What’s going on in North Dakota?

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/06/2019 (1936 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As usual on the Victoria Day long weekend, many Manitobans shopped in Grand Forks and Fargo, N.D. It’s a short car ride to both cities. While the North Dakotans you meet during your travels are pleasant and accommodating, the majority embrace political values that are ultra-conservative and far to the right of the values of most Winnipeggers and Canadians.

To take one example, six years ago: North Dakota led the way in the anti-abortion crusade by passing the first law to ban an abortion once a fetal heartbeat could be detected. The law was overturned by a lower court and in 2016, the Supreme Court refused to review the ruling.

Two months ago, however, encouraged by the anti-abortion laws passed in such states as Missouri, Alabama and Ohio, North Dakota’s Republican governor, Doug Burgum, signed a new bill making it next to impossible for women to have an abortion during the second trimester of pregnancy.

Burgum, who became governor in 2016, won 76 per cent of the popular vote that year. The state has had a Republican governor since 1992; in North Dakota’s 130-year history, 26 of the 33 men to serve as governor have been from the Republican party.

Needless to say, North Dakota — where farmers and the agricultural industry dominate the economy — is also staunchly Trump country. In the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump won 63 per cent of the popular vote, while the Democratic party’s Hillary Clinton only received 27.2 per cent.

Trump and the Republicans thus got North Dakota’s three electoral votes — as has been the case in every presidential election since 1968.

Trump’s recent trade war with China and his controversial tariff policies have been detrimental to the state’s farmers, who export a large percentage of their crop to China. On top of that, they have to purchase the machinery and goods they require on a market that has been affected by the tariffs, making these items more expensive.

Despite Trump’s assertion that the Chinese government and companies pay the cost of the tariffs, every economic expert — including Trump’s own economic adviser, Larry Kudlow — has pointed out that it is American consumers, North Dakotans among them, who are footing the bill. Nonetheless, as is his signature trademark, once Trump believes something to be true, he ignores all facts to the contrary and continually repeats the falsehood.

His devoted base, stoked by the echo chamber that is Fox News, ultimately accepts what Trump says to be true. It is a textbook example of how propaganda takes hold and spreads.

To alleviate the financial burden the tariffs have imposed on midwestern farmers — whose votes Trump needs in the 2020 presidential election — his administration has announced more than US$15 billion in subsidies to assist them. Yet this is only a temporary measure.

So, to recap, here is what farmers in North Dakota and other states have to come to terms with in topsy-turvy Trumpland: the president, for dubious reasons, started a trade war with China that has hurt the midwestern U.S. agricultural industry and makes Americans pay more for the goods they buy; then, he announces billions of dollars in subsidies, funded by American taxpayers, to help the farmers solve the problems his own trade policies created; he pats himself on the back for doing so, and his partisan supporters cheer his efforts. It boggles the mind.

The response from the North Dakota soybean industry has followed this line of thinking. “Many people are just torn because people want to support the president of the United States,” Nancy Johnson, executive director of the North Dakota Soybean Growers Association, said in an interview with the New York Times on May 10, before the subsidies were announced. “But it’s very stressful to be in the middle of these very challenging negotiations.”

It has been a staple of political-science thinking that most (but definitely not all) voters select candidates who best represent their economic interests; that in any election, it is economics that guide a person’s politics. But time and again, this theory has been found wanting in the U.S.

In his 2004 bestselling book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, American political analyst Thomas Frank wanted to figure out why his home state voted for the Republicans in the 2000 presidential election when their economic interests were much better served by the Democrats. The conclusion he was forced to accept was that social and cultural factors, unquestioning partisan loyalty and, above all, respect for moral values play a significant role in voting behaviour.

“People are unlikely to vote for a party that shows contempt for them” (as one reviewer of Frank’s book put it), a reality that Clinton forgot when, during the 2016 presidential campaign, she referred to half of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables.”

Like other midwestern voters, a majority of North Dakotans is so far sticking by Trump. They turn a blind eye to his numerous character flaws: serial lying, bullying, insults, Twitter tirades, embrace of authoritarian leaders, obstruction of justice and Congress and economic policies that have made their lives more difficult.

They imagine him, a real estate wheeler-dealer from New York, as one of their own. And why? Because he somehow makes them believe that he understands them and respects their conservative values.

It is not impossible for someone like former Democratic vice-president Joe Biden to make a dent in this entrenched Trump support in November 2020, but it won’t be easy, either.

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.