Politics is the art of selling promises that you have no chance to make good on, to voters who are both gullible enough to believe you, and who won’t hold you accountable for selling them a bill of goods.
This is particularly true of politicians who are running their last election. The current president elect is a good example. Trump has won his last election. He made all sorts of promises to rural voters in the process. He would be their retribution on those who held them back, those who attacked their way of life, redeem their country from the money changers and deep state, and make America great again. He would instantly bring down the prices of groceries, gas, house prices, and put an end to a whole range of price gouging. He would fight their side against all comers, deport hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who are stealing their jobs, make foreign countries pay for their own defense, and pull America out of alliances and agreements that are one-sided. And it would all be ridiculously simple to get done.
But the election is over, and Trump received enough of their votes to win. With no future elections on the horizon, he doesn’t need them anymore, and they are not going to make him richer. Only his billionaire buddies can do that. Voters, particularly low information ones, have played their brief role and will be retired to the cheap seats.
It seems voters, particularly rural ones, are in for another Brexit moment – another in a long series of buyer’s remorse experiences – another demonstration of why there is such a gaping chasm between successful political campaign rhetoric and the actual results of governing by the winner.
A brief history should show what I mean by a Brexit moment. In June of 2016, just a few months before Donald Trump won the presidential election and shocked the country, a referendum was held in the United Kingdom. The Queen’s subjects voted 52% to 48% to leave the European Union. The morning after hangovers for some voters were severe. Many who voted to leave did so as a protest against the establishment. They did not expect the referendum would succeed. But politics is a ratchet wheel. Once something happens, it is difficult to take it back. The Brits learned that the hard way.
During the campaign for the referendum, the advocates of Brexit painted a glorious picture of a United Kingdom reborn, which was to be the results of Brits taking back control of their country – a return to the UK setting its own rules, regaining control over its currency, living by British laws rather than those promulgated by bureaucrats in Belgium, and controlling immigration into the homeland. In part, the movement was a reaction by local politicians to having their power reduced and moved to the EU. Additionally, EU rules, that had advanced the interests of women and minorities, chafed in certain parts of British society. The island, and the British way of life, was under siege by foreign interests. The war cry was take back Briton for the British. These merchants of provincialism promised the return of Great Britton. They promised to make the UK great again.
The results of the exit were far from the rosy future that the Brexiteers promised. The average Briton was nearly £2,000 worse off in 2023, while the average Londoner was nearly £3,400 worse off because of Brexit. There were nearly two million fewer jobs overall in the UK due to Brexit – with almost 300,000 fewer jobs in the capital alone.
The gap between campaign promises and actual results was predictable. Campaigns are rather simple-minded things when compared to the challenges of running an entangled set of national and international issues by politicians who are much better at campaigning than they are at governing.
There is a lesson in this for both democracies and autocracies. When political leaders are chosen via a beauty contest, the results will certainly be that those who achieve office are almost guaranteed to not being up to managing the challenges they will face.
British subjects learned a hard lesson about politics. They voted on change only to find they had been sold a mirage. In the aftermath, there was a serious attempt to undo the results of the referendum, but Brexit was done. They discovered, yet again, the ratchet principle in action – that it is almost impossible to undo what is done in either haste or ignorance.
Human societies have evolved to such complexities that the process of selecting political leaders – either by election or violent revolution – almost never results in a leadership that is up to successfully governing. And that is because of a convergence of two realities. First, the process of selecting leaders inherently leads to the ascension of mediocrity. And second, because the demands of governing exceed the ability of current visions of political leadership to meet them. As complexity grows, this convergence will occur with rising violence and increasingly explosive buyer’s remorse.
Returning to the incoming administration, rural voters are about to have their Brexit moment. During the campaign, Trump made the solutions to major problems facing the nation to be simple matters that could be solved in a day or two. The war in Ukraine would be settled in a day. As would the conflict in Israel. Grocery prices would be brought down. Drill baby drill would bring down the price of gas. The United States would be respected again on the international stage and other countries would start paying their fair share of their own defense. The borders would be secure and, as if by magic, the immigration crisis would be solved. Millions of illegal immigrants would be instantly deported. Such promises are the currency of campaigns – the type of rhetoric that is necessary to get elected. The opposite, as both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris discovered, is the way to lose an election.
