisconsin. She talked often of farm life, her large family, the chores, the frugality, and the one-room schoolhouse. (She was born in 1946 by the way so that one-room schoolhouse was in the 1950s.) She made the very conscious choice not be a farmer herself.
I grew up a generation later in the lower half of the country, spending my elementary and middle school years in Laurens, South Carolina. It was a factory town with a bottling plant, a 3M plant, and two textile mills. But the farming sector in Laurens County was important enough that every year we all had to write essays on soil erosion. 4H and Future Farmers of America were popular school clubs. I moved away to Charlottesville, Virginia at the start of high school so I can’t tell you which of my Laurens friends became farmers. Several hoped to. Where are you now Ricky Tingle?1 But I picked up enough to know that I didn’t want to be a farmer myself, and I certainly learned enough to know how little I know.
My point for this essay is that however little I know about farming, there’s a good chance you know even less. Maybe you’re an avid and skilled gardener, but I’m not speaking of the growing food part of farming, I mean the business end of farming. Despite being possibly the most important sector in the economy of any state—we’re talking food after all—most of us know almost nothing about it. Farming is not like the building trades, education, healthcare, or manufacturing. It’s not like real estate, law, or medicine. It’s not like running a furniture store, drilling for oil, defending a doctoral thesis, or driving a big rig. Knowing those economic sectors won’t tell you much about agriculture. Farming is its own world with its own rules, schedule, culture, and needs.
Clarice herself passed away in April. I’ve been writing this series of essays because she wanted me to share my opinions about what we can do about Trump and the chaos around us. Instead of specific policy suggestions that have no chance of getting passed by Congress or implemented by the Trump administration, I’ve tried to present a general list.
Ending this series the way my aunt began her life—on a farm—seems fitting.
Where the Food Comes From
One of the basic iron laws of agriculture is if food is cheap for the consumer it must be cheap for the producer. That is, if consumers have inexpensive food, farmers won’t make much money. In order for farmers to make a lot of money, the food has to be expensive. But, you say, can’t they just grow more? Well, that’s where markets bite you. If all the farmers grow more, that gluts the market and drives the prices down, and farmers make less off what they grow. If an individual wheat farmer borrows money to finance improvements in land or technology to get higher yields, even if they succeed it can be a disaster, because if other farmers do the same, the glutted wheat market causes prices to drop, and our farmer makes no more than they would have if no one had borrowed the money or improved the land or technology. An innovating farmer might well go bankrupt if everyone else also innovates.2
Maybe spraying everything with, say, DDT is cheap and easy enough that the time saved exceeds the overall drop in wheat prices, but that only externalizes the cost into cancer treatment futures. Such is true of most factory farming methods. If they work for the farmers, they usually externalize long-term costs to everyone else: disease, poisoned water supplies, and—as the middle school me could have told you—soil erosion.
Ultimately the government has to square this circle by being very good at, well, governing. The government has the high-wire balancing act of both keeping the people fed and the farmers out of squalor, which takes skill. Whoever runs agricultural policy needs the intelligence to understand complex systems, patience to tolerate conflicting interests and points of view, and confidence to make decisions when it comes to it.
Farming in the Red
One of my ongoing themes is how Trump and our current crisis is much more like the fall of the former Soviet states than the rise of fascist movements in pre-WWII Europe. Turns out, that’s a wonderful introduction into bad agricultural policy.
Marxism began with the analysis of smokestack industries. Assembly-line, fossil-fuel, machine-dominated factories with the capitalist owners and 12-hour-shift working proletariat.3 When Lenin and his crew took control of what had been Tsarist Russia in 1917 they implemented their version of Marx’s theories. Contrary to capitalist Western propaganda, these theories worked pretty well for smokestack industries and sectors like mining. A coal miner or steel mill worker in the U.S.S.R. was not only better off than under the Tsars (Unless they were murdered by Stalin, but that didn’t usually have anything to do with economics.) but productivity was higher too. And why not? People aren’t complete idiots. Their economic models are simplifications, sure, but when applied to the systems the models were derived from they usually work okay. The Soviets were great at building guns, tanks, and even the first satellites.
Unfortunately, while not complete idiots it turns out we humans tend to be partial idiots. When a model works for something its proponents always try to apply it to everything else. So the Soviets struggled mightily to create quality consumer goods. Their theories were about productivity. Productivity was the measure of success. So in the centrally planned world of the USSR a warehouse full of refrigerators should be rewarded, even if no one wanted to buy them. For quality consumer products, central planning should have rewarded sales, not production, but the Soviets couldn’t think that way. So their production-based system was of little use in creating appliances and of no use in creating attractive shoes, handbags, or ties.4
But contrary to what you may have heard, it wasn’t shoddy consumer goods that destroyed the U.S.S.R. though it did play a role near the end.
Farming was the true downfall. If Marxism wasn’t suited to consumer goods, at least it didn’t kill anybody. When Marxism was applied to agriculture, millions died.
