King Coal’s Last Gasp, Trump, and the White Working Class

In 1964, at the height of the power of the American left, Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson stood before Congress and declared an “all-out war on human poverty and unemployment in these United States.” In his speech, Johnson touched on a great deal of moral urgencies, but made special mention of only one specific place: the “chronically distressed areas of Appalachia,” the mountainous cultural region stretching from southwestern New York to northern Alabama. Later that year, Johnson went on to beat Barry Goldwater in West Virginia, the only state entirely located within Appalachia. He won in a 36-point landslide, massively greater than his 22-point national margin. As late as 1996, Bill Clinton pulled off a 14-point West Virginia victory over Republican Bob Dole, more than his national margin of 8 percent. Even as the South around it shifted to the Republicans, the distressed areas of Appalachia remained a firm Democratic stronghold.

Today, the political alignment of Appalachia is drastically different. In 2012, despite a four-point national victory, Obama lost West Virginia by 26 percent. The story of this decline is complex, but it is inextricably tied to the industry long considered a symbol of Appalachia’s rough-and-tumble white working class, the industry that (coastal, elite) Stanford University decided was so awful that it had to divest from it: coal.

Appalachia’s hardscrabble outlook has been embedded in its history since its settlement. In the initial waves of English immigration to the Eastern United States, the Northeast was mostly the domain of upscale Puritans, Cavalier nobles, and religious Quakers. By contrast, Appalachia was predominantly settled by a fringe group known the Borderers. The Borderers were a radicalized, impoverished people who had lived near both sides of the Scotland-England border, a site of regularized invasion and extreme brutality. Borderer culture was highly tribal, violent, and hostile towards outsiders, and when the English monarchy decided to hike their taxes and sometimes forcibly evict them en masse, many Borderers were forced out to the American colonies. They were also expelled from other American colonies, which despised them just as much as the English did back home. The Borderers thus moved West, into the Appalachian mountains.

These mountains, by geographical chance, contained vast quantities of bituminous coal, and after the Civil War ended and the new industrial economy required energy to fuel its ravenous expansion, the rush for this “black gold” was on. Mining towns developed, and when demand spiked even higher during World War I, Appalachia enjoyed a brief period of working class prosperity as miners moved into the burgeoning middle class and thousands migrated into the region. This burst was short-lived, however, as the Great Depression devastated industrial production. World War II’s all-hands-on-deck need for power brought another renaissance, but as the war ended and as oil and gas expanded their global reach as alternative sources of energy, the good times ended once again. By 1964, LBJ, born and raised in an impoverished, rural town himself, was determined to make Appalachia the centerpiece of his plans for a Great Society.

Though better off now than in its days as LBJ’s symbol of American destitution, Appalachia remains cursed with extensive poverty. In West Virginia, 27 percent of personal income comes from government transfers, including Social Security, disability compensation, unemployment insurance, and welfare, the highest fraction of any state in the country. While a few urban centers have managed to fare well, since the 1970s the number of jobs in the mostly rural-based coal industry has fallen by over three-quarters. Coal towns have either depopulated, seen massive spikes in poverty, or both, and industry decline has deprived state and local governments of badly needed tax revenue. Much of Appalachia is located deep in the mountains, making it quite difficult to construct highways or other infrastructure to aid regional development, and local manufacturing was rendered uncompetitive decades ago.

A point that is worth emphasizing is the often wretched conduct of the coal industry itself, whose moniker, King Coal, comes straight out of a 1917 novel by famed muckraker Upton Sinclair. Sinclair’s title has stuck, and King Coal endures as the defining term of an industry willing to lie, bribe, and inflict violence to maintain its profits. In 1921, the political battle to form the United Mine Workers of America union became a literal one as King Coal brought in strike-breakers and anti-union militia to fight a weeklong shootout that killed over a hundred people. King Coal also has a long history of downplaying health concerns over mining beneath the earth’s surface for a dozen hours at a time. One such health concern is the infamous black lung disease, which occurs when coal dust settles in miners’ lungs and causes them to develop chronic bronchitis.

