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The Radicalization of America: Whatcom County

I read an article in the New York Times this evening “The Radicalization of a Small American Town.” Brian Groh, the author of the Times article, describes a microcosm of the radicalization of America, a small town in Indiana that has been devastated by the economy of the 21st century, wracked with pain and death of opioid addiction, crippled by the response to the covid-19 epidemic, and violently political.

Radicalization of America
Sunrise in Whatcom County

Instead of the friendliness, lack of pretension, and sense of decency Groh remembers from his youth, he recounts the story of a former neighbor who was recently threatened when he expressed a political opinion.

Groh laments the change.

Opioid crisis and the radicalization of America

It’s a good story, but I wonder if many of his neighbors would agree with his view. I looked at opioid death statistics in Indiana where statewide deaths per thousand are above the national average. The county in the article has one of the lowest rates in the state. We in Whatcom County are fortunate: although opioid and other drug deaths are still far too prevalent, some statistics show a slight decline in the opioid death rate in Whatcom County between 2002 and 2018.

We have a problem, but not a raging crisis. Thank heavens. Covid-19 is bad enough.

Rural Indiana

I’ve visited Mr. Groh’s rural Indiana. I’ve never lived there, but it felt like home as I listened to conversations among farmers at the tractor dealership where I was installing software. Both my Dutch and German ancestors spent a few decades in the Midwest before they made their final jump west to the edge of the Pacific Ocean. In rural Indiana, I felt like I could have been in Lynden or Ferndale.

What’s changed?

Groh’s experience does not match my experience in Whatcom County. I agree that the rural America I see today is not the place I saw when I was growing up. But the question is what changed? Did Whatcom County change? Or did I?

Well. I changed. I know that. I went off to college and graduate school.

What I learned

There, calculus taught me that differentiation and integration are mathematically two aspects of the same operation. In chemistry and physics, I learned that science can measure and predict the changes around us with greater precision than muddled impressions of undisciplined observation, but it continually refines and deepens understanding rather than lays down immutable laws.

At the age of nineteen, a mathematical logic class forced me to plumb the mysteries of the proof of Gödel’s theorem, which asserts that no matter how much you know, there will always be things you can’t fully understand. By twenty-one, I had learned to read classical Chinese and was forced to notice that the Athens-Jerusalem axis of western civilization has not been the only foundation for successful societies.

Then I realized that a humble farm boy had best quit straining the seams of his underpants. I came back home to work that out, but I was no longer the kid I was growing up and already I saw Whatcom County through changed eyes. But I also realized that my eyes had become exotic. I fret over Gödel’s theorem. My neighbors don’t.

Fifty years later

Fifty years later, I’m still working on that project. I see that my neighbors and relatives have many virtues. They are tough, self-confident, often happy. Some are prosperous, some think the prosperity they deserve has been withheld by forces they should control but can’t. Some are accomplished, many are stylish. A significant number are convinced that they have right on their side. I’m still the lout with manure on my boots that I was fifty years ago.

My experience is in the software business, which is like most businesses, as far as I can tell. You don’t last long in the software if you can’t spot who is likely to get the work done and who is likely to screw things up. I learned to stay away from loudmouths who succeed by refusing to pay their help, stiff their creditors, shift blame, and counter reason with bluster. They may succeed for a while, but eventually business caves in around them and everyone loses. That’s about as far as my politics go.

Doubling down

I also know it is easier to double down on a bad choice than it is to switch to a better choice. Switching to a choice that you once rejected is a humiliating struggle. I’ve been wrong often enough to know the sick feeling and bad taste that fouls my gorge when I recognize a misjudgment. I’ve faced it often enough; I don’t wish it on anyone.

When a bad choice is not all bad, the struggle is more painful. If a segment of the population prospered for three years while others struggled, the segment that thrived will not readily give up their gains. They will be proud of their sagacity. Those who look up to prosperity often throw their lot in with the prosperous even though they have reaped few benefits. Humans are not good at balancing long and short-term gains.

2020 vs 1960

In pandemic 2020, everyone is overstressed and close to anger. Add an atmosphere that promotes strife and tension over calm, and you have a community inclined toward violence.

