My comments on the Editors podcast are mentioned in Natan’s piece on the homepage today, so I wanted to reply with some additional thoughts.

Natan writes:

If there’s a question that cuts straight to the foundational disagreement between “establishment” conservatives and the “New Right,” it’s one about blame. Whose fault is it, exactly, that many individuals and communities in middle America find themselves in states of dissatisfaction, decay, and discombobulation?

I don’t think this is the right question at all. Perhaps some “establishment” and “New Right” people do, and to the extent that they do, I wouldn’t put myself in either camp.

Here’s the question that I find more important: Do many individuals and communities in middle America find themselves in states of dissatisfaction, decay, and discombobulation?

In one sense, yes. There are over 330 million people in the United States, about half of them live in a state that does not touch the Atlantic or the Pacific, and any group of people of that size will have millions who are dissatisfied, decaying, or discombobulated.

But of course, there are plenty of people living in urban areas on the coasts who are dissatisfied, decaying, or discombobulated as well. Conservatives rightly talk of the struggles facing Democratic-governed inner cities, where residents are often stuck in areas with slim employment prospects, high crime, and dreadful schools.

There’s a sense in which these problems are symmetrical. Republicans ask poor urban residents why they keep voting for Democrats, and Democrats ask poor rural residents why they keep voting for Republicans. Neither group of voters seems too interested in changing its mind.

We could pull a Thomas Frank and ask, “What’s the matter with Kansas?” i.e., why do these morons keep voting for the people who make them poor? Or we could assume our fellow Americans aren’t morons. Maybe they keep voting for the same party for other reasons, and maybe they don’t believe they’re victims of the elites.

If in 2024, inner-city Baltimore started voting Republican and eastern Kentucky started voting Democratic, would either become wealthy? We all know the answer to that is no. The people who live there know the answer to that is no, too. So they don’t do it.

We are blessed in the United States to live in a country where your region’s prospects are not determined by which party it votes for. That’s what happens in crony-states all over the developing world: Vote for our party and we’ll make you rich because we control the resources. Political parties in the U.S. don’t control the resources — thank goodness.

Who does control the resources? Is there some kind of cabal of rich industrialists out there manipulating things to make inner-city Baltimore and eastern Kentucky poor? This seems implausible too, if only for how difficult it would be to accomplish. And it seems this cabal, if it did exist, is rather scattershot in where it decides to concentrate its misery: sometimes on blacks in urban areas and sometimes on whites in rural areas, sometimes on people who vote for Republicans and sometimes on people who vote for Democrats.

It’s a big country: Maybe there are many different cabals of rich industrialists in different regions that seek to ensure some people are kept down and others are made rich. This also seems silly, and we know from countless regional investment plans that there are many influential people seeking the uplift of poor areas near them.

In a competitive market economy like the one the United States has, nobody is pulling the strings. There are plenty of people who would like to be pulling the strings — and not just the politicians and CEOs; many intellectuals and commentators think they should be in charge, too. Of course, every policy has impacts that are different in different places. But nobody actually has the capability to direct trillions of dollars in economic output across hundreds of millions of people over millions of square miles in such a way as to screw specific geographic areas on purpose.

Since we see struggling communities in both urban and rural areas in the U.S., it’s worth asking whether that’s the relevant divide at all. Reviewing What’s the Matter with Kansas? for NR in 2004, Richard Nadler pointed out that Frank was wrong to portray Kansas’s economy as stagnant and hollowed out. Nadler wrote:

The state’s per capita income increased 19 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars from 1990 to 2002 — precisely the era in which Frank says hard economic times sparked the right-wing “backlash.” Frank uses tearful anecdotes to describe rural desolation in the state; but these stories reflect particular hardships, not a trend. Kansas, like the rest of America, has been losing farms since the 1890s — but not in the recent years of supposed right-wing ascendancy. In 1992, the year Kansas conservatives captured the state’s GOP machinery, the Census Bureau reported 63,000 Kansas farms averaging 738 acres. In 2002, there were 63,000 farms averaging 752 acres.

Similarly, a closer look at some of the data on the issues commonly discussed in the conversation about middle America reveals some facts that might surprise those accustomed to the media narrative.

Consider drug-overdose death rates, for example. The U.S. in total experienced a terrible increase in overdose deaths during the Covid pandemic. West Virginia is one of the poorest states, has one of the highest proportions of white residents, votes for Republicans (although that is a relatively new development), and had the highest overdose-death rate in the country in 2021 at 90.9 per 100,000.

West Virginia’s overdose-death rate is highly unusual. West Virginia’s rate is triple Virginia’s, more than double Maryland’s and Pennsylvania’s, and almost double Ohio’s. There’s no state anywhere close to West Virginia on drug-overdose deaths, with the next three highest states (Tennessee, Louisiana, and Kentucky) all around 56 deaths per 100,000.

Meanwhile, the ten states with the lowest drug-overdose death rates in 2021 are:

1. Nebraska
2. South Dakota
3. Iowa
4. Texas
5. North Dakota
6. Hawaii
7. Wyoming
8. Idaho
9. Montana
10. Utah

Excluding Hawaii, all of those states vote Republican. Excluding Hawaii and Texas, all of those states are mostly rural, predominantly white, and aren’t on the East or West Coasts. Are drug overdoses destroying rural, white, conservative communities? Some, yes. Many others, no.

Or consider joblessness. Here are the ten states with the lowest unemployment rates right now:

1. New Hampshire and South Dakota (tied at 1.8 percent)

3. Nebraska and Vermont (tied at 1.9 percent)

5. Maryland and North Dakota (tied at 2.0 percent)

7. Alabama (2.2 percent)

8. Maine, Montana, and Utah (tied at 2.4 percent)

This isn’t unusual. More rural states, especially in the Midwest, commonly have unemployment rates below the national average. For as long as we have data (back to 1976), Nebraska’s unemployment rate has never been above the national unemployment rate. Minnesota’s has only ever surpassed the national rate for four months in 2007. Iowa’s has only ever surpassed it for several months in 1985 and 1986.

Or consider homeownership. The ten states with the highest homeownership rates in the first quarter of 2023 were:

1. West Virginia (77.9 percent)
2. Maine (77.0 percent)
3. Delaware (76.1 percent)
4. Wyoming (75.0 percent)
5. New Hampshire (74.3 percent)
6. Mississippi (74.0 percent)
7. Minnesota (73.4 percent)
8. Iowa (73.3 percent)
9. Alabama (73.1 percent)
10. Vermont (72.7 percent)

Again, mostly rural, largely white, and except for the New England states and Delaware, not on the coasts. And it’s worth noting that the homeownership rates for all ten of those states is higher this year than it was in the first quarter of 2019, so their conditions have improved since before the pandemic.

Sociologist Elizabeth Currid-Halkett has written The Overlooked Americans, a new book about middle America where she pairs a deep look at the data with many interviews of Americans who live in so-called flyover country. She argues in the book that the rural-urban/coastal-middle divide is overplayed by the media in an effort to sensationalize our politics. A closer look at how middle America is faring certainly turns up problems, but it also turns up millions and millions of people who are satisfied with their lives, careers, and communities. (I interviewed her for Capital Writing, and that interview will go up later this week.)

So, returning to Natan’s question, many individuals and communities in middle America do find themselves in states of dissatisfaction, decay, and discombobulation, but many do not. Many individuals and communities in urban America also find themselves in states of dissatisfaction, decay, and discombobulation. The causes for each are varied and often context-specific. The “national conversation” on middle America — much like other “national conversations” on other topics — papers over relevant details, perpetuates misconceptions, and is likely counterproductive.