A FAMILY FARM'S DEMISE, A DEMOCRACY'S DECLINE.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth

Just before the holidays, a Wisconsin state news outlet called Up North News carried a sad story: The family dairy farm where Robert M. La Follette, the great progressive politician and founder of this magazine, grew up was shutting down. The farm's milk cows were put up for auction on December 16.

"When the auctioneer brings down the gavel on Thursday, it will mark the end of the dairying era at the La Follette farm, birthplace of Robert M. 'Fighting Bob' La Follette, the father of the Progressive movement," wrote Susan Lampert Smith.

John and Joan Judd, only the fourth owners of the hilly, 216-acre farm in Primrose, Wisconsin, still had the paperwork documenting the La Follettes' 1850 purchase of the land where Fighting Bob was born in a little log cabin.

The death of a family dairy farm is a common event in Wisconsin, and a sign of the times. When the Judds bought the old La Follette place in 1969, there were 60,000 active dairies in Wisconsin, Lampert Smith notes. Today, there are about 6,600. The number keeps shrinking as small dairies go under, their cows sold off to a smaller and smaller number of bigger and bigger farms.

Startling statistics kept by the U.S. Department of Agriculture show that even as the number of dairy herds fell by more than half--from 15,838 in 2004 to 6,774 in 2021--the number of cows has stayed steady at about 1.2 million. There are just fewer herds.

To many people who consider themselves progressives, a large majority of whom now live in urban areas, small family farms are a relic of the horse-and-buggy days. Who cares?

But both the farm crisis and the pain of rural people affect us all. Many rural people who felt abandoned and looked down on by coastal elites expressed their displeasure by electing Donald Trump in 2016, voting for him again in even bigger numbers in 2020.

"The Trump election opened my eyes," the poet and essayist Wendell Berry, who lives on his family farm in rural Kentucky, tells me. "It revealed to me that I'm not a liberal or a conservative. I'm a rural American and an agrarian." Berry was appalled by the open contempt expressed by urban liberals for rural people after the 2016 election.

A recent Pew survey shows that, as the political divide between urban and rural voters has grown, both groups have become more convinced that the other group looks down on them. The "politics of resentment"--a term coined by University of Wisconsin political scientist Katherine Cramer to describe rural...