It’s cathartic to blame the state of the world on the current president – especially when he’s of the opposite party, and especially, if you’re liberal and the president is you-know-who.  But honest conservatives knew our problems didn’t begin with Barack Obama, and realistic progressives know their nightmares won’t end with this incumbency.  So this summer I decided to look further back.  WAY further back.

When I was in my first round of grad school, ostensibly pursuing a PhD in sociology but actually pursuing my soon-to-be spouse, I read a book called “The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World,” by Barrington Moore, Jr.  It compares the early modernizations of England, France, the US, Germany, Russia, China, Japan, and India, in an effort to derive universal laws about what leads societies to become democratic or dictatorial.  A huge undertaking to write, and at 550 pages of close argument, something of a doorstop to read.  But it fundamentally changed my worldview.

Moore focused on the relationship between landowners and peasants as one fulcrum for the development of a democratic society.  In England, lords forcibly kicked peasants off the land to pasture sheep – so peasants moved to towns.  This “enclosure” movement, combined with 17^th century English Civil War, broke the absolutist power of the monarchy, greatly reduced the number of people under the thumb of a rural lord, and put England on the road to parliamentary democracy.  We think of England’s democratic evolution as “peaceful”, Moore argues, only because they got their major violence out of the way in the 1600s.  The French monarchy, in contrast, kept absolute power, and French aristocrats kept absolute control over the rural peasantry.  So in order for democracy to take hold, there had to be a bloody social revolution – which there was, in 1789.  In Germany and Russia, the local aristocracy retained still tighter control over the peasants and crushed any revolts until the 20^th century, leading to a socialist revolution in Russia and fascism in Germany in the 20^th century.

Moore’s fundamental point – greatly oversimplified – is that you cannot have a democratic society where, in the countryside, a few people effectively control the destinies of all the others.  Call it plantation slavery, peasantry, peonage, sharecropping, latifundism, reservations, or colonization — the basic dynamic is the same.

Back in the 1960s when Moore was writing, and in the 1980s when I first read him, the book had a self-congratulatory aura, as in: “this is what we democracies did right, and all those bad dictatorships did wrong.”  But the book has sat on my shelf all these years, and I decided to take it on my summer vacation, because of my dim recollection of his chapter on the United States.  The voice of that chapter has been calling to me lately.  Not a voice of prophecy, exactly, but of prescience.

In that chapter, Moore focuses on the US Civil War as a “bourgeois revolution” imposed by one region on another, arguing that the system of plantation slavery in the antebellum South was fundamentally incompatible with the development of democracy in the United States as a whole.  Even though the war wasn’t driven by northern opposition to slavery, Moore argues that American democracy would ultimately have collapsed if the war not resulted in slavery’s abolition.  Still, the southern structure of land ownership mostly survived, after the North abandoned its Radical Reconstruction program.  As a result, southern plantation slavery morphed into a sharecropping system akin to the peonage that existed in Russia in the late 19^th century, where landowners had almost complete control over the lives of sharecroppers.   The social structure of peonage sharecropping in both Russia and the United States gave rise to political movements towards “semi-reactionary dictatorship” in both countries.  Moore points out the similarities between the Ku Klux Klan and the marauding “Black Hundreds” who perpetrated pogroms on Russian peasants, even to the point of importing the American word “lynch” into the Russian lexicon.

So what do these analyses of lords and peasants have to do with today?  First, it is strikingly obvious that our most fundamental political divide, both in the US and in Europe, is between urban and rural.   Every nation’s recent electoral map now features polka dots of urban liberalism against fields of rural conservatism.   Though their current manifestations may be new, these cleavages are centuries old.

Second, the American south – and by an extension of the same logic the American west – has only comparatively recently emerged as a democratic society for people of color.  That process is far from complete, and it’s subject to reversal and retrenchment based on the same social forces that have shaped the development of democracy and dictatorship across centuries.

Third, the breakup of traditional social structure in the countryside can become an engine of democracy’s destruction, as local elites try to preserve control over land and power in the face of changing demographics.  In 16^th century England, the engine of change was an invasion of sheep that converted farms to pastures and kicked the peasants off their land.  Today, the cultural squeeze comes from two directions – from immigrants changing the faces and power structures of rural communities, and from the cosmopolitan elites changing the faces and power structures of society as a whole.

The takeaway is that rural social upheaval is a fact that nobody who cares about the long-term health of democracy should ignore.  Currently, urban progressives tend to treat the concerns of rural voters with a combination of condescension and scorn – sort of an updated version of the old joke: “The peasants are revolting!  — I’ll say, they’re disgusting!”  This leaves the field wide open for conservatives to gain a monopoly on articulating rural concerns.  Concentrated media ownership enables broad zones of monolithic message saturation, stifling debate and reinforcing local power structures.  We vilify working people for failing to rise above generationally-ingrained — and cynically incited — prejudice. Stereotypes become reinforced to the point of dehumanization. This dynamic leads us in the direction of impending civil war, of city against country, state against militia, gang against Klan.  The predictable – from some perspectives even desirable — form of government to confront such a state of social breakdown is dictatorship.  Moore’s parallels between “semi-reactionary” tendencies in the US and Russia take on a curious and chilling significance.

Some might object that this 30,000-foot view fails to assign blame for the potential loss of democracy to the right or left.  But that’s actually my point.  To me the work of reversing the current slide toward tyranny is as much collaborative as partisan – one that involves more than voting Donald Trump out of office or chanting “lock her up.”  It requires new political alignments that cross the ancient cleavages dividing city and country.  This will require new ways of reaching across divides of class and color, forming new alliances, peeling back labels to find common interests beneath.  These are problems that have vexed European societies for hundreds of years.   Although the technologies of the eras are vastly different, the fundamental solution is the same – we have to look each other in the face.

Easier said than done, of course.  The question is, how?