The Red State Types Inside Blue States

I just got back from a Minnesota state DFL (Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party) caucus and a few things left me with a bad taste.  It wasn’t anywhere near as bad as the same district’s Republican caucus, which is full of braindead Trumpers and worse.  Still, a state Senate candidate, who I generally like, said some dumb stuff about the Twin Cities, mainly claiming that St. Paul is hoarding tax revenue that should be going to rural areas.  I kept quiet because I hadn’t looked at those numbers for a while, but later I refreshed my knowledge of who pays taxes in Minnesota and who gets the benefits. 

The fact is that the seven-county Twin Cities metropolitan area contributes about two-thirds of the total state tax collections, according to 2021 Minnesota Department of Revenue data. That same area accounts for about 57% of the state's taxpayers, which means Minnesota’s major urban area receives about eighty-six cents in services for every tax dollar paid.  Minneapolis alone generates roughly 3.5 times more in state tax revenue (income, corporate, and sales) than it receives back in state aid.  Minneapolis currently ranks highest among peer cities for the percentage of its own city income derived from property taxes, at approximately 48%.  State taxes for Minneapolis and St. Paul are expected to contribute $7.72 billion in net receipts, paid to the state's General Fund, for the first quarter of FY 2026.  The other successful semi-urban city in Minnesota, Rochester, gets shafted almost as hard as Minneapolis.  Dying cities like Duluth are better off, but that historical out-of-proportion state and federal support is finally declining as the city continues to shrink from its 1960 all-time population high of 107,312 to its current of about 88,000. 

Another way to look at state taxation equity is that the rural areas of the state get $1.30 in state services for every dollar paid in taxes.  That is almost exactly the same kind of unequal returns, on taxes paid, that most blue states suffer and most red states benefit from. In other words, the “failing” parts of the state (aka “Greater Minnesota”) are getting regular welfare checks from the successful cities.  And the part that pisses me off is, like Republican states who consistently receive a positive return, in federal aid, rural Minnesota not only gets more than it deserves but it is angry that it isn’t getting more. 

Practically every aspect of rural Minnesota life is paid for by taxpayers in the Twin Cities: schools, healthcare, roads, clean water, sewer, and all infrastructure, including internet access and, even, telephone service.  And the thanks urban taxpayers get is more whining about the pitiful quality of life in areas of the state that are hostile to education, science, technology, and medicine, while being totally dependent on all of those things, mostly supplied by Minnesota’s state government at the expense of urban taxpayers. 

A few years ago, I spent a week in Detroit taking a class from one of the city’s many fantastic maker groups.  In my spare time, I took a “Beautiful Ruins of Detroit” tour and, at the end of the tour, our guide took us to areas of the city that had been completely razed to the ground and rebuilt as urban agriculture centers.  After seeing the awful damage “globalization” and economic predators like Betsy DeVos’ family had done to the once-great hub of American manufacturing, we toured neighborhood hydroponic and enclosed, passively heated greenhouses and even small fully-enclosed mobile structures for raising chickens and pasture-raised, antibiotic and steroid-free cattle and pigs being raised for local consumption.  At last count, Detroit has about 2,200 urban farms and gardens focused on local sustainability and food sovereignty.

 

The only claim to state and federal rural welfare checks has always been “we grow the food you eat.” Even though that is, largely, untrue, since roughly 55% of fresh fruit, 32% of fresh vegetables, and over 70–85% of seafood of the “food we eat” is imported and California provides more than one-third of all U.S. vegetables and roughly three-quarters of its fruits and nuts.  In fact, California is the source of nearly half of the country’s total produce. 

US taxpayers cough up as much as $20 billion annually to subsidize corn and soybeans, which are mostly export and low-efficiency fuel crops.  For most of us, especially those trying to remain healthy, corn and soybeans are not “food.”  Certainly, the corn grown for animal food, undesirable and unhealthy “food products” (filler), diabetes-inducing corn syrup, and saturated with herbicides and insecticides is not food and most of us want it out of our groceries.  Corn grown for fuel is just an agricultural welfare check. 

