The voices of Appalachians as experts on their own condition are largely absent in the standard “Trump Country” think piece. The emotional politics of this genre cast Appalachians as a mournful and dysfunctional “other” who represent the darkest failures of the American Dream while seeking to prescribe how we—the presumed audience of indifferent elites—should feel about their collective fate. Whether readers find these protagonists sympathetic or self-sabotaging, “Trump Country” writing leaves its audience to assume that Appalachians have not earned the right to belong in the narrative of
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