Life was not great for farmers under the Tsars, but they ate, lived, and even grew enough grain for grain to be exported. In fact, grain was about the only regular Imperial Russian export (unless you count human refugees). But the attempts by the Communist apparatchiks to apply Marxism to farming led to enormous famines, and brutal drops in agricultural yields. The Soviets could overcome mass deaths in rural areas—that was Stalin’s middle name—but the drop in yields mean the Soviets needed to import grain decade after decade to feed the urban proletariat upon whom the state’s security and legitimacy rested. Since foreign countries demanded hard currency, the agricultural imports caused a steady currency drain that eventually crushed the economy of the USSR.5
A Bowl of Dust
Lest we Americans too quickly pat ourselves on our collective backs for the contrasting nobility of our system, recall that our market-based farming system also fails often. There’s the Farm Aid years, of course,6 and a brutal farming collapse in the 1890s that led to the rise of the Progressive Party. But in between remember that while the match that lit the Great Depression was a stock market collapse, the reason the house was flammable was the Dust Bowl.
Agriculture, including family farming, was a huge part of the economy in 1929—one quarter of workers were in that sector—so when farmers in the 1920s increased yields to cope with the drop in farm prices this led to soil destruction that culminated in the massive dust storms that led to more soil destruction. That in turn led to brutal poverty, homelessness, and even starvation. A financialized, market-driven agricultural sector was as disaster for us just as a centralized, production-driven agricultural sector was a disaster for the Soviet Union.
The New Deal responded to the Dust Bowl with an agricultural policy run by people who actually cared about farming. They created new agencies, policies, and staff. They paid farmers to set aside land, bought up overproduced commodities, worked out various agreements for production, distribution, and sales—all of which would make a libertarian vomit on his shoes. But it worked quite well in practice until the Reagan-Clinton libertarian types took control of the government leading to the farm crisis of the 1980s.7
My point is that, no economic model borrowed from non-agricultural economic activity, will work for growing food. Economic sectors like manufacturing and finance are much simpler than farming, so simple in fact that those involved in these sectors invariably invent cool economic models in a way that pre-industrial (and pre-financial) civilizations did not. When a modern country is controlled by its wealthy classes and their toadies they will (mis-)apply whatever model guided them to their fortunes in their respective economic sectors. The tech mogul assumes tech solutions work everything, the financier thinks money is what is needed, and the real estate deal maker thinks the world is about deals. But none of this will grow food.8


Neoliberal economic models were devised for finance-driven globalism during a period of cheap energy and American-maintained free trade. It worked as well for that as Marxism worked for steel production. Eventually, the Soviets had steel and coal but nothing else. Today we have cheap consumer goods while our streets are filled with homeless encampments, our housing unaffordable, our healthcare unobtainable, our cities bankrupt, our water systems failing, our old people dying alone in suburbs, our young people lost in online media, and no plan for climate change or the likely eventual disappearance of affordable fossil fuels.
Leaders Lost
Most of us feel an instinctive responsibility to our job and local community. For the federal government and its far-off activities we may anxiety, disdain, anger, and maybe pride, but few of us imagine that what the federal government wants should guide our actions beyond the dictates of the law, and maybe not even that. We naturally feel we should be mostly free of the federal government to do what we think is best.
When countries become empires for the ruling classes it’s the opposite. They come to feel an instinctive responsibility to the empire; it’s their job, it’s their community; it make them what they are so they want to guard and protect it. However, we citizens are far away. About us they may feel anxiety, disdain, anger, and maybe pride, but few of them imagine that what we want should guide their actions beyond the dictates of the law, and maybe not even that. They feel they should be free of the citizenry to do what they think is best.
Most politicians most of the time are doing what they think is right; they’re preserving the institutions and empire that gave them their privileges, honors, and wealth. In their minds we are too far away to understand their choices. One of the evils of empires is they erode any sense among the ruling class that their power ought to derive from us. After all, from where they sit, it doesn’t.
They won’t change until the entire system is on the brink of collapse, as it was for Mikhail Gorbachev when he rose to power in the Soviet Union in 1985, and even when they do change, it will likely make things worse. Most of us in the West don’t realize what a disaster Mikhail Gorbachev was for his own people. He was an oblivious, bumbling reformer raised in the bubble of an empire, who had no idea how to think his way out of that bubble.
Ultimately, our government won’t get consistently better until our empire dies, and empires don’t go down without a fight.
So Here We Are
Unlike empires good governments tax the rich, break up monopolies, and limit military spending—all while respecting some version of the rule of law. Norms, values, theories, slogans, technocratic schemes, protests, activism, boycotts, twitter fights—even Substack essays—are no substitute for taxing the rich, breaking up monopolies, and limiting military spending—all under the rule of law. Anything you want to do, whether left or right, depends on effective government, and no government is effective if it can’t tax its rich people, break up monopolies, and limit military spending, while obeying its own laws.
In contrast to these principles of effective government…
The Trump administration still wants to cut taxes on the rich.
