The Extraction Has Always Been Bipartisan

In the summer of 1964, Lyndon Johnson traveled to Inez, Kentucky, a town in Martin County in the eastern coalfields, and stood on the porch of a man named Tom Fletcher and told the national press corps that he had come to look poverty in the face. Fletcher was thirty-eight years old, unemployed, and raising eight children. Johnson was six months from his landslide election and several months into the legislative program he had inherited from his predecessor and was now calling the Great Society. He had just signed the Economic Opportunity Act. He was, by the account of most observers, genuinely moved by what he saw in Martin County. He was also, by the account of most historians, doing what American politicians had been doing in Appalachia for a very long time: using the mountains as a backdrop for a message aimed at a national audience.

The War on Poverty did not end poverty in Appalachia. Martin County is, as of 2026, one of the poorest counties in the United States. Its median household income is approximately twenty-two thousand dollars a year. Its poverty rate is roughly forty-five percent. Its water system has been in a state of near-continuous crisis for more than a decade, with service interruptions, boil-water advisories, and infrastructure failures that have been documented by state regulators, federal investigators, and journalists alike. The people who live there have lived through the Great Society and the Reagan cuts and the Clinton welfare reform and the Bush tax cuts and the Obama stimulus and the Trump tariffs. None of it has materially changed the fundamental condition, which is that Martin County is a place whose resources were extracted, whose labor was used, and whose people were left behind when the extraction was done and the labor was no longer needed.

The political history of that county, and of Appalachia more broadly, is the history of a region that has been available to both parties as a prop and useful to neither as a constituency. The failure is bipartisan. The record is unambiguous. And understanding it clearly is the prerequisite for anything that might actually change.

II

The Democratic party's relationship with Appalachia was, for most of the twentieth century, the relationship of a patron with a client. The region voted Democratic because the party of FDR was the party of the union and the party of the federal program and the party that, however imperfectly, directed resources toward the working poor. The New Deal built roads in West Virginia. The Tennessee Valley Authority electrified hollows that the private market had found unprofitable. The United Mine Workers of America, an institution deeply intertwined with the Democratic party for most of its history, won wages and benefits and safety regulations that made the coalfields livable in ways they had not been before.

None of this was altruism. The unions traded political loyalty for legislative protection. The Democratic party traded legislative protection for electoral margins. The relationship was transactional, and as with all transactional relationships, it functioned well when both parties were getting what they needed and began to deteriorate when one party stopped delivering.

The deterioration began in earnest in the nineteen-seventies, accelerated through the eighties, and became irreversible in the nineties. The UMWA's power collapsed as surface mining and automation reduced the labor intensity of coal extraction. The Democratic party, moving toward a coalition centered on educated professionals, suburban moderates, and urban minorities, found Appalachian white working-class voters increasingly difficult to hold. The cultural distance between the party's emerging leadership class and the communities of the coalfields grew wider as the economic interests became less aligned. By the time Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 — over the explicit opposition of the remaining union movement — the signal had been sent: when the interests of the party's new coalition conflicted with the interests of its old one, the old coalition would lose.

III

The Republican party's relationship with Appalachia is more recent and more openly extractive, which makes it in some ways more honest. The party did not pretend to serve Appalachia's interests. It served the interests of the corporations that operated in Appalachia, and it told the people of Appalachia that this was the same thing.

The coal industry is the clearest example. The coal industry has, for a hundred and fifty years, operated on a model that externalized its costs onto the communities around it. The black lung disease that killed miners by the hundreds of thousands was, for most of the industry's history, either denied by the companies or attributed to the miners' own choices. The stream pollution from surface mining operations was, for most of the industry's history, treated as an acceptable cost of doing business, borne not by the companies but by the downstream communities. The boom-and-bust cycle of coal employment — periods of intensive extraction followed by mass layoffs and community collapse — was treated as an economic fact of nature rather than as the predictable consequence of an industry that had no interest in the long-term welfare of the places it worked.

The Republican party's policy program in Appalachia has, consistently, protected this model. The regulation of surface mining has been a persistent political battleground, with the industry consistently seeking to weaken the surface mining reclamation requirements that were imposed by the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 — itself a modest piece of legislation that took years to pass over industry opposition. The regulation of coal dust and black lung prevention has been a persistent political battleground. The severance tax — the mechanism by which states can capture a portion of the value of extracted resources for the benefit of the communities from which they are extracted — has been kept, in West Virginia and Kentucky, at levels that are among the lowest of any major resource-producing state in the country.

The failure is bipartisan. The record is unambiguous. And understanding it clearly is the prerequisite for anything that might actually change. — Fixed Truth

IV

The concept of the sacrifice zone predates the terminology. The term was introduced into wide circulation by Robert Bullard, whose work on environmental racism documented the pattern by which environmental hazards — industrial facilities, waste dumps, pollution sources — were systematically located in communities with less political power to resist them. The communities were sacrificed for the economic benefit of others. The term has since been applied to Appalachia by scholars including Shirley Stewart Burns, whose work on mountaintop removal mining traces the physical transformation of the landscape and the communities that depend on it.

