By 2000, this dynamic had changed, with conservative political machines having entrenched themselves in rural communities during the 1980s and ’90s. Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” of appealing to white voters in segregated states had become a blueprint for conservatives in parallel to an intense capitalist restructuring of the economy: Corporations relocated textile, furniture, and semiconductor manufacturing as well as food industries like meatpacking to rural areas in the Sun Belt, creating what the historian Mike Davis called the “new union-resistant geography of American industry.” The move was accomplished by exploiting surplus land that had been freed up during the farm crisis and Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker’s monetary-policy-induced “shock” of the 1980s, using nonunionized workers—farmers, housewives, unemployed miners—who had lost their jobs as a result of these crises. And it happened at the exact moment that the nation’s mineral extraction industries began facing increased competitive pressure from the Middle East and South America. America was not so much deindustrialized as it was reindustrialized in more rural regions, using unwitting rural workers as scabs.

The visual representation of this shift also changed. The byzantine nature of our civic system requires ever-innovative means of rendering politics intelligible to the lay public, and the rise of television in the 20th century drove cartographers to new competitive heights. In its coverage of the 1976 election, for example, NBC constructed a 14-foot-high molded plastic map that lit up each state as it went for either Carter or Ford. The colors were the opposite of what they are now: Carter’s Democrats were red, Ford’s Republicans were blue, and the light bulbs burned so hot that they almost burned the studio down.

It wasn’t until the 2000 election between Texas Governor George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore that the major networks landed on the color-coded visual of Republican red and Democratic blue. Why the colors were reversed is a mystery, but the image was nonetheless plastered onto millions of TV screens for 36 nail-biting days as Florida recounted its votes, and, after Gore and the Democrats surrendered without much of a fight, it became seared into the average American’s political imagination.

This was ironic, because nobody expected the layout of the map to be permanent. Politics, and the way we represent it visually, changes constantly. “I’m working hard to change the image of our party so that sea of red…isn’t there” in 2004, then–Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe optimistically told The Kansas City Star in April 2002. “We can’t win the White House unless we win states in the Midwest, in these rural areas and Southern states.” But with the 2002 midterms, the notion stuck: The red states were now synonymous with the heartland, and from then on out they would be virtually written off by Democratic strategists up through 2016, with New York Senator Chuck Schumer infamously promising that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose…we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs.”

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The vexing question of the red-state voter has understandably caused a great deal of indigestion among many on the left. The left-populist writer Thomas Frank considered it “the preeminent question of our times”: Why did Nebraska’s McPherson County, for example—the poorest county in the Midwest, where New Deal liberalism had once reigned supreme—vote for George W. Bush in the 2000 election by a majority of greater than 80 percent?

Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter With Kansas? attempted to answer that question. Economic decline, he argued, had made heartlanders susceptible to political demagoguery about cultural wedge issues “like guns and abortion…whose hallucinatory appeal would ordinarily be far overshadowed by material concerns.” This led heartlanders to vote against their own interests, which in turn had destroyed their communities. “All they have to show for their Republican loyalty,” Frank wrote, “are lower wages, more dangerous jobs, dirtier air, [and] a new overlord class.”

Echoing Frank, his fellow left-populist writer Joe Bageant, a self-proclaimed “redneck” from the rural borderlands between Virginia and West Virginia, indicted liberals’ culpability in this process. “If the left had identified and dealt with this dissatisfaction early on,” Bageant raged in his 2007 book Deer Hunting With Jesus, “if they had counteracted the fallacies the Republicans used to explain that dissatisfaction…we might have witnessed something better than the Republican syndicate’s lying and looting of the past six years.” Both writers sought to develop—or perhaps revive—a better form of liberalism, one that would meet the needs of rural voters: a left populism that looked like the New Deal left populism of the early 20th century. Tim Walz’s surprise elevation in 2007 to the House of Representatives in a predominantly Republican district was a decent enough template—it demonstrated that an anti-corporate message that welded farmer and labor power could be effective. But the next decade would prove to be an infertile epoch for that template, and the optimism of red-state populists like Frank and Bageant was short-lived.

After the 2008 recession, the victory of Barack Obama, and the rise of the Tea Party, populist analyses of the heartland were replaced by another type of analysis—let’s call it “red-state anthropology.” The red-state anthropologists, who would go on to generate a small library of literature on the subject over the subsequent decade, were patronizing and clinical. To them, everything wrong with the average red-state American was a pathology that needed fixing. They believed, contra populists like Frank and Bageant, that developing a different kind of liberalism to meet rural needs was pointless. It’s not that they thought it was impossible. It’s that they didn’t want it to happen: With Obama in charge, the Democratic Party was fine as it was. It was the rural base that needed to change. But change could happen only after the rural mind had been mapped out and conceptualized.