But is the Whatcom County community fundamentally different from the same place sixty years ago? I say no. It was not ideal then and it is not ideal now. McCarthyism was still a topic sixty years ago. Racism was casually accepted among my parents and grandparents. Abusing native Americans acceptable behavior. The Ku Klux Klan flourished for a while in Whatcom County. Dig into the local newspaper archives and you soon run into language and propositions that might make you flinch.

Given today’s conditions, I think the county of my youth would have been inclined toward violence, perhaps more so than today. Although gun enthusiasts are vocal and prominent today, guns and ammunition were more easily available fifty years ago. Most country people had weapons for dealing with varmints and were ready to use them. More so than I see today.

Racism was more overt, mistreating the tribes was usual.

But serious violence never erupted. That’s important. Today, folks rant about antifa and the far right. As a kid, I overheard talk about threats from Bolsheviks, Wobblies, Fascists, Communists, and so forth, but it all turned out to be nervous fretting.

Is Whatcom County radicalized?

I don’t think so. No more today than fifty years ago. What I do see today, like fifty years ago, is a huge and quiet majority of concerned good people who want to live their lives in peace with their neighbors.

That hasn’t changed at all.

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Jefferson’s Revelation

A few days ago, I pulled Henry Adams’ history of the Jefferson administration off the shelf and started reading it, hoping to distract myself from 2019. I bought the Library of America edition a few years ago after reading Adams’ autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams. His vigorous, sharp-edged prose captivated me; I wanted to read more. As happens too often with me, the volume rested on the shelf until this week.

Looking for an antidote, I found a revelation.

Here is Adams quoting Jefferson in about 1800:

“Progress is either physical or intellectual. If we can bring about that men are on the average an inch taller in the next generation than in this; if they are an inch larger around the chest; if their brain is an ounce or two heavier, and their life a year or two longer, that is progress. If fifty years hence the average many shall invariably argue from two ascertained premises where he now jumps to a conclusion from a single supposed revelation, -that is progress! I expect it to be made here, under our democratic stimulus, on a great scale, until every man is potentially an athlete in body and an Aristotle in mind.”

This is refreshing, although women would not be left out of this formulation in the 21st century. On the physical side, the US has done well. In the intervening two centuries, we have become taller, we live longer, and we are better educated.

Reasoning from “ascertained premises” has been a triumph and a constant struggle. I marvel at the way Jefferson captures today’s dilemma more clearly than our claims and counterclaims of facts, alternative facts, and lies. He uses “ascertain” in a way that I intend to use more often. Webster’s Unabridged defines it as “to find out or learn for a certainty (as by examination or investigation).” Jefferson does not insist that premises be true. Instead, he asks for ascertainment: examination and investigation of the premises. Ascertainment is his only touchstone.

Truth does not enter the discussion. He requires investigation and examination, not truth. But action must wait for ascertainment, which is never final. Further ascertaining may yield more useful results, but Jefferson asserts that ascertained premises, and the more the better, yield progress. The opposite of ascertained premises, supposed revelation yields stagnation.

There is no need to examine and investigate a revelation, which is a great help to lazy thinkers. Pick any supposition from the sloshing pool of revelation. You know your inauguration was the largest ever, your tax cut is the biggest, and your trade policies are better than fried pickles at the county fair. These are your revelations. Investigating and examining revelations is a waste because revelations are truth. You are free to move on to your next great thought, go play golf, or take a nap with your trophies.

According to Jefferson, basing action on ascertainment, examining and investigating, rather than revelation made the United States different from Europe. When monarchs speak, they voice a revelation that is true because a monarch said it. But the United States have no monarchs. Its government’s actions are based on dynamic examination and investigation of the premises of the argument, not stagnant revelations.

The Jeffersonian method of progress is to ascertain, examine and investigate, rather than blindly accept revealed truth. Jefferson did not trust monarchs, established institutions, wealth, or revealed truth in any form. But he did trust the people’s examination and investigation of every premise.

