Towns that have never recovered from the gold rush
This again. “There are millions of City People in this state so we Rural People get ignored.”
Well, since there are far fewer Rural People and politics is people-based, that’s kind of inevitable, isn’t it. Actually Rural People are heavily over-represented in the US, because of the two senators per state rule. Montana, Wyoming, Nevada all have smaller populations than many US cities, yet they get their two senators and so do California and New York and Texas. So frankly I’m kind of tired of hearing about how Rural People resent the fact that they get ignored.
“When people see you’re from California, they instantly think of ‘Baywatch,’” said Mr. Johnson, the associate pastor of Bethel Redding, a megachurch in this small city a three-and-a-half-hour drive north of San Francisco. “It’s very different here from the rest of California.”
Mr. Johnson lives in what might be described as California’s Great Red North, a bloc of 13 counties that voted for President Trump in November and that make up more than a fifth of the state’s land mass but only 3 percent of its population.
From Hollywood to Silicon Valley, California projects an image as an economically thriving, politically liberal, sun-kissed El Dorado. It is a multiethnic experiment with a rising population, where the percentage of whites has fallen to 38 percent.
California’s Great Red North is the opposite, a vast, rural, mountainous tract of pine forests with a political ethos that bears more resemblance to Texas than to Los Angeles. Two-thirds of the north is white, the population is shrinking and the region struggles economically, with median household incomes at $45,000, less than half that of San Francisco.
And it’s very very sparsely populated, so what do you want us to do about it? It’s like the people who live in tiny towns in West Virginia and wonder why there are no jobs. I can tell them why there are no jobs: because tiny towns never have a huge array of jobs, because they’re tiny towns. That’s always been a major reason people moved to cities: to find work. It’s in the nature of sparsely populated areas that they don’t have all the amenities of cities, and that they don’t always have a lot of political influence…except, again, in the Senate.
The residents of this region argue that their political voice is drowned out in a system that has only one state senator for every million residents.
Meaning what? That instead there should be one state senator per X number of square miles? That the rural north should be wildly over-represented while the cities are wildly under-represented? How would that be fair? Why should square miles have votes instead of people?
This sentiment resonates in other traditionally conservative parts of California, including large swaths of the Central Valley, which runs down the state, and it mirrors red and blue tensions felt in areas across the country. But perhaps nowhere else in California is the alienation felt more keenly than in the far north, an arresting panorama of fields filled with wildflowers and depopulated one-street towns that have never recovered from the gold rush.
“People up here for a very long time have felt a sense that we don’t matter,” said James Gallagher, a state assemblyman for the Third District, which is a shorter drive from the forests of Mount Hood in Oregon than from the beaches of San Diego. “We run this state like it’s one size fits all. You can’t do that.”
Blah blah blah. You could always take over a wildlife refuge.
Taxation and hunting are two issues northerners are quick to seize upon when criticizing laws they feel are unfairly imposed by the state. But there are also more fundamental issues related to incomes and job opportunities that split California into a two-speed economy.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, unemployment rates hover around 3 percent. In the far north, where many timber mills have shut down in recent years, unemployment is as high as 6 percent in Shasta County and 16.2 percent in Colusa County.
Because industries shut down as technologies change. That happens. One possible solution would be to adapt accordingly. Another apparently would be to vote for Trump. How’s he doing on that bringing the timber industry back to Shasta County thing?
United States Representative Doug LaMalfa, a Republican representing Northern California’s First District, blames regulations that have shut down industries for the economic disparities.
“They’ve devastated ag jobs, timber jobs, mining jobs with their environmental regulations, so, yes, we have a harder time sustaining the economy, and therefore there’s more people that are in a poorer situation.”
The agriculture, timber and mining industries, on the other hand, have done no damage to anything at all, and if left alone could continue into infinity. Or something.
Residents here have long backed a different proposal for a separate state, one that would be carved out of Northern California and the southern reaches of Oregon. Flags of the so-called State of Jefferson, which was first proposed in the 19th century, fly on farms and ranches around the region.
Jefferson, named after the president who once envisioned establishing an independent nation in the western section of North America, is more a state of mind than a practicable proposal. Many see it as unrealistic for a region that has plenty of water and timber but perhaps not enough wealth to wean itself away from engines of the California economy.
Precisely. If they did that I wager most of them would not like the results.
“I wake up in the morning and think, ‘What is California going to do to me today?’’’ said Mr. Baird, a former airline pilot who owns a ranch about an hour’s drive from the Oregon border. In a grass valley framed by low-lying hills, Mr. Baird’s pastures are filled with his small herd of buffalo and a few pens of horses and donkeys.
Mr. Baird complains of restrictions on the types of guns he can own. “It’s tyranny by the majority,” he said. “The majority should never be able to deprive the minority of their inalienable rights.”
Of their genuine rights, no. Of highly debatable rights? Different story.
Is it just wishful thinking that these shrinking populations will just shrink down to nothing soon?