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Writers like the UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild posited that the red-state American has a propensity for emotional and mental volatility—and for nonrational ecstasy. According to Hochschild’s 2016 book Strangers in Their Own Land, red-staters justified the environmental degradation of their communities not out of rational calculation but out of “emotional self-interest—a giddy release from the feeling of being a stranger in one’s own land.” The reader is left to assume that this is not the case for the rational-minded blue-stater.

In 2018, the Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow isolated red-state rural communities further still, finding them worlds apart from the rest of America—almost akin to the mythical remnants of precapitalist modes of society. In The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Small-Town America, Wuthnow argues that rural communities are held together not by the drive for profits and social control over labor markets but by “basic moral principles, such as honesty, hard work, neighborliness, and faith, as well as tacit agreement on social norms such as being friendly and participating in community events.” He claimed that rural people dislike Washington, DC, because it is a big city, and people in small towns do not like big cities. “The basis of small-town life is not only that it is ‘rural’ but that it is ‘small,’” he helpfully explained.

Beth Macy’s 2018 book Dopesick added more fuel to the fire, forever cementing the association of opioids with red states. It’s not that the opioid crisis didn’t start in rural America—it certainly did. But Macy treated the crisis like a literary device, an epic struggle of good versus evil, rather than what it was: an effect of the economic process by which red-state rural areas transitioned out of “masculine” extractive work, like agriculture and coal, and into “feminine” service work, like healthcare. The result was a moral panic in which religious groups targeted community members for shame and punishment, fueling the crisis rather than easing it. It was not mythic at all, but all too modern. But because Dopesick lent an astonishing amount of deference to local rural police officers, their views contributed to its Manichean, dehumanizing narrative. The book became, predictably, a popular drama on Hulu.

In 2019’s Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland, the Vanderbilt University sociologist Jonathan Metzl articulated an idea that has since migrated to the anchors’ desks of MSNBC. “A host of complex anxieties prompt increasing numbers of white Americans…to support right-wing politicians and policies,” Metzl wrote, “even when these policies actually harm white Americans at growing rates.… As these policy agendas spread from Southern and midwestern legislatures into the halls of Congress and the White House ever-more white Americans are then, literally, dying of whiteness.” They are voting “against their own biological self-interests, as well as their own economic priorities.” The advised course of treatment for red-staters, Metzl argued, is to accept profit-driven neoliberal policies like Obamacare as a measure of solidarity toward their fellow Americans.

It is no surprise, with the concurrent rise of red-state anthropology, that many liberals enthusiastically endorsed Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance’s 2016 memoir about growing up in Rust Belt Ohio. Hillbilly Elegy was the perfect synthesis of the populist and anthropological modes of red-state analysis. On the one hand, Vance combined plainspoken, nonacademic prose with an authority derived from personal experience. His extended family is violent. His mother is a drug addict. His neighbors are all “welfare queens,” and, as he goes to great lengths to point out, “all were white.” His coworker at a tile warehouse, Bob, is lazy; after Bob gets fired for being a “terrible” worker, he becomes angry, which we are told was “reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible.”

On the other hand, Vance demonstrated his anthropological expertise by citing a number of scientific studies to support his thesis that the culture of rural white Americans “increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.” One was a sociological survey published in the Journal of Adolescence in 2000 that, Vance wrote, “suggests that hillbillies learn from an early age to deal with uncomfortable truths by avoiding them, or by pretending better truths exist. This tendency might make for psychological resilience, but it also makes it hard for Appalachians to look at themselves honestly.” This took the anthropological position to its logical endpoint: The red-state white worker was biologically and psychologically alien, someone who didn’t even make sense without the proper diagnostic equipment.

It took about eight years, and Vance’s evolution from writer to politician, for the anthropological mode to sour. By that time, much of the liberal goodwill toward red-staters—but also toward the left—had burned off. An era of upheavals—Covid, inflation, rent strikes, the George Floyd street insurrections, rising worker militancy, the October 7 Hamas attack, record numbers of migrants at the southern border, and the Democratic Party’s suppression of the Bernie Sanders primary campaign and the Black Lives Matter social movement—had left liberals reeling, and they responded with a kind of cynical fatalism and a new analysis.