On top of that, U.S. taxpayers put out approximately $38 billion annually to subsidize the meat and dairy industries, another export crop since US meat consumption has been dropping for years.  Put that money into "animal-free" (plant-based or cultivated) meat, currently totally unsubsidized, and you’ve put the knife even deeper into the heart of urban dependency on food production.  Rural welfare recipients are so worried about this “attack” on their “way of life” that Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, and Texas have passed laws banning cell-cultured meat.  Just imagine what some of those states would look (and smell) like without acres and acres of feedlots, rendering plants, packing plants, and animal waste “fertilizer” stinking up the state.  That’s what those states are trying to protect and the rest of us would like to see disappear. 

Keep that in mind the next time you hear a politician babbling about “income distribution.”  99% of livestock in the United States is factory-farmed and U.S. farming is rapidly becoming a corporate venture, with the “family farm” designation becoming more of a farce every year.  The USDA Economic Research Service (ERS) defines a family farm as “any farm organized as a sole proprietorship, partnership, or family corporation. Family farms exclude farms organized as nonfamily corporations or cooperatives, as well as farms with hired managers.”  Under this definition, a multi-million-dollar corporation, managed by cousins who own slightly more than 50% of the corporation, is a "family farm." The term masks the shift toward industrial-scale agriculture, where large-scale family farms (which can be thousands of acres) account for a significant portion of production.  Those corporate “farmers” are who bawls the loudest when their “way of life” is threatened by economic and societal changes and any reduction in their corporate welfare checks. 

Personally, I can’t wait for those people to be cut loose, entirely, by independent, self-reliant cities producing their own food and keeping their resources to themselves until rural goobers admit they need assistance to survive and get cut down to size.  Eventually, the US will have to become an actual representative democracy or it will, and should, be broken into smaller nations with the “haves” becoming democratic and the rest going their own backwards, regressive way. 

They Only Wish They Were Pretti Good

 

A Substack page I read regularly, The Contrarian, wrote “Sadly, a larger swath of Americans — white men and gun-owners, for example — might only have been stirred when the victim turned out to be someone who closely resembled themselves and people they know.”  Sadly, I object to this analysis because I live in rural Minnesota and, other than gun ownership, there is nothing about Alex Pretti that resembles many of the white people here in the outback.  Mr. Pretti was educated, adventurous, liberal, generous, and courageous.  I know a few people here who fit that description, but I was surprised and disappointed, when I moved from the Twin Cities to Red Wing, to discover that “Minnesota Nice” mostly applies to the urban areas. 

I have lived in many of Trump’s favorite “shithole” states and counties from Kansas to Texas to Nebraska to southern California to Indiana to Colorado to Minnesota and worked with and around racist, ignorant assholes from Florida to Alaska.  Up to taking a cabinet-making class in Winona, MN in 2015, I thought the rural southern goobers I knew in Dallas, Texas in the late 60s were the worst people—the most racist, ignorant, most violent and dangerous, and flat-out-evil—I’d ever imagined meeting.  Think the murderous Deliverance butt-fuckers for reference and you’ll almost have a feel for how vicious and awful our first Dallas neighbors were.  The ignorant, intolerant, fascist rural boomers filling the Winona State Cabinetry Lab night class were so benignly awful that I felt like I’d accidentally wandered into a KKK country club.  As wonderful as the huge Minneapolis anti-ICE crowds have been, it’s important, even critical, to remember that just a few miles outside of that fantastic city the countryside is sparsely filled with goobers who are just as awful as any ICE goon, Alabama Klan member, Michigan Proud Boy, or January 6^th seditionists. 

