Conscious Choice: Jim Hightower Gets the Dirt Out

December 2001 | Citizen at Large

Jim Hightower Gets the Dirt Out

by Jay Walljasper

I am an agitator, and an agitator is the center post in a washing machine that gets the dirt out. — Jim Hightower

With a best-selling book and two radio shows with millions of listeners across the heartland under his belt, Jim Hightower surely counts as one of America’s most influential progressive voices. He leads the charge against economic inequality, political corruption, environmental despoilment, and all manner of prejudice with hard-hitting opinionizing like this: "Some say we need a third party. I say we need a second one."

And: "We ought to pass a law that says the board of directors and top management of a company that wants to build a polluting facility — anything that spews or burbles — would have to live within one hundred yards of that facility."

And this: "If Paul Revere were to make his midnight ride now, it is not an invasion by redcoats he would warn us about, but the astonishing assault global corporate powers are making on our liberties, economic fortunes, way of life, and sovereignty."

That’s pretty strong stuff, especially in a political climate in which politically cautious Bill Clinton was hailed as a crusading idealist, and tepid centrist Michael Kinsley represented the left on TV’s Crossfire. (Hightower describes these two, respectively, as "a man who campaigns like FDR and governs like Herbert Hoover" and "Tweety Bird sent into a cockfight.")

But you wouldn’t easily recognize Jim Hightower as a progressive activist — at least not the kind of progressive we are accustomed to. He wears a cowboy hat, speaks in an unreconstituted Texas twang, and hangs out at burrito stands and honky-tonk taverns, peppering his commentary with one-liners instead of the rhetorical abstraction we’ve come to expect from leftists. He’s more Will Rogers than Ralph Nader, more Willie Nelson than Warren Beatty, more Main Street than Harvard Yard.

Hightower’s political education was acquired not in college courses but at home in Denison, Texas: around the kitchen table, at Methodist church services, and listening to country-western music. He’s more apt to quote western swing fiddler Bob Wills ("Little bee sucks the blossom / but the big bee gets the honey / Little man picks the cotton / but the big man gets the money") than Gandhi, Che Guevara, or Rachel Carson.

"My daddy ran a newsstand and all the other downtown merchants and delivery guys and clerks would come in to stand around his soda pop machine and I would listen to them solve all the world’s problems in the fifteen minutes they had before they needed to go back to work," he recalls.

If anyone asked those guys to describe their political beliefs, Hightower says, they would all say conservative — especially if the only other option was liberal. But if someone got them talking, "they’d hear about how out-of-state bank-holding giants are coldly squeezing the life out of little guys like them and little towns like Denison; about how both political parties have become whores to the Wall Street crowd and don’t really give a rat’s ass about Main Street folks; about how the tax laws are written by and for big corporations and the privileged at the expense of the working man and woman; about how the oil and chemical companies are run by a gang of greedy polluters who’d just as soon piss in your Dr. Pepper as say hidy to you."

One lesson Hightower learned from the impromptu political forums was the importance of humor. "Whatever topic was in the news of the day, those guys would get off to giggling about it," he recalls. "There was just a natural sense of goosey fun that I grew up with. And later I discovered that people absorbed what I was saying in large part because of the jokes. Humor gives us a way to communicate without totally depressing people. You can talk about how the bottom 80 percent of our society got only 1 percent of the twelve trillion dollars generated in new wealth recently, but you can also say,‘Sure, Wall Street is whizzing — it’s whizzing on you and me.’ "

This is the spirit of good-natured political subversion that boosted sales of Hightower’s book, There’s Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos (a phrase he first heard from a farmer in Deaf Smith County, Texas) and his feisty political newsletter, the Hightower Lowdown. In addition, he issues daily radio commentaries that inject a dose of political playfulness into the day’s news at more than fifty stations. For example: Quoting an ad executive who bragged that "as long as the consumer accepts the intrusion of advertising, there is no limit as to where it will go," Hightower quips, "It won’t be long before your church altar is adorned with a flashing neon sign hustling St. Joseph’s aspirin."