In Adams’ view of Jefferson’s day, Americans were struggling, as they struggle today, to prove wrong the reactionary belief, now prevalent in Russia and China, that democracy will inevitably lead to lives, in Hobbes’ words, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Not an easy task. In 1800, the United States’ debts from the revolutionary war dwarfed the rest of the budget. The country had little industry. Agriculture was disorganized and inefficient. Heavy transportation was by water and much work was needed before rivers would be reliably navigable. We had almost no roads and none fit for freight. Natural resources were abundant, but without means to extract them, they had little effective value. Schools were few. Artists, engineers, and scientists were scarce. Americans did not have the expertise to design their own capital and traveling anywhere was slow and arduous. The country was debilitated by a plague that debased slaves and demoralized slave-owners. The vultures of Europe were circling to pick the carcass of the infant nation’s demise.

But here we are today. Jefferson’s vision, that the ascertained premises of the people would generate progress that would crush archaic vultures and push away nasty, brutish and short lives, that revelation has prevailed. Ascertained premises won two world wars, put a man on the moon, conquered small pox, and elected a black president.

This is the antidote I sought.

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Thrashing In a Bad Year

The marine climate of Whatcom County is mild compared to the Midwest, but it does not guarantee that every crop succeeds. This time of year, late September, my father, Ted, and my grandpa, Gus, worried about rain. A heavy thundershower or a few consecutive days of steady rain could destroy the grain crop, meaning less milk to ship to the dairy, fewer eggs from the chicken house to sell to the grocery stores, and the pigs would not fatten up the way Grandpa liked. A farmer who is not prepared to face a bad crop doesn’t last long on the farm.

Dad and Grandpa never complained about a bad year in my hearing, but I could see it on their faces. One year, probably mid 1950s, the oats were ready to harvest. It had been a good year: the oat heads were heavy and drooping. In those days, Dad and Grandpa grew a traditional mixture of oats and vetch.

Dad went out into the fields after breakfast to check on the oats. I went with him. The days had begun to shorten, the air was cool, and the morning dew was heavy, but the sun burned into the back of my neck. A stiff breeze rattled the dry stalks. Dad thrashed out a head or two of oats in his hand and bit down on a kernel to test its hardness, then spat out the hull. I copied him. He said the oats were ready to cut and we had better get back to the barn and grease the binder.

I know it was the fifties because it was one of the last years Dad used the binder and a thrashing machine. By 1960, he was using a combine and the binder was relegated to the back of the machinery shed until he finally hauled it off for scrap.

I helped Dad by handing him wrenches and the grease gun when he asked for them. By noon, the binder was lubricated, a sickle that Grandpa had sharpened while we greased was mounted, a fresh ball of twine was threaded into the knotter, and the canvas apron that carried the cut grain stalks into the binding mechanism was tight and ready to go. Mom had called a few neighbors on the telephone. They arrived, and we all went in to noon dinner. The bundles from the binder would sit in the field a day or two before the thrashing machine arrived. I seem to remember it was Sorenson’s outfit from Everson.

While the men were eating and drinking coffee, the clouds began to come in from the West, rain clouds coming through the Strait of Juan De Fuca and over Georgia Strait (now called the Salish Sea) from the Pacific where they had loaded up with moisture. Dad cut the back swathe, the first cut around the field in the reverse direction and right up to the fence.

I helped the men pick up the bundles as they came off the binder and set them upright and to the side in shocks, so Dad wouldn’t drive over them when he began cutting in the right direction. All the while, the clouds were darkening and piling up against the hills to the east.

As I remember, Dad cut the back swathe and two rounds before the thunder cracked and rain came down like the clouds were emptying buckets from the sky. The rain flattened the standing oats already bowing under the weight of heads fat with heavy grain. Within a minute, the binder was jammed up with the wet straw that wouldn’t feed, and Dad had to stop. All the crew could do was go home. A few went in to Ferndale to the Cedars Tavern for hands of cutthroat three-hand pinochle in the back room, something Dad or Grandpa never did.

The thunder storm crashed and poured all night. In the morning, the oat field was flattened. The sun didn’t come out for a week and by then grass was growing through the straw and the oat crop was a total loss.

Dad and Grandpa were lucky. They also had a field of wheat that was shorter and a week behind the oats. Dad had wondered if he would have to cut the wheat before it was ready because we would have the thrashing machine for a few days before it moved on to the next job. The shorter stalks stood up to the rain and were not flattened. By the time the sun returned, the wheat was in prime shape and delivered a good crop that didn’t make up for the lost oats, but averted disaster.

It wasn’t the best year, but we made it through.