The Hillbilly Highway

 

Bidenomics and the Hillbilly Highway:
"It does not require an advanced degree to decipher one key strategic calculus underlying President Joe Biden’s multi-pronged industrial policy agenda, designed to bolster domestic manufacturing while speeding the transition to a green economy and now nicknamed “Bidenomics” by friend and foe alike. In the nine months beginning in August 2022, more than 75 percent of new investment subsidized by the CHIPS and Inflation Reduction Acts, Bidenomics’ legislative centerpieces, went towards semiconductor and clean energy projects located in Republican congressional districts. Two deep-red states, Georgia and South Carolina, led all others during that time in newly announced manufacturing endeavors. The southeast generally, a bastion of GOP control, has attracted more federally subsidized projects than any other region in the country.

"Not content to let such numbers speak for themselves, the White House spent much of the year hammering home to voters just who they have to thank for the windfall. So it was that Vice President Kamala Harris was dispatched to Dalton, Georgia, in the heart of administration-scourge Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district, to tout a new $2.5 billion investment by a South Korean clean energy company that promised to “create 2,500 more jobs right here in Georgia.” As Biden himself reminded an audience in West Columbia, South Carolina, home to a new solar energy partnership made possible by tax incentives provided by the IRA, “Every Republican member of the House in this state voted to repeal the clean energy provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act that…attracted all these jobs.”

"Bidenomics’ regional tilt does smack of a crudely tactical focus on the 2024 elections. But it also makes good economic sense. No region in the country has witnessed a greater decline in its manufacturing employment rate during the twenty-first century than the southeast. After gaining jobs during the first rounds of deindustrialization in the 1970s and 1980s, the South experienced catastrophic job loss beginning in the 1990s, as trade liberalization measures exposed critical southern industries, textiles and apparel most of all, to new forms of import competition. The political consequences of these developments, meanwhile, had begun to make themselves clear long before Marjorie Taylor Greene and her MAGA-brethren appeared on the scene. Recent research has demonstrated that it was free trade policies authored by Democrats during the 1990s, like NAFTA and the lifting of import restrictions on textiles, which prompted white working-class voters in the region to abandon the party in droves—much more decisively, in fact, than they had after the passage of the historic civil rights bills of the 1960s. Regional deindustrialization, as much if not more so than the politics of racial resentment, explains the current era of one-party Republican rule in the South.

"In other ways, the regional economic imbalance that the Biden administration’s industrial policy aims to address is nothing new. Throughout much of the twentieth century, the relative underdevelopment of the southern industrial sector had far-reaching political effects both inside the region and out. In some parts of the South, the weakness of southern industry empowered a plantocratic elite who were the architects and fiercest defenders of Jim Crow. Elsewhere, it paved the way for the ascendance of an oligarchy of mining interests to strip the region of its natural wealth and embed the South in a carbon capitalist regime that endures to this day. And across the region, a paucity of jobs in the most densely organized industrial sectors, combined with the generally inhospitable political climate, kept unions scarce, workers relatively powerless, and wages desperately low throughout the heyday of the modern American labor movement.

"For decades, one common way that poor white southerners responded to these and other symptoms of the economic underdevelopment of the region was by getting out. Millions of them—at least eight million, perhaps many more—headed north, to the booming cities and factory towns of the industrial Midwest, along what came to be known over the first two-thirds of the twentieth-century as the “hillbilly highway.”

                      by Max Fraser, author of The Hillbilly Highway (Princeton University Press.