Progressive economists have left rural America behind. Here's how small towns and farmlands can win the next economic revolution.

• Paul Constant is a writer at Civic Ventures, a cofounder of the Seattle Review of Books, and a frequent cohost of the "Pitchfork Economics" podcast with Nick Hanauer and David Goldstein.
• In the latest episode of Pitchfork Economics, economist Olugbenga Ajilore says wealth is created in rural communities, but it's all extracted out — and these communities need progressive economics.
• Things like universal healthcare, collective bargaining, and universal broadband would all make a big difference.
• It's also important to note that many discussions of rural communities focus on white ones — and that doesn't capture the whole picture.

After John Kerry's failed presidential run in 2004, Democrats didn't just double down on cities — they basically behaved as though building and maintaining power in cities was the only strategy going forward.

The Urban Archipelago theory argued that American cities were strongholds of progressive thought, and rural America had become an underpopulated conservative wasteland. The future, therefore, would be written in the city and those policies would emanate outward to other parts of the country.

Plenty of great policies erupted from the Urban Archipelago strategy: marriage equality, the $15 minimum wage, enhanced worker protections. The 2008 and 2012 electoral maps, which saw Obama winning handily even in traditionally purple states, seemed to indicate that Democratic cities could light the way for American politics. The few Democrats who won high-profile offices in rural states, like Montana Senator Jon Tester, were basically treated as weird anomalies.

But all at once in 2016, the weaknesses in the Urban Archipelago theory became obvious. Donald Trump won the presidency while losing the popular vote by an overwhelming margin, the Republican Senate maintained a stranglehold on the legislative process, and Trump and the Senate began packing courts with conservative judges.

The partisan divide between rural America and urban America has never been wider, even though rural America has never needed progressive economics more.

America's farmlands and small towns have for decades been plagued by a host of interrelated crises.

As factories continue to be outsourced to nations where corporations can more easily exploit workers, the economies of small company towns are hollowed out. Giant corporate retailers like Walmart drive small local shops out of business, replacing decent-paying jobs with low-wage part-time employment.

Rural hospitals and doctors' offices keep closing, leaving rural communities with few resources to combat a runaway opioid epidemic and the coronavirus pandemic.

Due to decades of inattention, urban progressives talk about rural America as though they're bombed-out wastelands, but that's not a correct assessment.

In the latest episode of Pitchfork Economics Olugbenga Ajilore, a senior economist at the Center for American Progress, argues that many of the problems with rural communities boils down to the fact that "you have all this wealth that's actually generated, but that wealth gets extracted out. There's no good policies being promoted to actually keep some of that wealth in the community," he explains.

Multinational corporations are pushing into lower-populated communities so that they can "dominate the market, and then be able to exert market power," Ajilore said. Those employers, largely in the agribusiness and meat-packing industries, are often literally the only game in town — if they were to move to the next town over, they would devastate the community in much the same way that paper mills and manufacturing plants did back in the 1980s and 1990s when they moved overseas.

Those small businesses that were ravaged by Walmart and Tyson and other multinational corporations aren't coming back to fill the void.

While unthinkable amounts of capital funding has flowed into a few huge American cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and San Diego, Ajilore notes, rural communities "don't have access to capital, because a lot of times there's not a lot of banks and financial institutions that would support entrepreneurial activity in these places."

While President Trump bragged about his booming economy and job creation numbers in 2017 and 2018, a paper authored by Ajilore found that employment growth and labor force participation in rural areas were even lower than the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009.

And, as coronavirus infection levels continue to skyrocket in rural America, those economies are taking an even greater hit than many of the cities that were hit hardest by COVID back in March.

It's important to note, too, that when Trump and the media talk about rural America, they tend to almost exclusively talk about white communities.

Ajilore said that doesn't reflect the reality of this rural economic collapse.

"When we look at African American areas in the rural South, or we look at tribal communities in the Southwest — especially Arizona and New Mexico — they've been devastated by this pandemic and there's no help to be found," he said.

Ajilore argues that huge, sweeping policy reform is necessary to revive rural America by allowing communities to keep and invest some of the wealth that they've created. Given that rural hospital closures have skyrocketed over the last decade, Ajilore said expanding Medicaid would go a long way to protecting health care. Expanded or universal health care, he argues, "helps these hospitals stay afloat so that they can provide care."

This would help combat coronavirus, and it would also provide out-of-the-way communities with children's health providers.

"One of the things we talk about in terms of rural communities is population decline," Ajilore said. It's hard for young families to make the choice to move to a location if they know there's no quality health care for hundreds of miles around.

Ajilore also calls for increased worker protections for rural populations. "People need to be able to have quality jobs, and therefore to be able to afford services," he said. And protections like paid sick leave and paid family medical leave are essential for areas of the country with limited childcare options.

For parts of the country with only one large employer, collective bargaining and other union protections are vital. "If you have unions, they're going to be a counterweight against those large firms. And therefore when people have better benefits and higher pay, that's money that goes back into the economy," he said.

Information infrastructure, too, is vital for rural development.

With strong universal broadband, Ajilore explains, every home would have high-speed internet. Rural kids are struggling with remote learning in the pandemic because internet connections are spotty in less densely populated areas. And perhaps more urban employees of tech firms would be eager to live further out in rural communities to enjoy the lower cost of living, if they could reliably do their jobs and enjoy cultural events through universal broadband.

For nearly two decades, America's rural populations have been ignored by urban progressives, exploited by corporations, and largely forgotten by trickle-down conservatives. The economic basics are just as true in the country as they are in the city: when more people have more money, that's better for everyone.

But it's going to take a rural progressive revolution to change course, and that means addressing rural problems directly and not treating every small town like a big city in waiting. By speaking directly to the needs and concerns of small-town America, progressive economics can evolve from a largely urban philosophy to a fully American ideal.