The Midwestern Farmer–Labor tradition began as a defense of ordered liberty and local independence and, over time, was captured by centralized, progressive forces that now use its rhetoric to justify bureaucratic control and dependency. Understanding that transformation is essential if families today are to teach their children to be both pious and patriotic, and to resist the latest round of utopian promises that never deliver anything but servitude. It may also help us to begin to understand how mayors and governors in the upper Midwest continue be reelected, despite increasing failures of governance in their cities, towns, and states. The institutional metamorphosis of The
Church, The Grange and the Farm Labor movement, as they all move ever closer to totalitarianism is worth reviewing, in light of the rioting in the streets that is sure to happen as a direct result of progressive-socialist, Democrat’s rhetoric.
A personal window into Midwestern protest: As a child and teenager, many of my summers were spent in the back‑country of Minnesota, on the shores of Cass Lake, where my cousin’s Ojibway relatives lived on the reservation. The neighbors were farmers, laborers, and tradesmen from across Minnesota and the upper Midwest, people whose politics grew out of hard winters, railroad monopolies, and the daily struggle to keep their land and their dignity. Later, as a physician and colleague to men and women trained in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa, I discovered how deeply that political culture still shapes the region: almost to a person, they continue to support the progressive, quasi‑socialistic philosophies handed down from parents and grandparents formed in the Grange and Farmer–Labor traditions.
Those movements were not born in malice. They stood up for farmers and workers against real abuses. But over time, they were co‑opted and transformed into something very different: instruments of progressive social engineering that now serve the interests of a professional political class far removed from barns, union halls, or sawmills.
The Grange, the Granger laws, and La Follette: The Grange, founded in 1867 as the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, was the first great national farm organization, promoting farmers’ economic and social interests and pushing state “Granger laws” in the 1870s to regulate railroad and grain‑elevator rates in the Midwest. Those laws, passed in states such as Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois, responded to genuine grievances: discriminatory freight rates, monopoly control, and corporate power that could bankrupt a farmer with the stroke of a pen. Historians now treat the Granger movement as the opening phase of a continuous agrarian “tradition of protest” that flows through later Populist, Anti‑Monopoly, and Progressive movements.
Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette’s Progressivism in Wisconsin drew heavily on this older anti‑monopoly sentiment. His 1924 Progressive Party campaign, backed by farmers, small businessmen, and unions, attacked railroad and corporate power and called for regulation and even public ownership of certain utilities, while still trying to distance itself from explicit socialism and communist influence. By the 1920s, La Follette’s Progressivism was more distinctly agrarian, Midwestern, and rooted in farmer‑labor constituencies than Theodore Roosevelt’s 1912 Progressive movement, which had a more urban and national character.
The Minnesota Farmer–Labor tradition and its heirs: In Minnesota, this protest tradition blossomed into the Farmer–Labor Party, which emerged around 1918 as a coalition of small farmers and urban workers reacting to price squeezes, wartime repression, and one‑party Republican dominance. Drawing on the same regional culture that had embraced the Grange and La Follette, the Farmer–Labor Party championed cooperative economics, public ownership of key utilities, and strong protections for labor; by the 1930s it had elected governors, senators, and members of Congress and became a dominant force in state politics.
By 1944, however, the Farmer–Labor Party was folded into the national Democratic Party, forming today’s Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor (DFL) Party. With that merger, the old regional protest tradition was absorbed into a broader national progressive project centered less on local cooperatives and more on federal programs, bureaucratic regulation, and permanent transfer payments. This was the party of Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, Eugene McCarthy and today Tim Walz and Keith Ellison. Today’s progressive leaders in Minnesota, such as those who preside over sprawling welfare systems and environmental and social‑justice bureaucracies ripe with corruptions of process, rebates and kickbacks, stand rhetorically in the Farmer–Labor line but, in class background and policy instruments, are creatures of the administrative state, not of the grain elevator and the dairy barn. The systems they now control are the very reason why the Grange and the Farm Labor movement came into existence in the first place. David has turned into Goliath.
From Natural Law to Hegelian emotionalism: The deeper shift is not just institutional but philosophical. Earlier agrarian reformers, whatever their inconsistencies, largely assumed a moral universe grounded in Natural Law and biblical categories: justice, fair weights and measures, stewardship of property, the dignity of work, and the duty to protect the weak without making them permanent dependents. Their remedies—co‑ops, local regulation, mutual aid—presumed a free and responsible citizenry, not a population managed from above by experts and bureaucrats.
The modern progressive movement, by contrast, leans heavily on what might be called Hegelian emotionalism: an ever‑advancing “arc of history” in which the state becomes the embodiment of the people’s moral will, and any resistance to new programs is cast as reactionary or hateful. Class divisions and social grievances are not healed but cultivated, because they justify new rounds of programs, offices, and transfer payments that enlarge the patronage and power of a professional political elite. In that world, the farmer and the laborer become permanent clients; the “bureaucratic godhead” in the capital becomes the source of their daily bread.
The new aristocracy of progress: Three generations after La Follette, Americans are told that today’s progressive leaders are still “down for the struggle,” champions of the poor and marginalized. Yet many of the loudest voices on the Left—whether in Congress, on cable news, or in governors’ mansions—come not from working‑class backgrounds but from the top two quintiles of the income and education ladder. They have built little in the productive economy, employ few outside their political staffs, and derive their influence from controlling the levers of regulation, subsidies, and public spending rather than from creating goods, services, or jobs.
This is not the populism of the Grange Hall or the Farmer–Labor picnic. It is a new aristocracy of credentialed progressives who speak in the language of compassion but govern through dependence. Their promises of “equity” and “justice” almost always involve greater centralization, higher taxes, thicker regulation, and more intrusive oversight of family, church, school, and small business. The result is not empowerment but quiet servitude, a citizenry kept busy navigating forms, benefits, and mandates while real power consolidates in administrative agencies and political machines.
Piety, patriotism, and the duty to remember: What is happening today is occurring right under the noses of “We the People,” especially in regions like the upper Midwest where the memory of the old protest traditions has faded and been replaced by a kind of inherited party loyalty. Many who grew up in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa have no idea how the movements their grandparents supported—Grange, Nonpartisan League, Farmer–Labor—were gradually captured and redirected by national progressive elites after the world wars.
Families must therefore recover their duty to teach both piety and patriotism, and to show their children that the two stand or fall together. Piety means recognizing God, Natural Law, and the moral limits on what any state may rightly do; patriotism means loving a constitutional order rooted in the self‑government of free men and women, not in the tutelage of bureaucratic guardians. Together, they arm the next generation against the seductions of utopian materialism—those glittering promises that have never yet produced heaven on earth but have often produced new forms of bondage dressed up in the language of progress.
