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.