This past summer, when asked about the dearth of jobs in regions like upstate New York, he opined that “Americans are going to have to start moving” to places where the jobs are. That, of course, would decimate his political base, but, as Washington Post reporter Heather Long noted in Wednesday’s paper, a number of policies Trump’s administration and the congressional Republicans are expected to roll out could have that effect nonetheless.
“In many of these struggling towns,” Long writes, “where few, if any, major corporations remain, the tax cut is unlikely to do much to transform them. But the next steps Republicans take could have a deeper reach. Scaling back welfare, especially Medicaid, Social Security Disability Insurance, and housing subsidies might force people to finally move.”
It's important to note that this is Long speculating: She's not quoting an administration source here (indeed, she's not quoting anyone). Nor is it clear that the evisceration of our semi-demi-welfare state would be any easier for the recipients of its meager benefits in big cities than it is in devastated towns. But it is certainly possible that whatever further immiseration such cuts would bring to the economically abandoned heartland would drive more of its residents to cities—as has been the pattern of American life ever since industrialization began in the decades following the Civil War.
Think of it as a kinder, gentler version of Stalin's war on the peasantry—forcing them off the land, sometimes through starvation, in the 1930s to produce the workforce for the Soviet Union's forced-march transformation into an industrial powerhouse. It would be inadvertent Stalinization, of course—where Stalin clearly intended to drive the peasants off the land, that wouldn't be the Republicans' intention at all: They need our beleaguered hinterlands to have enough voters to sustain their congressional majority. The refugees from non-metropolitan America would just be the unintended innocent victims of the GOP's war on social decency—just as its Republican authors would also be its unintended victims, only far from innocent. Indeed, guilty as hell.