Mountaintop removal is the technique by which the overburden — the rock and earth above a coal seam — is blasted away to expose the coal below. It is efficient. It requires far less labor than underground mining. It produces coal at a cost that allows the company to remain competitive in a market in which natural gas and renewables are rapidly displacing coal as a fuel source. It also destroys mountains, buries streams, and leaves behind landscapes that are, in the technical sense, permanently altered. The valley fills — the deposits of blasted overburden pushed into adjacent hollows — bury headwater streams. The studies of downstream water quality are not encouraging. The studies of community health outcomes in mining-impacted areas document elevated rates of cancer, cardiovascular disease, and pulmonary disease.

Mountaintop removal expanded dramatically under the Clinton administration, when the Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency reached a regulatory interpretation that made it easier to obtain permits for valley fills. It continued to expand under the George W. Bush administration, which rolled back Clean Water Act protections for the streams that valley fills buried. It was modestly constrained under the Obama administration, which attempted to reimpose stream buffer zone protections, only to have those protections repealed by Congress under the Congressional Review Act in the first weeks of the Trump administration. The party changed. The policy direction changed. The mountains continued to come down.

V

The severance tax question is the one that most directly illustrates the extraction dynamic, and it is the one that has been least honestly discussed in the public debate about Appalachian poverty.

West Virginia currently levies a severance tax of approximately five percent on the value of coal mined within the state, plus an additional per-ton charge. Wyoming, which mines significantly more coal, levies a severance tax of approximately fourteen percent. Alaska, whose economy is built on resource extraction, levies a severance tax on oil and gas that funds, among other things, an annual dividend to every resident of the state — a direct transfer of resource value to the citizens from whose land the resources are extracted.

West Virginia has no such mechanism. The coal comes out of the ground. The royalties go to the landowners, many of whom are corporations and investment funds that acquired the mineral rights in transactions that took place, in some cases, more than a century ago under terms that the landowners of the time did not fully understand. The severance tax goes to the state, at a rate that the industry has successfully kept below what comparable resource-producing states collect. The federal royalty on coal mined on federal lands is also a subject of ongoing political negotiation, with the industry consistently seeking to reduce it. The wealth generated by the extraction of a nonrenewable resource from the ground of West Virginia leaves West Virginia. That is the definition of extraction.

VI

The political realignment of Appalachia — from reliably Democratic to overwhelmingly Republican — is often explained, in the national media, as a story about culture. The people of the mountains voted against their economic interests because they were motivated by cultural resentment, by the politics of identity, by the social distance they felt from a party that had come to represent a set of values they did not share. There is truth in this. The cultural dimension of the realignment is real.

But the economic dimension is equally real, and it is less examined. The Democratic party, by the time the realignment accelerated in the Obama years, had stopped offering anything concrete to the communities of the coalfields. The Affordable Care Act expanded Medicaid in ways that genuinely helped poor West Virginians, and it did so over the unanimous opposition of the state's congressional delegation. But it did not address the fundamental economic structure of the region. It did not reform the severance tax. It did not invest in the diversification of the coal-dependent economy in ways that would have mattered before the market had already made the transition for it. It did not do the things that a party genuinely committed to the welfare of these communities would have done, because by that point the party was not genuinely committed to the welfare of these communities in the ways that would have cost it anything politically.

The Republicans offered something else: an acknowledgment of cultural legitimacy, a promise that the coal economy could be preserved, and an enemy. The enemy was the environmental regulation that was, by the party's account, destroying the coal industry. The account was false — the coal industry was being destroyed by cheap natural gas, by automation, and by the declining economics of coal relative to alternative power sources — but it was emotionally satisfying in the way that a clear enemy is always satisfying, and it pointed outward rather than inward, and the Democratic party had largely stopped making the case for itself.

VII

What would a politics that actually served Appalachia look like? It would look like a severance tax set at a rate comparable to other major resource-producing states, with the proceeds directed toward economic diversification, infrastructure, and the kind of long-term investment that coal communities need to make the transition to an economy that does not depend on a fuel that the market is already abandoning. It would look like honest treatment of the black lung epidemic — honest acknowledgment, honest funding of the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund, honest enforcement of the dust standards that are supposed to prevent it. It would look like broadband infrastructure, because the communities that are most economically isolated are also the communities with the least internet access, and without internet access, economic participation in the modern economy is not possible regardless of what other policies are in place.

None of those things are easy. None of them are cheap. None of them are available from either party in the form they are actually needed, because both parties are, in the ways that matter most, more interested in Appalachia as a political asset — as a set of electoral votes, as a cultural symbol, as a backdrop for a speech — than as a set of communities with specific material needs that could, with sufficient political will, be addressed.

The mountain is not a prop. The people who live in it are not a parable. They are not the noble poor of a campaign advertisement or the benighted voters of a political autopsy. They are people who deserve honest accounting of what has been done to them and who has done it. That accounting does not spare either party. It should not spare either party. The extraction has always been bipartisan. The reckoning, if it comes, will have to be as well.