I live in the southwestern corner of Virginia, the Appalachian part of
the state that borders North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and West
Virginia. Like all of these neighboring states, we went overwhelmingly
for Donald Trump on November 3rd, with margins in most of our counties
between 75 and 80%. Five days after the election, comments on the
Facebook page of our primary daily newspaper ran about seven to one that
the election was fraudulent, stolen from Trump.
So, how did we get here? How did we get to such a strenuous divide, one
that has many dimensions, but is in large part geographical?
A third or so of this region is ‘coal country’, communities whose
economies have been dependent on the coal industry for generations, even
as it declined inexorably for more than forty years. Trump’s pledge to
bring coal back has, like most of his boasts, proved to be an empty
promise. There are fewer coal jobs now than there were in Obama’s last
year in office.
The many thousands of small farms throughout the region don’t do a lot
of exporting to China, so they’ve missed out on those federal payments
that have kept bigger farms afloat. A fair number have embraced new
enterprises or shifted to selling local food at local markets. Still,
the last four years has been a struggle for small farmers. But then,
there’s nothing unusual about that.
Several efforts to diversify local economies – from downtown
revitalization in Bristol to an “ecological education campus” in the
tiny town of St Paul – are beginning to bear fruit. Most of these have
been helped along by a range of investments, including grants from the
Appalachian Regional Commission. ARC is popular among businesses and
economic developers and has continued in spite of Trump’s repeated
efforts to zero out its budget.
You’re probably starting to get the picture. My part of the world is
full of people who, according to most of my liberal friends, “vote
against their own interests”. It is true that this once-Democratic
stronghold has shifted to Republicans over the past dozen plus years,
and that Trump has cemented that support to a degree we’ve never seen
before. It’s also true that a region whose people are known for their
neighborliness and readiness to pitch in for whomever needs help, is
increasingly defensive about its guns, deeply suspicious about
government and ready to believe the worst about people with different
views or politics. Which is to say, Democrats, liberals, progressives.
Me. Us.
https://stansburyforum.com/2020/11/28/what-we-must-do-understanding-and-overcoming-the-urban-rural-divide
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