I don’t believe, for a second, that the murders of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti are waking these awful people up with some deeply buried and suppressed sense of compassion, community, decency, or empathy.  I imagine that the majority of rural fascists are church-going and that the churches they attend are led by pastors and priests who are just as awful as the people they “minister” to: selling hate, prejudice, and racism like it’s some kind of “get out of hell free” pass for fun and profit.  Minnesota’s claim to decency comes almost exclusively from the progressives in the major cities (Minneapolis, St. Paul and the suburbs of the Twin Cities, Rochester, Duluth, and the state’s college towns) and that is about two and one-half million of the state’s four-million, eight-hundred-thousand people.  A not-insubstantial percentage of the Cities’ suburbs are uncomfortably transplanted rural goobers who are exactly the same miserable souls as their rural misfit and unfit relatives. 

I would love to believe that the majority of rural Minnesotans were stirred to action or even empathy because the two murdered Minnesotans “closely resembled themselves and people they know,” but I’m not that gullible. 

Things We Do and Say At the End

In 2009, a long-time friend who had always made herself valuable, by being totally no-bullshit, received what, three years later, would be a terminal cancer diagnosis.  We had been having a long email dialog about a variety of personal subjects and, out of nowhere, she sent me a blistering, hyper-critical “never write or speak to me again” email.  I don’t have a lot of friends and I, usually, go to foolish extremes to hang on to the ones I have and, after a few days of letting that percolate, I wrote back to her.  I apologized for whatever it was that had set her off and asked for some clarification about the awful thing I had done to deserve it. 

After a bit, she wrote back and told me about the cancer diagnosis and made it clear that she did not, ever, want sympathy for her situation.  She had decided that she’d rather be friendless than to have to listen to sympathetic and sorrowful outpourings from her friends.  Like me, she didn’t have a lot of friends and even fewer family members who she was close to.   This was a tough, tough lady who had been independent since she was 16.  When she was married, she was her family’s sole income source until her husband found a younger substitute, when their son was about 5-years-old.  So, from then on I started every email with a joke about death.  As a life-long atheist, I tend to think concerns about death are funny-to-hilarious, so the jokes I picked were pretty ruthless. And we continued to communicate until her death three years later.

Our friendship began, slowly and weirdly, when I hired her to be a manufacturing engineer for a small audio company where I was the manufacturing engineering manager.  She not only hadn’t done a lot of electronics manufacturing, but she didn’t have any sort of engineering degree or even a high school diploma.  She did have a terrific track record with past employers and interviewed brilliantly and, critical to my situation at the time, she was cheap.  Early on, I discovered that she was hyper-conservative and very, very Christian; all negative flags for me, personally.  So, we began to argue about that stuff, off work and for the fun of it.  She was my first experience with a Christian conservative who never, ever, resorted to logical fallacies: Ad hominem, Ad populum, and an appeal to authority are the ones I most often experienced with conservative or religious people,  Philosophically, I often felt like I was falling on my face when I had prepared myself for the kind of irrational response I’d consistently experienced for my first 40 years of life and, instead, got a rational, fair-and-open-minded, well-considered rejoinder. I am a bit autistic (or a lot, depending on your opinion) and a stutterer, so I have always had to mentally prepare my replies in advance to keep from sounding totally mentally deficient.  When a response is completely unexpected, I have to reformulate my thoughts, rewrite my response, mentally practice forming the words, and, eventually, say something.  Arguing with her was a LOT more work than practically anyone I had ever met.  More rewarding, too.

A year or so before I left California, she had become a lead manufacturing engineer for a large medical devices company and she had arranged interviews and a pretty good offer for me with her company.  I was grateful, but had no interest in living in the southern California desert (where her employer was located), even for a six-figure salary.  After I left California, had lived in Colorado for five years working for a medical device company, and ended up in Minnesota working for another medical device company, we discovered that we were employees of the same conglomerate.  We restarted our email correspondence and I was surprised to discover that she had become a far more radical, much more angry, atheist lefty than me.  She and several other manufacturing engineers started a consulting company.  Her income bumped up against seven-figures, her lifestyle was international, and she was regularly published in the Journal of Manufacturing Engineering as an international quality expert.   