The readjustment of expectations by the incoming administration has already begun, as the Trump team faces the reality that following the policies they campaigned on will have negative impacts on their major financial donors,and do great harm to the people who voted for them. (the latter being far less important than the former.) Agricultural producers could face greater losses than any other economic sector from Trump’s plans to impose sweeping tariffs on imports and to undertake what he frequently has called the largest domestic deportation operation of undocumented immigrants in American history. Hospitals and other health providers in rural areas could face great strain from proposals Trump has embraced to slash spending on Medicaid, which provides coverage to a greater share of adults in smaller communities than in large metropolitan areas. And small-town public schools would likely be destabilized even more than urban school districts if Trump succeeds in his pledge to expand “school choice” by providing parents with vouchers to send their kids to private schools.
Let’s focus more deeply on these three areas – agriculture, health care and education. Removing a significant share of those workers through deportation would further erode the international competitiveness of American farmers by raising their labor costs and thus the price of their products. Eliminating undocumented workers would also put upward pressure on domestic food prices—after an election that, as Trump himself noted, he won largely because of the price of groceries—and would also weaken rural economies by removing those workers’ buying power. In such an environment, promises of substantial reductions of food prices will be a fading fantasy.
A recent attempt to model how Trump’s tariff and mass-deportation plans would affect agricultural producers found a devastating combined impact. In a scenario where Trump both imposes the tariffs he’s threatened and succeeds at deporting large numbers of immigrants, the nonpartisan Peterson Institute for International Economics has forecast that by 2028, agricultural exports could fall by nearly half and total agricultural output would decline by a sixth. Mass deportation, the institute projected, would reduce the workforce for agricultural production more than for any other economic sector. Not a good recipe for reducing the price of eggs!
Equally painful for rural America could be Trump and congressional Republicans’ agenda for health care. Big cuts in federal spending on Medicaid and subsidies for the uninsured to buy coverage under the Affordable Care Act were central to the Trump-backed plan that House Republicans passed in 2017 to repeal the ACA. Trump’s administration later backed a Senate Republican proposal to convert Medicaid into a block grant and significantly cut its funding.
Medicaid is a linchpin in the struggle to preserve rural hospitals. These face much more financial stress than medical facilities in more populous areas. Over the past two decades, over one hundred and ninety rural hospitals have closed or converted to other purposes, and nearly a third of the remaining facilities show signs of financial difficulty. The results are that the very candidates that rural voters elect are working to restrict their access to health care by forcing the closing of hospitals in their districts and states.
Finally, to education. Trump has repeatedly promised to pursue a nationwide federal voucher system that would provide parents with public funds to send their children to private schools. In numerous state ballot initiatives over recent years, rural residents have voted against proposals to create a school-voucher system. That record continued in 2024, when rural areas again mostly voted against voucher systems in ballot initiatives in Nebraska and Kentucky. But those voters are no longer a constituency that Trump needs to pay attention to. Some of his major financial backers would benefit from such a change – and that is the single metric which dominates after the election is over.
There is an area that Trump is likely to keep his campaign promises – the fanning of racial and cultural tensions. In three elections, Trump’s messaging, particularly his hostility to racial and cultural change, has resonated strongly in rural communities. It won’t cost either him or the financial interests backing him anything to provide a distraction from his underperforming on other campaign promises. A measure of his success will be if that deep reservoir of ideological support will counterbalance policies that threaten the material interests of rural America in so many ways.
The Founders based their new government on the idea that voters would know, and effectively pursue, their own best interests. That is no longer the case. And that puts their entire experiment in self-governance at risk. The present way of electing political leaders does not meet the demands of a complex and entangled social and economic environment. As recent massive increases in income and wealth inequality clearly show, the current system benefits predominantly the very wealthy and politically powerful.
In the United States, the question is still in the hands of the voters. Maybe this Brexit moment will be enough for them to change how they decide to vote – for competence over celebrity. But success in making that change will require overcoming the ratchet effect, and that probably means active revolution.
The dice are still rolling down the green felt. Whether they come up as a winner or craps will likely depend on how badly the incoming administration performs. Predicting what the outcome will be is above my pay grade, but one thing is certain, the fate of the Republic is riding on their dizzying dance and eventual results.
© Earl Smith