King Coal poisoned the earth of Appalachia itself, pioneering a technique in the 1960s called “contour mining” in which companies would simply dynamite entire hillsides to save time on digging. By the 1990s, as surface-level coal ran out, King Coal developed “mountaintop removal,” which is exactly what it sounds like. Companies would explode hundreds of feet of soils, which they would then deposit in nearby valleys, before strip-mining the revealed coal and then repeating the process in the same area. These silts, thrown basically anywhere, would often drip into nearby rivers, exacerbating toxicities already generated by insufficient cleanups from mines dating back decades. Millions of acres of forestry and unknowable rivers and tributaries have been destroyed in the name of the fossil fuel widely acknowledged to emit more carbon per unit of energy than any other source on the planet.

King Coal, despite its history, is hardwired into the cultural conception of Appalachia. It is rowdy, tied to the earth, rugged- and it has leveraged its status as a historic industry to help induce a political transformation in its favor. The industry often operates with near-total impunity. For example, between 2000 and 2005, the West Virginia Division of Environmental Protection issued 4,268 citations to Massey Energy, with no real consequence. The CEO of Massey, Don Blankenship, once confronted a long-serving judge on the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, Warren McGraw, who tended to side with coal workers in injury cases, by spending $3.5 million to unseat him. Blankenship’s campaign ran ads claiming that McGraw let sex offenders free into society, at no point mentioning that Massey Energy had several cases pending before that court.

McGraw lost the election because of the efforts of one coal baron, who would go on to extend his rule over much of West Virginia’s judicial system before shockingly actually being indicted after he presided over the largest mine disaster since the 1960s. The industry, as a whole, has spent millions on local and state legislative and judicial elections, and can now do so through dark-money groups like Alpha Natural Resources to promote regulatory rollback of the industry and blame Washington, D.C. outsiders for Appalachia’s problems.

King Coal has exploited its position as a cultural symbol to accelerate a sociological rift between working-class whites and the broader Democratic Party, blaming Obama in particular for the destruction of coal jobs by instituting stricter Environmental Protection Agency limitations on coal companies. Such an accusation is misleading: coal jobs began an extended decline in the 1970s, not 2009, and like in any other industry, coal had been busting private-sector unions and automating jobs for decades.

And while the EPA hastened coal’s fall from grace, it is not regulation of capitalism that caused what has become a free fall of the industry, but rather capitalism itself. Around 2009, oil wildcatters made substantial improvements in a technique known as ‘fracking‘: breaking up bedrock through hydraulic fracturing in order to hugely lower the cost of natural gas, a competitor to coal. Since 2010, the share of American electricity generated by natural gas has risen by 10 percent while coal has declined by the same percentage. Market values of coal companies are collapsing under the onslaught. Peabody Energy, once the world’s largest public coal company, whose strip-mining of Western Kentucky has been chronicled forever by John Prine, lost 99 percent of its share value in five years and eventually declared bankruptcy.

King Coal, so profitable barely a few years back, now almost appears to be in its death throes.

Democrats in Appalachia, who have had to essentially detach themselves from the national Democratic Party and run against Obama and the EPA to survive, take little comfort. The largest shifts toward the Republican Party in this country over the past election cycle (as high as 20 points in four years) have been in the counties with the largest declines in coal. But the number of actual coal jobs supplied in Appalachia is now very low relative to the region’s economy as a whole, and there is more to Appalachia than just one industry, and in this time of tumultuous politics, other, tenser explanations have been levied for the decline of the Democrats in their former fortress.

This debate, previously mostly a matter of interest to political scientists and frustrated liberal politicos, has been explosively thrust into mainstream dialogue by the rise of Donald Trump. Any observer of American politics knows that the Democratic Party routinely captures huge majorities of nonwhite voters, while the Republican Party is overwhelmingly white. Prominent Republicans roundly deny accusations from the left that their party is hostile to nonwhites, and past Presidential nominees (Dole, Bush, McCain, Romney, etc) have insisted that conservative principles are for everyone and put varying degrees of lip service towards diversifying their support. Trump, obviously, is a different breed entirely, and his noxious white identity politics and general demagoguery are essentially guaranteed to deepen the divide between Republicans and people of color.

