For-profit democracy: why the government is losing the trust of rural America

Ashwood (Auburn) studies agriculture, land loss, and pollution. Her work expands on ideas of moral economy, structural power, and majority/minority dynamics. Her examination of power relations in the US explores the loss of trust in democracy by rural Americans and builds on works such as John Gaventa's Power and Powerlessness (1980). Drawing on four years of fieldwork in rural Georgia, Ashwood explores religion, gun possession, and racism as entwined within a wider system of corporate and government greed that has eroded people's faith in democracy and their means of economic survival. Ashwood argues that churches have become spaces of redemption when none can be found within the legal and political system; guns a tool of self-defense; and nuclear power a solution to global warming that expands local dispossession and inequality. Of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, and those in rural and political studies. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Jodie Asselin, University of Lethbridge

Auburn University agricultural economist and sociologist Ashwood relocated to rural Burke County, Ga., to better understand the growing distrust between the government and rural populations for this thought-provoking investigation. She chose the location because the extremely poor county is home to the first new nuclear power plant built in the U.S. in decades, and the process by which the for-profit companies that own the plants took the land of poor disenfranchised residents, polluted and eroded the country's natural resources, then found a loophole to avoid paying much-needed taxes to the county, illustrates what she refers to as the "public-private fallacy" that prioritizes benefits to corporations over those of individuals, leading to a system in which profit creation drives policy. While this sounds like a relatively academic concept, the work itself is character-driven, affecting, and philosophical. Recounting many of the interviews she conducted with more than 80 people, Ashwood successfully illustrates the human impact of eminent domain and abstract-seeming ideas such as what she terms "the rule of numbers." She argues that a centuries-old preference for privatization and industrialization in places like Burke County has germinated loss of faith in the government, and highlights the stories of Burke County residents William Gresham and Lela Roberts, who oppose the for-profit democracy ethos through civil disobedience-for instance, treating the land now owned by the plants as though they still belong to the locals-and religion. A more intellectual cousin to recent cultural soul-searching works like J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, this is an accessible exploration of how government affects and is perceived by rural Americans. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Auburn University agricultural economist and sociologist Ashwood relocated to rural Burke County, Ga., to better understand the growing distrust between the government and rural populations for this thought-provoking investigation. She chose the location because the extremely poor county is home to the first new nuclear power plant built in the U.S. in decades, and the process by which the for-profit companies that own the plants took the land of poor disenfranchised residents, polluted and eroded the country's natural resources, then found a loophole to avoid paying much-needed taxes to the county, illustrates what she refers to as the "public-private fallacy" that prioritizes benefits to corporations over those of individuals, leading to a system in which profit creation drives policy. While this sounds like a relatively academic concept, the work itself is character-driven, affecting, and philosophical. Recounting many of the interviews she conducted with more than 80 people, Ashwood successfully illustrates the human impact of eminent domain and abstract-seeming ideas such as what she terms "the rule of numbers." She argues that a centuries-old preference for privatization and industrialization in places like Burke County has germinated loss of faith in the government, and highlights the stories of Burke County residents William Gresham and Lela Roberts, who oppose the for-profit democracy ethos through civil disobedience–for instance, treating the land now owned by the plants as though they still belong to the locals—and religion. A more intellectual cousin to recent cultural soul-searching works like J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, this is an accessible exploration of how government affects and is perceived by rural Americans. (June)