In 2007, a medical condition wrecked all of that.  Her ability to hyper-focus and work insanely long hours uninterrupted by sleep, meals, or rest turned out to be due to a Graves Disease variation that began to unravel her life.  Pre-ACA, she was dropped by her health insurance company and could only find coverage for $10,000/year with a $50,000 deductible.  Her medications cost nearly $500,000/year and she was unable to work.  The Great Recession and her medical situation cost her nearly everything, but she was able to manipulate the total disorder of the last year of the Bush II administration into freeing herself, with bankruptcy, from her expensive Riverside County, California property, her medical debt, and she ended up owning, outright, a small acreage in the desert hills of San Jacinto, California.  She turned that into a successful organic farm, where she grew heritage tomatoes, in buckets, that approached trees in size and a variety of herbal remedies that she sold at farmers’ markets and through her website.  And that lasted until her cancer took away the physical ability to maintain her farm and business. 

One of the last emails I received from her, a few weeks before she died, contained her list of “Things I have learned and learned to accept in this life”: 

•       Bad things happen to good people
•  Good things happen to just horrible, even evil people
•  No good deed goes unpunished
•  Mercy is preferable to justice
•  Keeping up with the Jones’s is a symptom of insanity
•  Degrees & diplomas are not worth the paper they are printed on, but are handy to light a fire.
•  If you are angry or bitter, you forget how to be happy
•  It doesn't matter if the glass is half full or half empty - who the fuck cares? The point is to DRINK.
•  Humility gives clarity to a natural state of gratitude that generates real happiness.
•  Fanatics, on all extremes, are not worth listening to - they are confused and in pain.

She was about a decade younger than me and died at 51 years-old.  Now at nearly 78, after the past six years of one fucked up medical issue and lost capability after another and feeling my mortality pretty strongly, I can relate, strongly, to her urge to avoid sympathy at all costs.  Sympathy and pity are not helpful and the words are, usually, more depressing than encouraging or comforting.  Those of us who are introverted and a bit (or more) antisocial are more likely to want to die like an old cat, with “a quiet, unaccompanied acceptance of mortality amidst the recurring, cyclical, and violent destruction of human civilization” (from A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.).  At its best, this life is hilarious and violently nonsensical, punctuated with brief moments of compassion, love, and loss (lots of loss, seemingly mathematically impossible with what feels like more loss than initial gains).  Someday, I hope to have a friend who sends me occasional jokes about dying when I am in that state. 

Here Is Where We Are in History

 And who we are imitating.

 

As proud of this comparison as the MAGA fascists are, the most embarrassing part is that the Nazi executioners had the “courage” to do their murders in plain sight, mask-less.  Trump’s “Gazpacho” is so certain that they are criminals, likely before imitating “law enforcement,” that they go nowhere without their disguises in position.  Even as degraded and corrupt as the ICE goons are, they are not proud of this moment in history and their part in it.  That may be the only normal thing about the moment in history that we are witnessing.  Otherwise, this is the US equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989.  Two years later, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) broke into 15 independent countries. 

Today, it’s certainly not hard to imagine the United States’ lower 48 dissolving into Colin Woodard’s “11 Nations” plus Hawaii returning to independence and Alaska being battled over by Russia, China, and Canada.  Republicans have long been “the party of unintended consequences” and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is very likely to have a totally different outcome than their “plan.” 

Outside of The Far West, the Deep South, and Tidewater, most US citizens would have a hard time surviving under a king or a dictatorship and a “racially pure” society.  And those places, without the moderating influence of the democratic state would quickly devolve into 3^rd world status and feudalism.  The only argument I have with Woodard/s map is that, if The Far West did split off from their more progressive and productive Left Coast benefactors, I suspect the Left Coast would claim, by force, a lot more of the California, Oregon, and Washington territory. 

While Cheeto Benito would likely be the dictator the South and Tidewater worship, I doubt that climate-exposed area will be much more prominent in world politics and power than Italy or Greece is today.  Scraping away diversity and returning to a primitive patriarchy is a formula for cultural decay and economic stagnation. 

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