Ashwood: Pragmatic Rural Politics

Loka Ashwood (Kentucky, Sociology) continues her work on political alienation in rural America in “No Matter if You’re a Democrat or a Republican or Neither”: Pragmatic Politics in Opposition to Industrial Animal Production. In this work, published by the Journal of Rural Studies, Ashwood explores direct local action as a means to counter concerns about authoritarian populism and control. In particular, she examines two groups who stopped the construction of large-scale, corporate-owned industrial hog facilities in Illinois.

Relying on a combination of interviews, archival, observational, and experiential evidence, Ashwood identifies how a combination of stakeholders with diverse pro-state, anti-state, and stateless ideologies came together to facilitate direct action in the two instances examined. These included pro-statists who retrieved documents and filed lawsuits, individuals choosing statelessness in the form of mutual aid in favor of their neighbors, and dispersal of power into less hierarchical organizations, a crucial element of anti-statism.

Pragmatic Politics disputes approaches that focus on formal state elections as the only means for countering authoritarian populism and suggests that pragmatic politics, sometimes utilizing the state and other times disavowing it, underlie effective mobilization and action.

For more on Ashwood’s work on rural resident reactions to industrial, confined animal operations, see this fantastic talk Ashwood shared along with Aimee Imlay as part of our Spring 2021 Rural Law and Policy Series: The Mid(burden): Courtroom Battles Over the Right-to-Farm in the Heartland.

This digest was produced with significant contribution from Aurora Kenworthy, UNL Law Student.