SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
rural
Why Guaranteed Income Is the GOAT
Minnesota's three-year-old Guaranteed Income for Artists pilot program offers a small yet mighty payment that has unlocked creative freedom and opened new opportunities that ripple through our communities.
Nov 21, 2024
If you were driving by a remote stretch of Minnesota County Highway 210—connecting Wahpeton, North Dakota and Fergus Falls—you would see a massive billboard depicting a painting of three goats. It looks out of place—colorful and vibrant on a desolate stretch of highway mostly used by westbound truckers and locals. On the top left-hand corner of the billboard rests a stark reminder to anyone looking up: "In rural we tend to the herd."
My wife and I share a farm with Edith, Willa, and Milagro—our three goats and the willing subjects of the billboard—and 10 laying chickens, two inside dogs, and three outside cats. As a recipient of Minnesota's three-year-old Guaranteed Income for Artists pilot program, I was inspired to create the billboard as a tribute to the state's guaranteed income pilot, which tends to the community and is changing the lives of artists like myself.
Since moving to Otter Tail County in 2017, I've deepened my connection to the land and the rhythms of rural life. I am attuned to the changing of the seasons, and the serene landscape outside my windows becomes inspiration for paintings in my home studio. Living in a rural setting provides the space I need to get into the creative flow. And the quiet, slower pace of life has unlocked the creative freedom to make my large-scale narrative paintings.
As policymakers and community leaders consider implementing guaranteed income programs, I hope they look to Minnesota's example.
But making a living as an artist in rural Minnesota is no easy feat. It often requires having many different income streams to stay on top of student loans, car payments, and grocery bills. So, when I received an email telling me I had been chosen by lottery to participate in a new pilot providing guaranteed income for rural artists, I breathed a sigh of relief.
The program is set to expand, soon providing no-strings-attached $500 monthly payments to 100 artists for five years—far exceeding typical 12-18-month pilots. This growth cements its position as the nation's longest-running guaranteed income pilot focusing on both urban and rural creators. For me and my fellow artists, this small yet mighty payment has unlocked creative freedom and opened new opportunities that ripple through our communities.
As Minnesota finds itself in the national spotlight following Gov. Tim Walz's candidacy for Vice President, our state's innovative approaches to social and economic policy are garnering renewed attention. As of 2024, 10 states have introduced legislation attempting to ban guaranteed income programs. The misplaced fear stems from ideological and economic concerns about the effects of guaranteed income even though more than a dozen studies have shown that it leads to higher employment rates, housing and food security, and more family time.
When artists have the freedom to create and engage, we become catalysts for positive change that benefits entire communities. Take Jess Torgerson, a multidisciplinary artist and community organizer in Fergus Falls, Minnesota. Before the guaranteed income program, Jess was working 60 hours a week. Now, she has partnered with another artist to create sculptures from found materials, simultaneously making art and ridding her community of unwanted waste. Then there's Torri Hanna, a fiber artist. The program helped Torri and her daughter improve their living situation and stabilize her yarn store business. Torri, too, has expanded her community involvement, working with the local senior center to create art for downtown storefront windows.
Recent data from the program shows its remarkable impacts. Participants reported a decrease in financial stress, an increase in their ability to pay for basic needs, and an increase in their ability to take on creative and community projects they wouldn't have otherwise pursued. The success of Minnesota's program is part of a larger movement, with over 100 pilot programs across the United States testing the impact for different groups of people. Programs like the Works Projects Administration coming out of the New Deal made it possible for artists to make a living and beautified our nation's infrastructure. We have a history to look back on in guiding public investments in artists—we already know that investing in artists pays back manifold.
In my community, we understand the value of tending to the herd—and we've all taken an important lesson from Edith, Willa, and Milagro, who sit in formation with their backs to each other so that they can share body heat, and each can observe a different direction to keep an eye out for threats. Our communities are strengthened when we tend to each other with the same dedication. This, to me, is what guaranteed income does for artists. It says, "We've got your back."
As policymakers and community leaders consider implementing guaranteed income programs, I hope they look to Minnesota's example. Include artists in your pilots. Recognize the unique value they bring to your communities. Understand that by supporting artists, you're nurturing the creativity, resilience, and interconnectedness that make our communities thrive. In Minnesota, we know that the strength of the herd depends on how well we tend to each individual. We know our rural parts of the state enable our strong urban centers to thrive. As you consider the future of your own communities, look out for each other. Share your warmth. Face different directions, but always stay close and connected.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Progressive Populism of Tim Walz
Walz is making an argument for Harris and the party that is rooted in the rural values of regions where Democrats have struggled to compete in recent years.
