The Heartland’s Revival
21st August 2020
For roughly the past half century, the middle swath of America has been widely written off as reactionary, backward, and destined for unceasing decline. CNBC recently ranked the “worst states” to live in, and almost all were in what is typically defined as the Heartland.1 Paul Krugman of the New York Times sees the region populated by “jobless men in their prime working years, with many suffering ‘deaths of despair’ by drugs, alcohol or suicide.”
Another Times article describes much of the small-town and rural areas as home to “the left behind”—Trumpian knuckle-draggers at war with modernity. This coastal contempt for the interior is nothing new, going back to celebrated figures such as Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken, who dismissed it as hopelessly “backward if not reactionary.”2 Two New Jersey academics have even proposed, with the approval of much of the national media, that large parts of the Great Plains be evacuated to make way for an expansive “Buffalo Commons.”3 One progressive publication suggested that the country should send “reparations” to the region, as if it were incapable of devising its own recovery.
Yet in reality, the Heartland—a region of twenty states between the Appalachians and the Rockies—has remained a critical part of our country. In 2016, this area generated nearly $5 trillion in goods and services.4 As of 2015, it was also home to nearly 60 percent of the U.S. population,5 a percentage that is likely to increase as both the Northeast and coastal California are projected to grow less than the national average between 2010 and 2030.6