Janet Lynn Stumbo leaned on her cane and surveyed the two dozen or so voters who had convened in a small Appalachian town to meet with the chair of the Kentucky Democratic Party.
A former Kentucky Supreme Court justice, the 70-year-old Stumbo said the event was “the biggest Democratic gathering I have ever seen in Johnson County,” an enclave where Republican Donald Trump got 85% of the presidential vote last November.
Paintsville, the county seat, was the latest stop on the state party’s “Rural Listening Tour,” a periodic effort to visit overwhelmingly white, culturally conservative towns of the kind where Democrats once competed and Republicans now dominate nationally.
“The gut check is we’d stopped having these conversations” in white rural America, said Colmon Elridge, the Kentucky Democratic chair. “Folks didn’t give up on the Democratic Party. We stopped doing the things that we knew we needed to do.”
It’s not that Democrats must carry most white rural precincts outright to win more elections. More realistically, it’s a matter of consistently chipping away at Republican margins in the way Trump narrowed Democrats’ usual advantages among Black and Latino men in 2024 and not unlike what Kentucky’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, did in two statewide victories.
The irony is terrace farming is in large part a strategy that is designed to literally improve the quality of soil and reduce erosion.
True, but it isn’t cheap, the effort costs more than you’d save in labor.
Couple that with the nightmarish logistics (lived there, it takes 4-6 hours to get in and out of the mountains over tiny roads not meant for trucks, that’s a lot of refrigeration), and the region just isn’t good for much economically.
I definitely don’t want to make it sound like it would be easy or anything. But I definitely think it should be a lot easier than what the Incas did when you consider what they had available to them and that it’s basically some of the rockiest, most rugged terrain on the entire planet. And also keep in mind too that the altitudes are so high that their growing season wasn’t even very long either! Pretty much the only thing that Inca had going for them that made their life any easier was volcanic soil. In basically every respect Appalachia has a 100+ times advantage over them so again I’m just saying that I have confidence that we really should be able to do this if we put our minds to it.
As for nightmarish logistics, that’s actually kind of another reason to do this in the first place because people live there right now and it’s very expensive to get food into all of these very isolated communities. It would be a very empowering thing if a small little hollow that spends a ton of money on food because of the nightmare logistics could just grow its own legumes and grains right there (and I also just want to point out that grains and legumes don’t require refrigeration either after you dry them.)
I also want to address something you said about an agricultural business having to do this. Yes, that is true, but only if we literally do not think that we have some kind of moral responsibility to remediate the destruction of the coal industry in Appalachia. Otherwise, the way I see it: if we have a social problem, we as a society have to find a solution otherwise, it will make everything worse for everyone, even the ones directly experiencing the problem. In solving problems usually will cost us something. So the effort costing us more than the labor involved doesn’t necessarily seem like a problem to me. And in fact, when you really think about it, wouldn’t it be actually insane if it was possible to actually solve the destruction wrought by the coal industry without having to spend more than we would save?
And one last thing I would like to address other things you’ve kind of mentioned in general about like the people they’re not wanting to and stuff. You have to understand that Appalachia was literally like one of the greatest strongholds of labor politics in the history of the United States and a lot of the reason why it became like that was because of ambitious New Deal-style economic projects just like this one. and we’re literally having a conversation on an article talking about strategies for how the Democrats can appeal to voters in places like Appalachia. I just don’t really see a good reason to think that if you give basically any group of economically exhausted people something to believe in that made sense, even if it’s a long shot, why we should expect them to respond any differently this time around.
So, you have excellent points.
Here si where so much of that falls down:
This is worse in the south, but Appalachia had it too: any federal or external program is seen by the ruling elite as a cash cow that they rightfully deserve, and often they genuinely believe that by taking the money they are protecting their community from being bribed into dependence on outsiders.
That’s an odd rationalization, but it’s what I’ve seen in many rural areas.
What you need is a true grassroots movement, and that article suggested as much, I’m just skeptical because you’re asking them to go against a decent chunk of what they consider heritage, as the Virginia lowlands were the rich tobacco farmers that originally mistreated the Appalachians and lead to their oppositional identity.