A farmer in southwestern Virginia wrote recently about cutting firewood with a stranger, and how that afternoon made the political divide feel less like an unbridgeable chasm and more like the product of decades of bipartisan decisions. I did not need to drive to Virginia to see the same thing. I just needed to walk out my shop door onto Highway 13. We got the empty storefronts, the consolidated clinics, and the manure lagoons, and we didn’t get the courtesy of a national campaign asking why.
What we got instead was a listening tour. The Dollar General on Main Street had a new flyer in the window last week — a “Rural Listening Tour” sponsored by some outfit out of D.C. I read it while I was waiting for my coffee at the gas station next door, which is also where the bank used to be before it was bought twice and consolidated out of the county. The flyer said they wanted to hear from people like me about what our communities need. I’ve got a pretty good idea what we need. We need the hardware store back. We need the bank back. We need the small-animal vet back. We need a Democratic Party that didn’t help take them all away.
Then I read an essay in the Guardian by Anthony Flaccavento, a Virginia farmer who ran for Congress as a Democrat and now runs something called the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative. The essay is called “The three things Democrats must do to regain rural America’s trust,” and it is earnest, and it is respectful, and it is wrong in exactly the way these things are always wrong. Flaccavento’s argument is that Democrats have to think differently, talk differently, and act differently. Thinking differently means recognizing that rural people believe the system is rigged. Talking differently means listening more, speaking plainly, dropping the jargon. Acting differently means organizing neighbors across party lines to pack food boxes and install smoke alarms. The column is full of the kind of anecdotes that read well in a national newspaper — the coalminer’s widow who told him not to change a word, the Republican county supervisor who endorsed him because of years of local work. It is hard to read those stories and dislike the man. I don’t dislike the man. I dislike what his column represents, which is the Democratic Party’s conviction that the problem is how it talks rather than what it has done.
Flaccavento himself names what it has done. He writes that “Republican and Democratic administrations alike punted antitrust enforcement, crushing family farms and independent businesses and facilitating extreme corporate concentration.” He names NAFTA and the investor-driven trade policies that hollowed out manufacturing towns. He notes that Democrats became the party of elites, and he quotes a professor who says the class composition of the two parties has basically flipped. All of that is true. He then proceeds to offer a solution that does not touch any of it. Thinking differently, in this telling, is about acknowledging that rural people believe the system is rigged — not about admitting that the party helped rig it. Talking differently is about sounding like a neighbor, not about saying out loud that the party will break with the donors who wrote the trade deals and blocked the antitrust enforcement. Acting differently is about community potlucks and firewood-cutting, not about a platform that would reverse the consolidation that put the Dollar General where Peterson’s Hardware used to be.
Down the street from my shop, there is an empty lot where the hardware store stood for sixty years. The owners sold it in 2018 because the regional chain in Wisconsin Dells undercut them on price by 18 percent across every SKU and they couldn’t hold on. The Democratic Party was not in charge of Adams County when that happened. But the Democrats were in charge of the Federal Trade Commission for years when it declined to block the kind of retail mergers that make a regional chain’s pricing power possible. The Democrats were in charge of the Department of Justice when it let the bank mergers go through that took the loan officer who knew every farmer’s name and replaced her with a call center in Charlotte. Democratic administrations and congressional leaders pushed through permanent normal trade relations with China, backed the trade agreements that moved the textile mill jobs out of the Carolinas and auto parts jobs out of Michigan, and left the towns behind to figure out what comes next. And now they are courting autoworkers in the Midwest even as the trade structure they helped build keeps bleeding the plants they now court. The same Democrats who backed trade normalization with China are now worried that autoworkers don’t trust them. The listening tour is the apology they offer instead of the reversal.
