Appalachia in the Neoliberal Era

Appalachia in the Neoliberal Era Lou Martin In May 2017, four months into Donald Trump’s presidency, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote about the president’s budget proposal.1 Krugman, a Nobel Prize–winning economist, noted that the cuts in social spending and the elimination of Obamacare could have devastating effects, especially on the president’s supporters. To make his observation more “concrete,” he used West Virginia as an example because it “went Trump by more than 40 percentage points.” After listing the many ways West Virginians depended on the very programs that Trump would cut, Krugman wondered why so many had voted for him. “Partly, presumably, they supported Trump because he promised—falsely, of course—that he could bring back the well-paying coal-mining jobs of yore,” he wrote. “Maybe he would take benefits away from Those People, but he would protect the programs white working-class voters, in West Virginia and elsewhere, depend on.” In other words, maybe their racism had made them victims of “an epic scam.” Krugman hoped that if they ever realized the truth about Trump, they would “punish him the only way they can—by voting for Democrats.”2 Krugman was one of the many who, trying to understand the surprising results of the 2016 election, looked to Appalachia for answers. Their observations followed a pattern. They noted the high percentage of votes for Trump, and then made assumptions about voters such as being racist and gullible and clinging to the “jobs of yore.” Finally, they would quote a few locals to support their assumptions. The narrative that emerged was that Trump won the election because of the wrongheadedness of uneducated Appalachians and others around the country like them.3 This kind of scapegoating of the region’s supposedly backward thinking echoed commentary about Appalachians for more than a century and a half. Superficial observations about Appalachian culture have been a substitute for knowledge of more complex subjects such as the region’s history and its place in the nation’s political economy. Additionally, blaming an “other” has helped reassure urban, upper-middle-class audiences in times of uncertainty.4 [End Page 1] Krugman’s conjecture about West Virginians’ voting patterns is not only an example of national observers continuing to draw on hillbilly stereotypes but is also evidence of the public’s ignorance about the region’s recent history. Historians have an important role to play in illuminating the region’s historical development over the past four decades. In this article, I do not attempt to explain the 2016 presidential election results but instead argue for the importance of conceptualizing recent decades as a distinctive historical era. In particular, I argue that understanding voting patterns, as well as other subjects, requires a better understanding of the rise of neoliberalism since the 1970s and its various effects on the nation and Appalachia.5 Policymakers and scholars have viewed Appalachia as a laboratory for liberal projects like the War on Poverty, but fewer historians have noted the shift to neoliberal policies and examined their impacts on the region. Situating the region in the neoliberal era helps illuminate the causal relationship between national policy and its economic, social, and political developments, such as the shift away from mining and manufacturing, the decline of unions, environmental degradation, modest economic growth in college and health care hubs, the defunding of state-run services, and changes in Appalachian politics. Understanding this sea change in the dominant national ideology leads to a deeper understanding of these seemingly disparate developments and helps refute explanations of political behavior that rely on the existence of a distinctive, backward Appalachian subculture.6 Scholarship on the Liberal Era and Neoliberal Era Historians of Appalachia have written extensively about midcentury liberalism, often and understandably focusing on its failures, such as the flawed assumptions of many government programs. David Whisnant’s 1980 book Modernizing the Mountaineer presented one of the first comprehensive accounts of reform efforts in the region and is also one of the most critical of reformers. He places programs from the New Deal through the War on Poverty in the larger context of outsiders’ and missionaries’ attempts to “modernize the...