Early iterations of this new take on red-state pathology began cropping up in the pages of The New York Times under Paul Krugman’s byline. There, he began to flesh out a theory of the rural areas as parasitic drains on civic society. After citing the anthropological maxim in 2019 that “rural America is increasingly a world apart,” Krugman went farther in a 2022 column: “Rural America is heavily subsidized by urban America…. Rural areas…pay fairly little in federal taxes while receiving large benefits from Social Security, Medicare and other government programs.” It was a liberal version of the accusation that conservatives lob at “welfare cheats,” and Krugman has since hammered the point home repeatedly.

In their recent book White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, the political scientist Tom Schaller and the journalist Paul Waldman pushed Krugman’s red-state fatalism even farther. Rural Americans, the authors claim, are draining America of its vitality not out of selfishness or misguidedness but out of a variety of inherent deficiencies. “Rural Whites are the most conspiratorial cohort in the nation,” they write. “No group of Americans boasts a higher degree of support for, or justification of, violence as an appropriate means of public expression and decision making.” This is because of their “veneration of White culture and values,” to the point where their “democratic attachments are…faltering.” We are told that these people are an “essential minority,” “armed with outsize electoral and mythic powers,” who are, ultimately, “holding America hostage.”

The argument has certain similarities to those of both Vance and another conservative intellectual, Charles Murray, the author, with the psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein, of the social Darwinist tract The Bell Curve. In a 1993 essay titled “The Coming White Underclass,” Murray applied eugenicist talking points about “welfare queens” and “illegitimate” fatherhood in the Black community to poor whites; Schaller and Waldman reproduced many of Murray’s framings in White Rural Rage. Borrowing an anecdote from Dying of Whiteness, they refer to an unemployed and disabled man named Trevor who told Metzl he would not sign up for Obamacare because he didn’t want his tax dollars going to welfare queens and migrants. “Never mind that, unemployed and disabled, Trevor almost certainly drained more from public coffers than he ever contributed in state or federal taxes,” Schaller and Waldman write, sounding very much like Murray. The authors gloss over the fact that Trevor is not from a rural area but from a suburb of Nashville.

That conflation of “red state” with “rural” produces, in the mind of its audience, a specific image, one that can serve as an object of derision, scorn, or, ultimately, surrender. But what is most troubling about Schaller and Waldman’s book—and what the entire project of rural divination amounts to when it’s stripped of a class analysis—is the obsession with, bordering on a fetishization of, whiteness. White Rural Rage frequently mentions the economic despair and immiseration in rural communities. But that despair is always ultimately disqualified because of its proximity to whiteness.

Nixon’s Southern strategy had indeed harnessed the existing racism in the countryside to win elections, and so helped to frame the contours of rural backlash to progressive policies. But this ideological project had run parallel with economic developments, adding up to a cynical view of humanity and the way its affairs are ordered—a view that met with consensus from the liberal center. Left movements of the 20th century, such as the Communist Party USA of the 1930s or Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition of the 1960s, had argued for a way out: Repeated confrontations with capitalists would align the interests of white and Black workers. But Schaller and Waldman see little possibility for anything of the kind. They take Nixon’s cynical assumptions for granted and push them even farther. The status of white rural workers is fixed not only in terms of class but in terms of geography, their intransigence rooted in both the soil and the blood. Rather than being in need of transformative social welfare or multiracial working-class solidarity, red-staters are “an anchor dragging down the rest of the country.” Whiteness becomes a kind of dematerializing solvent for all social questions, an eternal and ethereal substance moving throughout history, the persistence of which can never be defeated.

It was a position very much consistent with the calcified, end-of-the-road liberalism of the Biden years. The material and social reality could not be overcome, and so the people themselves were to blame. The kernel for this thinking went back to the way the federal government, under both Trump and Biden, handled the pandemic. Responsibility for not spreading the coronavirus was placed on individuals, morally as well as logistically, rather than on the government—at the exact moment that the government expanded its social safety net to adjust for the economic disruptions of lockdown. This safety net, arrived at by an obvious contradiction, was a boon to rural areas in terms of employment, municipal revenue, and administrative capacity. It was not lost on anyone when that safety net was allowed to expire under a liberal president.

And yet, just weeks after Biden dropped out, here was Kamala Harris gesturing toward the common man with her running mate, Tim Walz, as if that safety net had not just been offered to the public and then unceremoniously yanked away. Trump’s name on the stimulus checks of 2020 stuck in the collective memory, but the slow burn of Biden’s infrastructure proposals lacked the public visibility—and the immediate impact—of the end of eviction moratoriums or the disenrollment of millions of beneficiaries of the expansion of Medicaid.

