Essays From West of 98: Secede
Turning away from the merchants of big solutions and towards the things that matter
Republicans are not going to save rural America.
Democrats are not going to save rural America.
Did I possibly just anger some of my readers? Perhaps. Sorry not sorry, as the kids say. We just finished the quadrennial spectacle in this country that we call national political conventions. I didn’t watch a lick of any of it. I am on record that all political conventions are unnecessarily ostentatious if they are not conducted in less than 45 minutes in an Allsup’s parking lot. However, I am given to understand that Democrats and Republicans unanimously agreed on one important item at their conventions: everything will be saved if you will just cast your vote for their candidate.1
I don’t intend to talk out of turn, but I suspect that they both might be selling us a biased argument full of big promises so they can gather power unto themselves! That’s fine. To a degree, that is the nature of electoral politics in a large heterogeneous nation. They are welcome to make speeches and ridiculous promises of salvation, but we are not obligated to believe them or feel confident in their ability to make good on any of it.
Even if a politician is genuine in their desire to “fix” things on the state or national level, why should we expect it to happen quickly as if by magic? I need not remind you of the intricacies of federalism, but our system was never designed to work quickly at the hands of a few. That limitation has proven both a blessing and a curse at various points in our history, but that is how it was intended. So, let us remember that promises by politicians are just that. If we cast our hopes, dreams, and salvation onto our choice in the voting booth, we are asking for disappointment and division. That is not where the answers lie.
“Come all ye conservatives and liberals
who want to conserve the good things and be free,
come away from the merchants of big answers,
whose hands are metalled with power;
from the union of anywhere and everywhere;
by the purchase of everything from everybody at the lowest price
and the sale of anything to anybody at the highest price;
from the union of work and debt, work and despair;
from the wage-slavery of the helplessly well-employed.
From the union of self-gratification and self-annihilation,
secede into care for one another
and for the good gifts of Heaven and Earth.
--Wendell Berry, “The Mad Farmer, Flying the Flag of Rough Branch, Secedes from the Union”
Our society is troubled right now in many ways. Too many people are struggling to make ends meet. Many cultural institutions are crumbling or focused on all the wrong things. Our media and social media whip us into an angry frenzy against one another. We are pushed to mindlessly scroll and entertain ourselves into oblivion.
The merchants of big answers just spent a whole lot of oxygen and television airtime promising big answers to those troubles, but we have no more reason to believe in them now than in the last set of big answers that fell woefully short of their goals.
In the summer of 1874, Generals William T. Sherman and Philip H. Sheridan sent Army columns from five different directions to converge on the Llano Estacado of Texas. It was there that Colonel Ranald Mackenzie’s troops would fight a decisive battle against Quanah Parker’s band of Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne warriors.2 This would be known as the Red River War and would permanently open the southern Great Plains for settlement.3 My old friend Jay Leeson (may he rest in peace) used to tangle with those who said the federal government never did anything for West Texas by pointing out (among other things) the impact of the federally-waged Red River War. That military campaign is not the only massive federal intervention into life in West Texas over the last 150 years, but it was the one from which all further settlement flowed.
I don’t foresee the merchants of big answers launching any sort of program that could influence our places on the grand scale of the Red River War. Rural America’s population is simply too small and our political influence is too meager to justify it even if the politicians *did* actually care. I’d be happy if they simply took a stab at solving some of what ails the modern farm economy.4
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Our friend the Mad Farmer points us in the right direction: into the care for one another. I read a while ago (forgive me for not having a link or a citation) that there can be no big solutions to big problems, there can only be the combined result of many small solutions. Whoever said it was wise. It starts with each of us. It starts with how we care about ourselves, our families, our neighborhoods, our neighbors, and our place. If each of us took just a little less interest in the merchants of big answers in politics and if each of us exerted just a little more effort into the care of each of those things (however it might manifest itself), the results would be incredible.
We have just over two months until our presidential election. That’s enough time to be made miserable, angry, and cynical from all the self-gratification and self-annihilation that is yet to come. I do not have the time or energy to be made miserable like that. There is another path! Every time it starts to drive us batty, we can steer back towards the small solutions that we can influence locally.
May we secede from the union of self-gratification and self-annihilation and into the care for one another and for the good gifts of Heaven and Earth! If we do, our people, our places, our individual faiths, and our world will be better off as a result.
James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found. Check out the West of 98 Bookstore with book lists for essential reads here.
The posturing of the parties is little better than the argument between Ulysses and Pete in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” as to who should lead their trio of fugitives after they escape.
It remains a stroke of good fortune in my marriage that we had two daughters, lest my wife have to reckon with my well-stated (and well-rejected by her) desire to name a future son after Colonel Ranald Slidell Mackenzie.
It should go without saying, but it is important to mention that this project also wreaked ecological havoc by very nearly exterminating a keystone species in the American bison and it permanently displaced these tribes from their ancestral homelands. One need not engage in revisionist history or presentism to acknowledge that policy decisions have difficult consequences.
I’m not confident on this point either. Meaningfully solving this problem would require agricultural policymakers, technocrats, and politicians to admit that 60+ years of federal agriculture policy has failed farmers, ranchers, and rural America.