The Trump administration still plans to increase military spending.
The Trump administration continues to operate with complete indifference to the law.
There is a faint glimmer of hope on one front:
Under the Trump administration the antitrust cases started under the Biden administration have continued forward, so that we might be on the brink of the break up of some of the big monopoly tech companies. But I predict that once the monopolists kiss up to him enough, Trump pulls out of all of that.
Neither the Trump administration, the other Republicans, nor the Democrats as currently constituted, are going to make our country great again.
Neither the Trump administration, the other Republicans, nor the Democrats as currently constituted, are going to do anything about 60% of Americans now unable to afford a minimal quality of life.
Neither the Trump administration, the other Republicans, nor the Democrats as currently constituted, are going to respond to public pressure in a meaningful way. Think about the most important event in the world right now: the Gaza War. Across the Western world the public is disgusted by Israeli actions in that war, yet across the Western world, governments do not respond with the obvious action of simply withdrawing support from Israel.9 Unlike pulling Americans out of poverty ending U.S. support for the Gaza War would just take a phone call. Still they won’t do it.
Interesting Times
People in the future will be incredulous that we spent ten years arguing over tweets, watched the country fall to pieces, and elected Donald Trump. Twice. They’ll be incredulous that we elected Joe Biden when he was manifestly mentally unfit for office, that we didn’t even have a 2024 Democratic Primary, that we invaded Iraq, supported Israel long after their sell-by date, and failed to respond to the 2008 Great Recession, when the party in power owned a how-to-manual for how to respond to economic downturns called the New Deal.
However, the best response to these times is local. We should expand city councils, reinstate elected mayors, and deprofessionalize bureaucracies. We should build public housing, add apartments to all box stores and shopping centers, and plan for a variety of futures, including futures with permanently ineffective federal government, eroded state schools, unreliable supply chains, and major climate changes.
So that’s what I think. If you made it through these essays I appreciate it. I don’t pretend I’m good at this type of writing, since it lacks hope, a personal connection, or a call to action. But it’s something I needed to do for Clarice.
That’s the thrilling conclusion of What to Do About the Coup! Wednesday, we will return to personal stories, tales of prehistoric climate change, and the saga of fossil fuels. Plus summer is almost here with some new series.
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Ricky Tingle, in addition to wanting to be a farmer, had an amazing collection of comic books. I read his Fantastic Four comics in Science and/or Health class whenever our 7th grade gym coach-teacher gave us free time, which was often, since he didn’t like teaching. In addition to reading Fantastic Four, we played a lot of hangman and paper football.
The postwar “Green Revolution” which increased yields around the world glutted markets putting peasant and traditional farmers into debt, costing them their farms, and eventually leaving them in the slums of third-world cities. That is why those third-world cities are so huge.
He also borrowed dialectics from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, which ended up being a central part of the thinking of actual Soviet-era communists.
Such was the prestige of the smokestack that even Czechoslovakia, a country with a history of producing attractive consumer goods, was pressured by the Russian overlords to produce coal and steel, even though the Soviet Bloc didn’t need the coal and steel.
The need for hard currency to pay for grain imports was met in some years by energy exports, but when energy was cheap, the Soviets had to borrow money on interest. Eventually, at risk of default they tried to create a separate economic system with a new money. This encouraged smuggling and hording, which spelled doom.
Farm Aid was a response to the 1980s “Farm Crisis.” Ironically, that was triggered by an embargo on grain exports to the USSR after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, although the rising cost of petroleum, and other factors contributed too. Weirdly, the embargo on grain exports actually led the USSR to make some improvements in their agricultural sector but it wasn’t enough.
See #6 above.
The ultimate absurdity is the “escape pod” islands and towns being financed by billionaire tech bros. The dream is apparently that the brilliant people will live in these places safely as the world they’re ruining dies. But what will they eat? Hydroponic crops grown by robots, perhaps? But those require lots of energy and where does the energy come from? Where do the replacement parts come from? What happens if there’s one year a crop fails—because sooner or later farms have bad years. Either the food has to be brought in, or the energy has to be brought in, and why would anyone supply them? What do they have in return? Not to mention that the forty rednecks they hire as bodyguards, or mechanics to fix the robot bodyguards, won’t see any reason not to overthrow the tech bros or reprogram the robot bodyguards.
The U.S. support for Israeli’s monstrous—and illegal—collective punishment of the people of Gaza won’t be prevented until U.S. military expenditures are reduced to a level appropriate for actual defense, but Trump has been negotiating directly with Iran and Hamas without Israeli interference, and already unilaterally negotiated a truce with the Houthis without Israeli interference. So he is certainly willing to “stand up to” Israel publically. But probably that’s just so he can ingore the Israeli starvation of the Gazans (Currently nearly two million Gazans are on the brink of starvation as Israel blocked all food from coming in.) without being publically associated with it. Biden claimed to have splits with the Israeli government too, but since then sources had said there was never any pressure from the U.S. Here are three videos with different insights on Israel’s war.