Aug 09, 2024
Kamala Harris set up a virtual primary for the Democrats who wanted to join the party’s 2024 ticket as her vice-presidential running mate. She offered them all—governors and senators, progressives and centrists, East Coasters and Midwesterners, Southerners and Westerners—an opportunity to secure the nomination. And they all gave it their best.
So how did Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, arguably the least well-known and least politically connected of the finalists, come from the back of the field to win Harris’ confidence?
Democratic Party insiders and the political pundits who listen to them are struggling to figure out what just happened. But there is nothing complicated about the Walz surge.
“Their idea of freedom is to be in your exam room, your bedroom. You know, banning books, we’re banning hunger. These are Democratic policies.”
What Walz recognized—to a far greater extent than more centrist and cautious VP prospects such as Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro—was that Democrats wanted to add a happy warrior on the ticket with Harris, whose replacement of President Joe Biden as the party’s presidential nominee has given the Democrat’s 2024 prospects a significant boost in morale and in the polls.
Walz had no problem fitting the bill. His record and political instincts positioned him as a candidate who is capable of winning where Democrats need to prevail in the race against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance.
As a Democrat who had won six races in a rural, Republican-leaning congressional district in southern Minnesota and then two terms as the governor of a politically competitive Midwestern state, Walz knew exactly how to rally the party base and to reach out to the progressive-leaning independents who must be mobilized to defeat the Republican right.
Where other Democratic candidates and party strategists had struggled for years to figure out how to characterize Trump and the MAGA cabal that has taken over the Grand Old Party, Walz got to the point in his first interviews as a VP contender. “You know there's something wrong with people when they talk about freedom: freedom to be in your bedroom, freedom to be in your exam room, freedom to tell your kids what they can read,” Walz toldMSNBC’s Jen Psaki. “That stuff is weird.”
The “weird” line went viral, as Democrats from across the ideological spectrum embraced what turned out to be a highly effective critique of Trump and Vance.
But there was much more to Walz’s appeal.
In a remarkable series of cable TV appearances in late July, at a point when the former teacher and National Guard master sergeant was still in the back of the pack of Democratic vice-presidential prospects, Walz made an argument for Harris and the party that was rooted in the rural values of regions where Democrats have struggled to compete in recent years.
“I grew up in a small town of 400 people. I have said I had 24 kids in my class—12 were cousins—graduating. That’s small-town America,” began Walz in one of his first MSNBC appearances during the VP race, turning the tables on Trump and Vance. “I said the thing that most irritates me and baffles me... is a failed real-estate guy from New York City that knows nothing about small towns and a guy who wrote a book that denigrates my neighbors and tells them that this is some type of cultural thing. I think the real message here is that the reason that rural America is struggling more—[with challenges such as the] outsourcing of jobs—is because of Republican policies and people like Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, a venture capitalist who cares nothing about those institutions there.”
Then he dug into the issues that actually matter to the rural regions, small towns, and small cities where Democrats need to do better—areas where, if the party can hold its own in the way that it did when Barack Obama was its nominee in 2008 and 2012, it will win nearly every swing state. And, perhaps, a few states that weren’t thought to be competitive.
“If you’re in a town of 400, there are two institutions that are the most important to your town. That is the public school and a hospital or a clinic, if you have it,” Walz said to MSNBC. “Both of those things are being gutted by the Republicans. They’ve been telling us for six-and-a-half years they have a plan on healthcare, and that means taking away Medicare and Medicaid and reducing [Affordable Care Act] access. And they talk about privatizing public schools.”
Rejecting the tired, and massively disproven, Republican talking point that says the private sector will invariably do a better job than the public sector, Walz mocked the GOP line that says, “Oh, we’re gonna privatize this and take the money out of our public schools.” Then he said, “Let me be very clear: When you talk about private education, that means you gut the public schools, you send [public money] to people [who are] already sending their kids to those schools, and you got it. So I think the condemnation of these people [is that] they don’t know middle America. They don’t know who we are.”