That was a clue to how the campaign would proceed. Walz would be a symbolic gesture up front, an idealistic appeal to get voters through the door. Once the doors were closed, the mask would come off and Democratic voters would find themselves in a hall of mirrors. One has to wonder, given Mellencamp’s reassuring lyrics at the November 8 event, whether Walz himself did not also make this horrifying discovery.

Perhaps the most enlightening data point from the 2024 election came in early October, when Walz and Vance shared the stage for their vice presidential debate. That debate seemingly promised to hold the key to the eventual results in November, as the long-awaited showdown over heartland authenticity. What viewers got instead was anticlimax. For the first half-hour, the two men agreed on most matters, from immigration to foreign policy. Rural America was barely mentioned except as a way to touch on deindustrialization, trade with China, and opioid addiction.

The lack of any substantive discussion of the rural question was the clearest proof that the Democrats had nothing to offer the electorate this time. The Republicans had laid down their Authentic Heartlander card: Vance is an anthropologist turned fatalist, whose solution for the plight of rural America is higher birth rates and a return to traditional values—with the whiteness on both counts heavily emphasized. To counter that, the Democrats reached for the only weapon they had: a populism that, after two decades of psychometrics and hand-waving and condescension, had been suffused with fatalism, poisoning anyone who tried to wield it, even an old hand like Walz.

In retrospect, the dynamic revealed what had been under the surface all along: that rural America exists as nothing more than a myth in the imaginations of both parties. There was, after all, a reason the rural white red-state subject had to be constructed in the first place. Over the 1980s, ’90s and 2000s, rural America went through massive structural changes: Land was consolidated, farms sold, mines closed. As the extractive industries that had been specific to rural areas for so long began to disappear, this organized abandonment shrunk the tax base and left municipal governance in crisis, just when Bill Clinton’s welfare “reform” was revolutionizing the prerogatives of local governance.

The invention of the red-stater provided the liberal establishment with an alibi, absolving it of the obligation to win the votes or practice politics on behalf of a group of people who were increasingly displaced and insecure, wandering from abandoned industrial parks to jails to hospitals. But those people were not good or evil; they were not sacred; they were not authentic or homespun or virtuous. They were not, in fact, uniformly white. They were a population that had once served a distinct role in furthering the cycles of profit accumulation and global land dispossession—and who were now starting to resemble, ironically, the very people that their government and business leaders had spent generations displacing worldwide.

Campaign rhetoric has reduced that population to an identity category, defined by its members’ consumption habits, the dirt on their clothes, the TV they watch, the towns they live in, the amount of money they make, the politicians they vote for, their level of education, even the ideas in their heads. This view disregards the social relations undergirding their existence: their relationship to the means of production and their relationship to the land. Attention to the economic reality would have revealed the crisis of red-state America in the second half of the 20th century for what it was: a roller coaster of deindustrialization and reindustrialization, attenuated by worker exploitation that resulted in no major political victories for rights or representation, but instead in further estrangement from their communities, their fellow workers, and even themselves.

The long-sought populist revival never materialized, because the economic base for it no longer existed. The numbers of farmers and miners had dwindled, replaced by nurses and McDonald’s workers. This was not an alluring picture for the stump-speech simulacrum of populism. Women working in fast-food kitchens or drawing blood did not hold the same narrative weight in the American political imagination as men chipping coal from the earth. On an even more fundamental level, the notion of worker power had been so degraded, so thoroughly eroded through geographical displacement and deunionization, that many could summon only the old, century-withered forms of social change: voter education and a better Democratic Party.

The Democrats could not employ a different analytic, because that would have required an acknowledgment of their role in creating rural America’s manifold crises to begin with: neoliberal economics, beginning under Jimmy Carter; the 1980s Atari Democrats’ focus on technology-driven jobs and technocratic methods of governance; Bill Clinton’s welfare “reform” and NAFTA. To the party, the sudden appearance of the red state was a siren—calling on them not to actually do something, but to mystify and abstract the changing structure of the rural economy. The ensuing moral panic about the red-stater found liberals embarking on a journey to construct a political subject that would one day be controllable and amenable to their end-of-the-road political project. They conjured ghosts and specters out of the past, borrowing here from the populist informants on the ground and there from the anthropological experts in the ivory tower. The Democratic Party had to produce both Tim Walz and the neutralization of Tim Walz.

For now, the right controls the map. That is its bastion of geographical—yet not necessarily demographic—support: where its material power is most easily reproducible through land, minerals, livestock, guns, and a bloc of displaced, disorganized workers. But the right has to chart an increasingly narrow terrain of contradictions. Today, the ideology of land and ammunition buttresses the hegemony of natalism and deportation. But the profit motive beckons, and the amount of resources shrinks every day. With it, so does the patience of the working class.

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