This disparity can affirm progressive ideas about successful and inclusive governance, but it also has serious implications for the country as a whole. Anger is brewing in Republican America, along with conspiratorial fabrications about who to blame for their condition. A harbinger of this trend is Antlers, Oklahoma, where I grew up: a once-thriving town in the southeastern part of the state, bordering the lush Ouachita foothills with dense forests, abundant agriculture and lucrative tourism resources. The city rebuilt itself after a devastating tornado in 1945, but it couldn’t resist the politics of the 21st century.

Racially and politically, Antlers is typical of much of rural Oklahoma, a state forged from 19th-century territory reserved for Native American tribes forcibly removed from other parts of the United States. Antlers is now 75% white and 22% Native American or mixed race, but with very few Latino, Asian or black residents. In 2020, Antlers and his county, Pushmataha – which supported former President Bill Clinton in 1996 and even Jimmy Carter against Ronald Reagan in 1980 – voted for Republicans, 85% against 14% for Democrats, against 80% for Republicans in 2016, 54% in 2000 and 34% in 1996.

Antlers social stats are more than alarming. Nearly a third of its inhabitants live in poverty. The median household income, $25,223, is less than half of Oklahoma’s $55,557, which is well below the national median of $74,099 in January 2022.

The most well-off ethnic group in Antlers is Native Americans (median household income, $35,700; 48% with an education beyond high school; 25% living in poverty). That’s still well below the national median, but conditions for the white population are dismal: a median household income of $24,800, only 41 percent with a post-secondary education, and 30 percent living in poverty.

In a growing national trend, the median household incomes of people of color, according to the US Census Bureau, now exceed those of whites in nearly 200 of the 1,500 counties in the Republican trio, those in which the party controls the office of governor and the two. legislative chambers of state government. It’s a visible factor that has fueled complaints from Trump voters alleging the diminished status of white people.

According to the most telling statistics, white Antlers are nearly twice as likely to die from a gun as Native Americans. Compared to whites nationally, whites in Antlers suffer from excessive death rates from drugs and alcohol (1.3 times the national average), suicide (1.5 times), all violent deaths (1.8 times), homicides (2.5 times) and shootings (2.6 times).

The numbers on paper look pretty bad. Seeing them on the ground is a new kind of scary. When I grew up in Antlers 60 years ago and visited it 20 years ago, my family’s old block consisted of well-kept middle-class houses overlooking yards for chickens and horses. When I last visited in January 2022, I found the houses all boarded up or opened by the wind (see photo above). There are hundreds of abandoned dwellings with collapsing roofs and walls and empty lots filled with trash next to barely intact but still occupied houses.

However, Antlers is not entirely devastated. It sports a gleaming travel center built by Choctaw and funded by casino revenue, which is also invested in the welfare of local Native Americans. And there are booming neighborhoods, including a posh suburb of mansions upriver from the city. Antlers’ 2,300 residents can take advantage of three liquor stores and seven new marijuana dispensaries.

A widening social and economic chasm

Across America, the partisan gap in gross domestic product per capita is also huge and growing: $77,900 in Democratic-voting areas, versus $46,600 in Republican-voting areas. Antlers and Pushmataha County are not alone: ​​444 Republican counties have a GDP per capita below $30,000, and 10 times as many people live in these counties as in the seven low-GDP Democratic counties. Whites in about 40% of all Republican counties have lost income over the past two decades. And the Trump administration has not helped its base. During his presidency, the overall GDP per capita gap between Democrats and Republicans widened by an additional $1,800.

It is not just an urban-rural divide. For the largest urbanized states, the three states under Democratic control of all branches of government (California, New York, and Illinois) had significantly higher GDPs per capita than the three largest states under Republican control (Texas, Florida, and Ohio ).

The right-wing duck that hard-working white people subsidize welfare-cheating cities is backward. Democratic-voting counties, with 60% of the US population, generate 67% of the nation’s personal income, 70% of the nation’s GDP, 71% of federal taxes, 73% of charitable contributions, and 75% of state and local taxes.

Like the Antlers, white Republican America also suffers violent death rates, including suicides, homicides, firearms and drunk driving accidents, far higher than whites in Democratic America and higher than non-whites anywhere in the world. To top it off, Americans governed by Republicans are much more likely to die from COVID-19. As the mortality gap between Republican and Democratic areas widens over time, white life expectancy in Republican-voting areas (77.6 years) is now three years shorter than that of whites in Democratic areas (80.6 years), shorter than that of Asians and Latinos everywhere, and only a few months longer than Blacks and Native Americans in Democratic areas.

Misplaced blame

Surveys and studies consistently reveal that white Trump supporters, usually older, are enraged by “loss of status” and fear being “replaced” by non-whites. That whites are falling behind in key economic, health and security indexes is not due to immigrant victimization and liberal conspiracies, but to victimization by other whites and self-drinking. -inflicted, drug overdose and suicide.

Is the solution to America’s massive federal joint ownership programs to improve Republican America’s struggling economies and troubled social conditions then? Aside from the problem that Republican members of Congress (and two recalcitrant Democrats) sabotaged beneficial initiatives, former President Barack Obama has tried this before. From 2010 to 2016, the Obama administration’s economic stimulus created millions of new jobs and thousands of dollars in real median income growth for whites in urban and most rural areas, reversing the recession under Republican President George W. Bush.

Yet despite these gains, white voters have vehemently rejected Democrats in successive elections. Today, grassroots Trump voters elect candidates who share their racial resentment and imagined victimhood, not those who actually advance their security and economic well-being.

Despite the superficial resemblance of the crumbling neighborhoods, trash-filled lands, and widespread poverty of the Antlers and conditions in a devastated city of color like Camden, New Jersey, the origins of their devastation are very different. Camden is the product of systemic racism and industrial abandonment inflicted on poor, mostly non-white residents powerless to prevent their exploitation. Antlers is the predictable endgame of white majorities who had better options instead of empowering incompetent and corrupt demagogues (segregationist Democrats in the past; nihilistic Republicans today) who flatter white claims to racial privilege and religious while granting largesse to rapacious foreigners.

Poverty in cities and on reserves mainly requires a sustained political will to work with people who welcome the effort. In contrast, repairing white rural poverty against the angry, undemocratic recalcitrance of most white people themselves requires entirely new political thinking that we have yet to imagine.