That is a progressive populist message that’s rooted in the rhetoric of Democrats such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman, who won rural Americans, and of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, who won enough rural, small town, and small city votes to tip the balance to their party in the elections of 1976, 1992, 1996, 2008, and 2012.
It also reflects the record of a congressman from rural Minnesota who continuously won volatile elections from 2006 to 2016, and of the Democratic governor of a frequent battleground state who won big in 2018 and 2022.
Recalling his congressional wins, Walz now says, “I represented a district that Trump won by 18 points, but that got tougher and tougher.” But, instead of giving up, Walz says, “I think we need to take this populist message—the economy, the freedoms—[and say that]: These guys aren’t for freedoms. Their idea of freedom is to be in your exam room, your bedroom. You know, banning books, we’re banning hunger. These are Democratic policies. And I think the people in Missouri, [and] I would argue, the people in Montana, doing those types of things make a big difference. What is Donald Trump offering? You go to these rallies, he’s talking about Hannibal Lecter.”
And that, as Tim Walz put it, is weird.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Raging Against White Rural Rage
In their new book, Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman write as if economic class no longer exists or matters.
Apr 17, 2024
I don’t like to slam books, especially those ahead of mine on the best seller list. It might seem like petty jealousy. But one recent release, White Rural Rage by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, is seriously flawed.
For starters, the authors write as if economic class no longer exists or matters. According to this book, all rural white people, or at least most of them, share similar racist attitudes. Class distinctions between bosses and workers, rich and poor, are meaningless.
Because Schaller and Waldman view the world through their anti-class, whiteness lens, they don’t consider the possibility that working-class voters share common attitudes across geographies. Contrary to their thesis, the research for my book found no discernable differences in attitudes on hot-button social issues between urban, suburban, and rural white working-class voters.
When Democrats, like Sherrod Brown, show the courage to fight against Wall Street’s war on workers they gain working-class support.
As Democratic Party pollster Mike Lux reports, “These voters wouldn’t care all that much about the cultural difference and the woke thing if the Democrats gave more of a damn about the economic challenges they face deeply and daily.”
Where’s the Beef?
Schaller put his cards on the table during an interview on MSNBC, during which he called rural Americans “the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geo-demographic group in the country.”
The authors also claim it is getting worse. In defending themselves in The New Republic, they write that “as the rest of the country moved away from Donald Trump [in 2020] rural whites lurched toward him by nine points, from 62% to 71%.”
But voting for Trump is not the same as being a bigot. In fact, the data in my book shows that white working-class voters, rural and otherwise, are growing more liberal, not illiberal on key social issues.
Anti-Immigrant?
“Are you in favor of granting ‘legal status to all illegal immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least three years and not been convicted of any felony crimes?’” (Cooperative Election Study)
White working-class in favor:
2010: 32.1%
2020: 61.8%
Anti-Gay?
“Should gay or lesbian couples be legally permitted to adopt children?” (American National Elections Study)
White working-class in favor:
2000: 38.2%
2020: 76.7%
Increasing Racism?
“Agree that most Blacks just don’t have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves out of poverty.” (General Social Survey)
1996: 56.8%
2021: 32.8%
Furthermore, our data, which is derived from three large multi-year voter surveys, shows that from 20-50% of white working-class non-Democrats are liberal on social issues.
What About Sherrod Brown?
If white rural racism is the key to all politics, then why do significant numbers of rural voters in Ohio support Sen. Sherrod Brown, who in 2018 ran about 12% ahead of President Joe Biden in 2020? In fact, Brown, who votes liberal on social issues up and down the line, ran significantly ahead of Biden in every rural county.
Brown’s connection to working-class voters might have something to do with his willingness to take on Wall Street for ripping off workers again and again. It works politically because enough of those supposedly bigoted white workers care a lot more about never-ending job instability than they do about wokeness.
In his excellent review (and evisceration) of White Rural Wage, Nicholas Jacobs, a political scientist, points out that:
Democrats who give in to the simplistic rage thesis are essentially letting themselves off the hook on the politics, suggesting that rural Americans are irrational and beyond any effort to engage them.
It’s not white rural rage. It’s not irrational rage either. Rather it’s very clear-eyed working-class anger as insatiable corporate greed tears up their lives.
When Democrats, like Sherrod Brown, show the courage to fight against Wall Street’s war on workers they gain working-class support.
Maybe it’s time for a little more Democratic Party rage?
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular