New Songs
Other than Elvis Presley, there is no icon more enduring in antique malls south of the Mason-Dixon than Johnny Cash album covers. The Man In Black incarnated the realities, challenges, and spirit of small towns left behind and rural communities struggling as the global economy shifted labor forces and displaced small businesses.
In a recent Wall Street Journal article on a small town in West Virginia, one resident lamented, “We’re on our own. Nobody’s coming down here to save us.”
As I’ve watched the news this New Year, with the high-profile capture of Maduro and visits over the past few weeks from several heads of state to Mar-a-Lago, including Israel’s Netanyahu, I’ve thought about the temptation many second-term Presidents face to focus outward, on international concerns. Yes, the Maduro capture was couched as a domestic matter tied to drug trafficking, but the reality of running Venezuela and rebuilding its economy, much like President Trump’s stated desire to make Gaza the “Riviera of the Middle East,” expresses a different objective.
For decades, sociologists and economists have been reporting the decline of social and economic capital in America’s rural communities. We wrote about this in our blog post, “Who are the Rich Men?” last year. To address these realities, Clapham launched the Social Capital Campaign in 2021 and has been an active advocate for public policies that address the affordability concerns of working families.
As we enter the New Year, Congress and the Administration have an opportunity to revisit and reprioritize several of these policies that could deliver relatively immediate benefits. We want to highlight four that we believe would scratch the affordability itch:
Strengthen families with children by increasing the Child Tax Credit’s top-line value, with a particular focus on families with children from conception through age five, while promoting work incentives by ensuring the first earned dollar qualifies for CTC tax relief for all working families.
Incentivize new investment in communities by promoting Opportunity Zones, including newly designated rural zones, and by exploring ways to expand the supply of child care businesses in both rural and urban communities.
Promote paid leave by increasing awareness of the recently passed Paid Leave tax credit (45S) and highlighting the new advantages it offers small businesses that claim it.
Enable greater homeownership and housing affordability, especially for families just starting out, by modifying regulations to incentivize family-friendly housing and exploring ways to assist first-time homebuyers.
There are many other policies we could list that would benefit struggling families and communities. Still, some of the most important challenges do not lend themselves easily to policy intervention. Perhaps none are more important than promoting marriage and its stability as a foundation for rebuilding social capital. Another is, as we’ve written, the growing interest in organized religion, which we at Clapham believe is a partner in promoting shared flourishing and personal well-being.
This month, we launch our final Salt and Light story before stitching the series together as a graphic novel. We chose to end with Johnny Cash, a reflection on the power of music to express our deepest struggles, hopes, and aspirations.
As we note in our introductory essay, Cash was a storyteller of the human soul. His stories were about the struggle with our weak, sinful nature and a God whose ways are not our ways.
Johnny Cash was haunted by this metanarrative and never lost sight of the redemption road God had placed him on, even though he had personally wandered from it. His focus on the tension between the lost and the found, the sinner and the saint, the junkie and Jesus, was grounded and reflected in the name he gave himself in his song “Man in Black”:
Well, I'd love to wear a rainbow every day and tell the world that everything's okay
But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back
‘Til things are brighter, I'm the man in black.
Music is uniquely tuned to our souls, and the most powerful songs emerge from empathy attuned to real human experience. This is why Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” resonated so widely, as it was written from his own lived experience.
The same is true of Vice President Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, which is why we have hope there is an internal advocate in the White House seeking to prioritize the revitalization of these rural communities. It is work he previously pursued through Steve Case’s venture fund, Revolution, then led by Ron Klain, who would later become President Biden’s Chief of Staff.
Whether right or left, Democrat or Republican, Black, White, or Brown, let’s commit this year to singing songs that don’t pit us against one another. Instead, let’s find new songs that, like Johnny Cash’s, look squarely at the challenges we face, and offer hope that together, we can overcome them and flourish as a result.