While he didn’t acquire his political beliefs at North Texas State University (where he worked as assistant manager of the local chamber of commerce to pay his tuition), Hightower did learn in political science class that there was a better word than conservative to describe his political views: populist. It’s a word he still uses with pride, making a connection with the Populist uprising of the late nineteenth century — a ragtag army of dirt farmers, sharecroppers, factory workers, and small-business owners who laid the groundwork for most of the progressive reforms of the twentieth century.

Taking a cue from the Populists, who sent ten thousand organizers across the South, Midwest, and Great Plains to spread their message of economic fairness, he feels that progressive activists today need to venture beyond college campuses and liberal urban enclaves to engage middle America in discussions of economic fairness. The time is ripe for a progressive resurgence, he says.

"The powers that be have overreached. They have stomped on too many people," Hightower says. "Our leaders are well-practiced at holding down the poorest one-fifth of our population, labeling them‘welfare cases,’ riffraff, or worse, and hiring ever more police with ever more police power to contain them in their own neighborhoods or in prisons. But we’re talking now about four-fifths of the American people.... They know the unprecedented new wealth that has been created — because they helped produce all this. Yet practically all the economic benefits generated by the many have been forklifted to the top, leaving them stewing in the realization that their families’ middle-class opportunities are being stiffed."

Hightower sees stirrings of a new progressive populist movement all across the countryside. He points to the work of citizen groups like ACORN, Clean Water Action, the New Party, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and the re-energized organizing efforts of the AFL-CIO, along with the efforts of creative politicians like Senator Paul Wellstone (Minnesota), Senator Byron Dorgan (North Dakota), Representative Bernard Sanders (Vermont), Representative Marcy Kaptur (Ohio), and Representative Lane Evans (Illinois).

And he’s no armchair observer when it comes to either activism or politics. For five years in the 1970s, Hightower ran the Agribusiness Accountability Project, which documented how government and land-grant colleges favored big, agro-industrial interests over family farmers, with disastrous results not only for rural America but also for the safety and taste of the food on everyone’s table. The project was closely connected with Ralph Nader, whom Hightower cites as one of his chief influences — along with farmworker leader Cesar Chavez, revolutionary agitator Thomas Paine, abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, novelist Upton Sinclair, and Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs.

Hightower put his populist principles into practice in the 1980s, when he was twice elected Texas commissioner of agriculture. He and his longtime partner, agricultural economist Susan DeMarco, who worked at a yearly salary of one dollar, established a slew of innovative programs to help small farmers, develop new crops, and promote sustainable agriculture. They doubled the number of farmers’ markets across the state, boosted livestock exports from six million to seventy-seven million dollars, and, in the words of the New York Times, "turned [a] once-obscure, twenty-million-dollars-a-year, 580-person agency into a national center for reforming American farm policy."

These experiences left him with the belief that liberalism-as-usual is not enough — not enough to boost the prospects of the 80 percent of Americans left behind by the financial spree of the past two decades, and not enough to win the hearts and minds of the majority of Americans who don’t vote. These people, most of whom probably would back liberals if they did turn out, don’t vote because they don’t find anything worth voting for.

"The liberal response is to say,‘Oh my God, the farmers are losing their farms, workers are losing their jobs — let’s find a way to get‘em some money or a program for‘em,’" Hightower says. "The populist approach is to say,‘There’s something wrong with the system. We gotta redesign the system.’

"America’s true political spectrum does not run right to left, but top to bottom," he continues. "Right to left is theory; top to bottom is experience. And most people today know they are no longer even within shouting distance of the powers at the top, whether those powers wear the masks of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals."

Excerpts of the Hightower Lowdown appear monthly in this magazine. Visit the Web site at www.jimhightower.com.

Adapted from the book, Visionaries: People and Ideas to Change Your Life (New Society Publishers) available at your local bookstore or 800-880-UTNE .

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