I grew up on a farm (albeit not in the US) so I have some understanding of this kind of thinking. Poor decision making by lawmakers who grew up in cities and don’t understand how the countryside works have led to some awful things happening. For example, the awful response to the Chernobyl disaster which rendered the agrarian products of my particular corner of the UK dangerously radioactive because the cloud passed directly overhead and rained down on our sheep and cows, none of whom could be sold or eaten. The government response was inadequate to the scale of the problem and many farmers simply went under. The margins on farms (small farms anyway) are pretty small and it doesn’t take much to push them underwater.
But this isn’t an excuse for the insistence of country people (and it was as true in the UK when I lived there as it is in the US. I wonder if French and German farming folk are the same too) that they have an outsized voice in national politics. The ‘Real America’ talk that is part of the whole dangerous cloth that the NRA in particular likes to tout, this idea that city-dwellers are somehow less American than rural people, is utterly pernicious. How can a New Yorker or an Angelino be less American than someone who lives deep in Appalachia? It makes no sense. But so much of it is casual shorthand for something else – racial politics that beat like a corrupted heart under rural America.
Don’t encourage them. The current Administration might just hand it over.
On a cheerier note: Happy 4th July to my American friends. I hope sincerely that two-scoops and assorted flavours do as little damage to you as possible in the coming year, and that things improve.
What Claire said. I don’t mean to dismiss rural issues in general – it’s only this self-pitying illogical “why don’t we get every bit as much attention as Los Angeles I’m voting for Trump so there ha” bullshit I’m tired of.
The Times article shows Mark Baird waving a flag for the State of Jefferson movement in Northern California. The Times reports the SOJ movement is about representation within California on issues of rural versus urban, etc. But the Times totally missed the SOJ relationship to the Federal government that I’ll write here.
If you click my SOJ link above, and you pull down Resources > Videos, you’ll see Mark Baird showing you the same pocket US Constitution that I pointed out in this B&W thread about Ammon Bundy. I’ll repost some things I wrote on that thread for convenient reference here.
That pocket US Constitution is from the Idaho-based National Center for Constitutional Studies (NCCS). The Southern Poverty Law Center wrote a report about the NCCS in 2011. Quoting from the SPLC report about an NCSS seminar in Fairmont, West Virginia:
“Enough of tyranny of the majority! Bring on the tyranny of the minority!”
One thing these rural folks never mention is the amount of money that flows out of cities into the countryside. Taxes in the city often flow toward the rural area, and people never bother to acknowledge that fact. They have disproportionate power in the senate, in the electoral college, an disproportionate shares of tax dollars, but they are the ones being treated ubfairly and ignored!
And they (rural voters) routinely vote against anything they perceive as helping “them” – them being city folks, people of color, single women, or LGBTQ.
Insofar as it could be practical, I’d not mind gun laws applying on a town or county level – it’d mean rural areas where there IS a lot of hunting, where they WANT their guns, and where fewer people who DON’T want them are around to get shot by them are possible victims. The trouble is, with the Second Amendment having the current sacred and unlimited status it has, democratic majorities even on the county or city level can’t have effective gun control laws if anyone in the jurisdiction has a problem with it.
I’d also like to see state governments working as unified ones, respecting and advocating for the interests of all their regions appropriately, instead of suffering this ridiculous urban vs. rural struggle, when each region serves the larger whole in distinct and valuable fashions and is served by that greater economy. But that’s not going to happen by the rural minorities getting even more political power through even less democracy – if anything, they’re spoiled by the expectation of too much power, by white privilege, by ideologues reinforcing it as the natural and proper way of things, and by the anti-democratic biases already built into the U.S. political system (voter suppression, gerrymandering, the Senate and Electoral College). They don’t think that should have to compromise or make their case to an urban and suburban majority – they feel entitled to demands as if sheer geographical extent were the proper basis of political power. And in return, that urban and suburban majority, who is all too familiar with the view down the barrel of a political system diminishing their representation and shrugging off violence against them in the case of darker folk, has got no sympathy for the rural demands when they could have fine sympathy for fellow citizens approaching them in the spirit of harmonizing divergent regional interests and tastes in the context of a larger community.
Jeff, the hunting argument would have validity if people wanted guns that were actually for sensible hunting. NZ has a very high level of gun ownership, almost exclusively hunting weapons. It’s very hard to get a licence for non-hunting weapons such as handguns, military or military appearing weapons. Special licences and background checks/restrictions apply and most people will be turned down flat. Even a simple bunny hunting rifle requires a licence, Police background check, proper storage facility and needs renewing every 10 years.
You don’t need high calibre automatic weapons, hand guns or whatever for hunting. When that guy was complaining about not being allowed his gun of choice I doubt it was a 17HMR, 0.338 or anything in between.
[…] a comment by Dave Ricks on Towns that have never recovered from the gold […]
““I wake up in the morning and think, ‘What is California going to do to me today?’’’
Please forgive me Mr. Baird if I don’t give a fuck. Just finished a book ‘”All the real Indians died off” : and 20 other myths about Native Americans’ in which it is pointed out that for several decades in the 19th century, California’s official policy towards its original inhabitants was extermination by private militias. Sounds like he’s kinda a fan of private militias. I wonder if he thinks the ethnic cleansing of California was “miraculous?” Is gunpowder a miracle?
I wonder which side Mr. Baird would have supported had he lived back in the day?