Tony Chiado

I hear it a lot these days from friends who are largely checked out. They say they aren’t very politically minded or they they simply favor common sense ideas. To say nothing of the political centrality of common sense envisioned by the likes of Thomas Paine, the whole idea of an apolitical common sense is, to me, foolish. Common sense assumes a norm, and the assumption of norms is inherently political. Our norms are shaped by our experiences, values, morals. It’s highly subjective from person to person, and norms even differ within an ideological group to some degree. In other words, our perceived common sense is our political ideology.

I was talking to a a friend from farm country about regenerative agriculture. We agreed that it was an important step for economic and environmental sustainability, but I questioned how the practice would avoid being swept up in the tornado of the culture wars. In his words, the farmers around him aren’t really political and will rationally adopt regenerative farming if it’s pushed enough. All they care about is that no one “fucks with their livelihood or their land.” I’ve lived in farm country, too, and that is the dominant political colloquialism. But I don’t buy it. It is a sort of bucolic fantasy.

It reminds me of the media narrative that real America is the small town farm community. That they don’t have a political bend, they simply are. Fundamentally, it is actually an attempt to bend our political norms, for deep cultural reasons, around America’s farming community. And this means, inherently, holding the farmer’s political beliefs in higher regards than the urban factory or office worker’s. This isn’t even a condemnation of the farmer’s politics, simply a recognition that they do exist. But their common sense isn’t necessarily everyone’s common sense, so why should their beliefs be seen as the norm anymore than their counterpart’s?

Three in four voters in rural America voted for the Trump Regime in the most recent election. And the main reason they did this? A long, tailing culture war that has swept them up largely onto one side of the battlefield. They’ll deny this as much as their counterparts try to deny this, but it’s a social truth.

As I said earlier, I speak to many friends who believe they exist outside of the political realm. In cities, many people have rejected it. They have not and they cannot. As much as the farmer operates on a set of political beliefs, so do their societal counterparts. This does not mean that they are enemies, one superior and one inferior, or even opposites. It means that we are a complex, social, and political species and no one can escape that truth.

I reject that people have abandoned politics in favor of simple common sense. No such reality exists. The political is the social. It’s all around us. It is us. How can the farmer transcend himself above the political any more than the factory worker or the professor can? We are amidst a culture war that shakes society in the most violent of ways. It is necessary to recognize that we, and all those around us, shape and are shaped by politics. It is the only way for us to exercise our political agency in meaningful ways.