Disrupting Political Polarization: The Role of Politics in Explanations of Farm Loss in Southern Wisconsin☆

Abstract

Social science and popular media have described political polarization as a threat to democracy and effective policy. Scholars connect right/left political divides to macro-level social divisions, such as those between rural and urban residents, environmentalists and farmers, and pro-versus anti-government sentiments. While previous scholars have complicated these dichotomies, political polarization scholarship often seeks out evidence of polarization without considering these complications. In addition, we know little about how polarization is affecting community responses to social problems. This paper explores the rhetoric of political and social polarization as it appears in community responses to a particular social problem, the decline of small and mid-sized dairy farms in southern Wisconsin. During interviews, farmers, municipal leaders, and community members indeed used polarizing rhetoric and identified polarization as a problem in their communities. We argue, though, that the connections between commonly bifurcated identities, including a common attachment to the land and relationships across the rural–urban continuum, are equally important. We conclude by encouraging policy responses meant to address the fallout of the loss of mid-sized dairy farms to draw on these connections to avoid inadvertently reinforcing political divisions.