But who supported Trump on his path to the Republican nomination? Not the remains of the country club WASP elite. A New York Times report titled “The Geography of Trumpism” found, on a county-by-county level, the ten variables most highly predictive of Trump’s primary vote share. The profile of a median Trump primary supporter thus becomes clear: a non-college-educated, native-born, mid-to-lower-income white. This median person lives in an economically struggling county, near nonwhites, that registered high support in 1968 for segregationist candidate George Wallace. Many Appalachians fit into many of these categories, and it is in Appalachia, especially in (ex-)-coal counties in West Virginia, western Virginia, and eastern Kentucky, where Trump has racked up his highest support of anywhere in the country.

That the typical Trump supporter is a working-class white has caused a firestorm among non-Trump-supporting political and cultural commentators, aligning certain factions alongside others with whom they normally wouldn’t be caught dead. Many liberals have seized on Trump’s incredible success as proof that the Republicans ‘use racism’ as a way to win over poor whites to ‘vote against their class interest’ and to despise the agenda of the first black President. These people are beyond saving, their argument goes, and so the Democratic Party is not obligated to do what they consider catering to bigotry in order to win votes.

Some movement conservatives, people who are ideologically right-wing and disapprove of Trump’s ‘vulgarity’ and un-Reaganite policy heresies, more or less agree with the assessment that these white working class Trump supporters should be written off if they can’t shape up. Most (in)famously, Kevin Williamson, a writer at the National Review, wrote a scathing report arguing that these whites have no one to blame for their troubles but themselves, and that if they refuse to take responsibility and fix themselves, “these dysfunctional, downscale communities…deserve to die.”

On the other side of this debate over how to view Trump supporters are more unlikely allies. While the center-left, mostly-Clinton-supporting pundit class tends to scorn Trump supporters, the mostly-Sanders-supporting, socialist/democratic socialist left intelligentsia has responded viciously to such attitudes. These Trump supporters are poor and looking for someone to stand alongside them, not condescend to them as hillbillies, their argument goes. For the Democratic Party to give up on them would be to confirm that they are elitist ‘neoliberals’ who don’t actually care about fighting for social democracy. Relatedly, they claim center-left sympathy for the downtrodden seems to only fall on people who, to put it bluntly, vote for Democrats, and so really demonization of working class whites is a dressed-up form of brute partisanship.

Also calling for empathy with Trump supporters, but not Trump himself, are a branch of conservatives called ‘reform conservatives’ or ‘reformocons’. These reformocons, including figures like Ross Douthat, Reihan Salam, Michael Brendan Dougherty, and David Frum, believe that Republican elites have failed their working class supporters by pursuing the plutocratic economic agenda of their wealthy donors while neglecting issues like immigration restrictionism. Therefore, Trump supporters have legitimate grievances because they have been effectively abandoned by both political parties.

It is beyond the scope of this article to thoroughly evaluate each of these arguments, but it is worth reiterating that, one, conditions of life among many Trump supporters are indeed deteriorating, and two, that Donald Trump is a repulsively racist and ignorant figure who is comically unworthy of the American Presidency. It also bears consideration that Appalachian working class whites are politically unsexy, too economically unsuccessful and low-status to earn the respect of much of the high-earning, elite coastal right, and too uncomfortably white and culturally conservative to gather the attention of much of the multicultural, elite coastal left (of which us Stanford undergraduates are members pretty much by default).

That the way we choose to express empathy towards others is heavily colored by political-cultural identity, and that a hip, ‘intersectional’ leftist is just as capable of turning outgroups into caricatures as a former coal miner who believes that all liberals and people of color resent him. That the rent-seeking barons of King Coal did their best to bend the legislatures and culture of Appalachia to their will, abused it for their own profit, and will certainly not be stepping in to help out the community now that their money train has run out. And lastly, that the least you could give your fellow Americans is your solidarity, and a solidarity that does not care about nonwhites or poor people is not much of a solidarity at all.

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Andrew Granato, a junior studying economics, is a staff writer at Stanford Political Journal.