Wendell Berry wrote, in The Unsettling of America, that a community’s economy is its membership, and that extraction destroys the membership before it destroys the economy. You can watch the membership die by checking the county business registry. Wisconsin lost fifteen thousand dairy farms between 1997 and 2022. That is not a weather event. That is the result of a policy environment that told small operators to scale up or sell out, while the same politicians who preached competition watched four corporations consolidate eighty-five percent of the beef-packer market. What got extracted from Friendship, Wisconsin was not just the hardware store and the bank and the vet clinic. What got extracted was the membership — the knowledge that the man who sold you the furnace filter also sat on the school board, and the woman who processed your loan also ran the 4‑H bake sale. The extraction was legal, and it was bipartisan, and the membership is not coming back because a Democrat shows up with a chainsaw.
Michael Sandel has written about how the winners of the new economy are taught to believe they deserve their winnings, and the losers are taught to believe they deserve their losses. That is exactly how the rural professional class began talking to the people who fix the tractors and cut the timber. They scolded. They prescribed. They assumed the problem was a lack of education or poor planning, when the problem was that the county clinic had been acquired by a health system three hundred miles away that closed the labor-and-delivery ward to balance a corporate ledger. The meritocracy myth tells you that if you just get a college degree you will be fine. It does not mention that the degree only buys you a seat at a table that is shrinking, while the people who kept the machinery running are told to adapt to a service economy. The community-collapse contradiction tells them the town they grew up in is a cultural relic to be pitied rather than an economy to be defended.
Flaccavento’s column contains one line that gets closer to the truth than the rest of it. He writes, about the mechanic who told him “I could never vote for a Democrat,” that “Democrats just couldn’t be trusted, even when the betrayal of rural America — and working people more broadly — was bipartisan.” He is right that the betrayal was bipartisan. He does not seem to notice that this makes his prescription incoherent. If both parties did the betraying, then a Democrat who talks like a neighbor is still a member of the party that did the betraying. The mechanic in Christiansburg knew that. The farmer in Abingdon who supported Flaccavento anyway was making an exception, not a rule.
The argument that rural America needs a handout is the exact wrong framing. People who work with their hands do not want a handout. They want the government to level the playing field and enforce the rules. They want the banks that were bailed out to face the consequences of predatory lending. They want the supply chains that run through their counties to pay local taxes. They want the manure lagoons upstream to face the same drinking-water standards that apply to everyone else. They want the diagnostic software for sale at cost. The right-to-repair settlement forcing a major farm-equipment manufacturer to sell diagnostic software to independent shops is a perfect example. The federal government had to be dragged into it through the courts. The party that could have written the antitrust statute instead wrote press releases about tax credits.
The Democratic Party does not need three things. It needs one thing. It needs to stop doing the thing that broke the trust. That means a trade policy that keeps manufacturing in the country. That means antitrust enforcement that breaks up the regional retail chains and the consolidated banks and the four meatpackers that control 85 percent of beef. That means a Farm Bill that does not funnel conservation money to CAFO manure lagoons under the label of “climate-smart agriculture.” That means saying plainly that the party will accept the loss of some donor checks in exchange for a base that includes the people who actually live in the counties it wants to win back.
That is not what the listening tour is offering. The listening tour is offering a version of respect that costs the party nothing. It is a way to feel better about the betrayal without undoing it. Rural people are not confused about what happened to their towns. They are not waiting for a Democrat to use plain language so they can finally understand that the party is on their side. They are waiting for a party that is actually on their side. There is a difference.
Up the road from my shop, the old hardware store lot has a sign now — a community garden, started by the Methodist church. It is a good thing. It will not replace the hardware store. What would replace the hardware store is a federal policy that makes it possible for a small operator to compete against a regional chain, and impossible for the chain to kill the competition by pricing below cost for three years until the independent folds. That policy exists in the antitrust statutes. The Democratic Party helped stop enforcing them. It could start again.
Firewood-cutting, listening sessions, smoke-alarm installation — these are parlor tricks masquerading as politics. The people who live in the counties the Democrats want to win back know the difference between a neighbor helping you stack wood and a party that stopped the merger that put your employer out of business. One of those things builds trust. The other builds a press release. The firewood stacks in Virginia are no different than the firewood stacks in Adams County. People want to keep their own houses warm, and they want a government that stops selling the wood to the highest bidder.