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Applied and Extension

Introduction from Book Project: The Rural Debacle: How Government Sold Out Rural America and Broke Democracy Ann Eisenberg*, Ann Eisenberg,

The rural problem. It resurfaces in the media cycle every year, whether due to election season or because a new book hopes to shed light on the issue. National attention then turns for a time to the so-called urban/rural divide: the phenomenon that rural regions increasingly vote Republican-red while cities vote Democrat-blue, all while rural regions have seen their economies and populations dwindle as urban centers have prospered.

Supposedly, no one knows how to fix the rural problem. These trends are framed as entrenched, overwhelming, and intractable. Attention often turns to rural people themselves as the source of the problem and the agents of their own disadvantage. They are framed as white, conservative, ignorant, and angry. They vote against their interests, and so they are beyond help, and the rural problem is unfixable.

The persistence of this narrative is doing real harm and obscuring a much larger story. Our society has still not reckoned with what a half-century and more of bad rural policy has wrought. If we’re going to do better going forward, we can’t keep talking in circles and repeating the mistakes of the past.

The Rural Debacle invites this overdue rural reckoning. The reckoning involves three key points, centered on the essential but overlooked role government has played in creating the urban/rural divide. The first point is that rural America was abandoned on purpose. Policy choices throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries reveal that the federal government pursued an intentional retreat of the state from protecting rural people and places. Second, there needs to be more recognition that rural depopulation is a bad thing. Cutting the rural population almost in half between the 1980s and the 2020s has meant the crumbling of local governments, the overcrowding and price pressures on coastal cities, strains on public resources, and political strife. Third and finally, because rural marginalization is a manmade, structural phenomenon with severe consequences, we need a more robust, less fatalistic conversation about actually fixing the rural debacle. That’s a challenge. It’s not something we’ve had to do before as a country. Guiding principles and proven policy tools, such as long traditions of federal utilities regulation, infrastructure investments, and relocation incentives, help illuminate a possible path forward.