Power and powerlessness in an Appalachian Valley – revisited

ABSTRACT

With the rise of Trump support in rural Appalachia – the coal mining, mountainous region in the heartland of the eastern United States – media and other commentators have rushed to explain this conservative politics in ‘exceptionalist’ terms, largely based on cultural stereotypes. Revisiting my work on Power and Powerlessness in an Appalachian Valley (1980), I argue that the attention to ‘Trumpism’ fails to see or take into account the widespread rural resistance which exists in the region, historically and presently. A focus on the rise of place-based grassroots activism and scholarship in the region offers a more emancipatory view of rural politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Appalachia
• power
• coal
• collective action
• land
• authoritarianism
• emancipatory rural politics

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Michelle Mockerbee for contributing to background research on this article and to Dee Scholey for her editorial assistance. Thanks also for comments on an earlier version of the paper at the ERPI 2018 International Conference on ‘Authoritarianism and the Rural World’, and to the anonymous reviewers of this later version.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

John Gaventa http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0360-3248

Notes

1 At least in the Appalachian Valley, it is important to note that this shift was not sudden – in this predominately white area, there was a major shift in the 2008 and 2012 elections, when Obama also received far less than his Republican counterpart. One could argue then that Trump consolidated a growing disillusionment for these working-class voters, but this was capitalizing on a longer-term trend.

2 It is very difficult to document the trends exactly, as the Appalachian Valley cuts across precincts, counties, and states. There has long been a historical difference between the rural non-mining-area voting, and the mining-area-voting patterns.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Gaventa

John Gaventa is Research Director and a Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) in the UK. He worked from 1971 to 1996 as a scholar-activist in the Appalachian Region, including with the Highlander Research and Education Center. In 1996, he shifted to IDS, where his research focuses on power, participation, and citizen action more globally. His first book, Power and Powerlessness in Appalachian Valley (1980), received a number of awards, including the Woodrow Wilson Award from the American Political Science Association.