ADVERSE SELECTION.

Kevin Williamson went on a trip through Appalachia.  For all of the efforts of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and all the other do-gooders who have taken up the cause, the area remains a poverty pocket in part because the most ambitious people have long since bailed.

Like its black urban counterparts, the Big White Ghetto suffers from a whole trainload of social problems, but the most significant among them may be adverse selection: Those who have the required work skills, the academic ability, or the simple desperate native enterprising grit to do so get the hell out as fast as they can, and they have been doing that for decades. As they go businesses disappear, institutions fall into decline, social networks erode, and there is little or nothing left over for those who remain. It’s a classic economic death spiral: The quality of the available jobs is not enough to keep good workers, and the quality of the available workers is not enough to attract good jobs. These little towns located at remote wide spots in helical mountain roads are hard enough to get to if you have a good reason to be here. If you don’t have a good reason, you aren’t going to think of one.

It's not that these parts of the country suffered a singularly bad day, such as when The Pennsylvania Railroad reduced the payroll in the Altoona, Penn., backshops, or when Big Steel saw the folly of maintaining small open-hearth works in the Mahoning Valley.  "The employed and upwardly mobile leave, taking their children, their capital, and their habits with them, clean clear of the Big White Ghetto, while the unemployed, the dependent, and the addicted are once again left behind."  There still is a sort of commerce, based on public assistance, and causing furrowed brows among advocates of the Nanny State.

Once a month, the debit card accounts of those receiving what we still call “food stamps” are credited with a few hundred dollars — about $500 for a family of four, on average — which are immediately converted into a unit of exchange, in this case cases of soda. On the day the accounts are credited, local establishments accepting EBT cards — and all across the Big White Ghetto, “We Accept Food Stamps” is the new E pluribus unum — are swamped with locals using their public benefits to buy cases and cases of soda; reports put the number at 30 to 40 cases for some buyers. Those cases of soda then either go on to another retailer, who buys them at 50 cents on the dollar, in effect laundering those $500 in monthly benefits into $250 in cash — a considerably worse rate than your typical organized-crime money launderer offers — or else they go into the local black-market economy, where they can be used as currency in such ventures as the dealing of unauthorized prescription painkillers — by “pillbillies,” as they are known at the sympathetic establishments in Florida that do so much business with Kentucky and West Virginia that the relevant interstate bus service is nicknamed the “OxyContin Express.”

The naïve technocrats, in their naïvete, labor under the delusion that taking pop off the distribution list will somehow defund the druggies.

Last year, 18 big-city mayors, Mike Bloomberg and Rahm Emanuel among them, sent the federal government a letter asking that soda be removed from the list of items eligible to be used for EBT purchases. Mayor Bloomberg delivered his standard sermon about obesity, nutrition, and the multiplex horrors of sugary drinks. But none of those mayors gets what’s really going on with sugar water and food stamps. Take soda off the list and there will be another fungible commodity to take its place. It’s possible that a great many cans of soda used as currency go a long time without ever being cracked — in a town this small, those selling soda to EBT users and those buying it back at half price are bound to be some of the same people, the soda merely changing hands ceremonially to mark the real exchange of value — pillbilly wampum.

Ultimately, the pop-to-pill economy suffers from a toxic mix of well-meaning enablement and contemporary relativism.

In effect, welfare has made Appalachia into a big and sparsely populated housing project — too backward to thrive, but just comfortable enough to keep the underclass in place. There is no cure for poverty, because there is no cause of poverty — poverty is the natural condition of the human animal. It is not as though labor and enterprise are unknown here: Digging coal is hard work, farming is hard work, timbering is hard work — so hard that the best and brightest long ago packed up for Cincinnati or Pittsburgh or Memphis or Houston. There is to this day an Appalachian bar in Detroit and ex-Appalachian enclaves around the country. The lesson of the Big White Ghetto is the same as the lessons we learned about the urban housing projects in the late 20th century: The best public-policy treatment we have for poverty is dilution. But like the old project towers, the Appalachian draw culture produces concentration, a socioeconomic Salton Sea that becomes more toxic every year.

“The government gives people checks, but nobody teaches them how to live,” says Teresa Barrett, a former high-school principal who now publishes the Owsley County newspaper. “You have people on the draw getting $3,000 a month, and they still can’t live. When I was at the school, we’d see kids come in from a long weekend just starved to death. But you’ll see those parents at the grocery store with their 15 cases of Pepsi, and that’s all they’ve got in the buggy — you know what they’re doing. Everybody knows, nobody does anything. And when you have that many people on the draw, that’s a big majority of voters.”

There's still not enough "seeing how to live" in the shadow of the projects, either.

If nothing else, Election 2020 revealed a deeply divided nation -- two Americas, not one -- though that dividing line marked anything but an even or obvious split. A startling number of Americans are trapped in wretched conditions and hungry for a clean break with the status quo. On the other hand, the rampant voter suppression and racialized gerrymandering of the last decade of American politics suggests that extremists from the wealthier America will go to remarkable lengths to undercut the power of those at the bottom of this society. They have proven ready to use every tool and scare tactic of racist division and subterfuge imaginable to stop poor Black, Latino, Asian, Indigenous, and white potential voters from building new and transformative alliances, including a new electorate.

It’s time to move beyond the defeatist myth of the Solid South or even the dulling comfort of a Midwestern “blue wall.” Across the South and the Midwest, there are voter-suppression states still to win, not for a party, but for a fusion movement of the many. The same could be true for the coasts and the Southwest, where there remains a sleeping giant of poor and low-income people yet to be pulled into political action. If this country is ever going to be built back better, to borrow Joe Biden's campaign pledge, it’s time to turn to its abandoned corners; to, that is, the other America of Martin Luther King that still haunts us, whether we know it or not.

That could get interesting, if the coronavirus lockdowns that are destroying the lives of people who weren't in a position, back in March, to work from home and stay in safe pods, also create a coalition of people who will not be made into vassals.

The challenge, and Mr Williamson has recognized that, is that there's a tension between a political order in which the Powers that Be don't treat fellow citizens as vassals, and a political order in which the right to be left alone might leave people behind and in a bad place, as in the hollows and in the slums.

What America needs most right now, then, is boring old bourgeois libertarianism: the lived philosophy of peacefully enjoying life and property while mostly minding your own business. That philosophy rules out attempts to enforce orthodoxies of thought and expression, no matter how good the cause, and refuses to treat other people's lives and property as dispensable in the pursuit of political goals, no matter how noble.

When people reject those principles, they create civic spaces where no one can thrive—in the long run, not even them.

The current pass has been a long time in coming. The Beats and the hippies were for the most part in a position to opt out when it was fun and opt back in because it was still possible. Much the same thing is true of the credentialed nihilists who thought deconstructing bourgeois norms was an interesting exercise, but did they give up their tenured posts?  The people left in the decaying neighborhoods had no such succor.  Buckle in.