How Liberal Contempt Destroys Democratic Politics
I’ve never been called a freeloader before.
But the other day, I opened Substack to be smacked in the face with an article – written by a serious person with a platform who should know better – about how Red States are freeloaders that should simply be cut off.
While it is true that I live in a (very) Blue District, I also live in Red America. And so, by the very nature of my geography, as a Red State resident I was described as a “moocher” and “the national equivalent of the roommate who never pays rent, empties your fridge, and then has the audacity to lecture you about your ‘lifestyle choices.'”
(I’ll forgive this city slicker for not knowing that the states he specifically calls out in his piece are agricultural states that quite literally fill your fridge. So his choice of analogy was odd. But perhaps he doesn’t eat rice, or chicken, or eggs.)
He described Red America as “the poorest states in the union, hemorrhaging jobs, shedding population, collapsing in every public measure – yet gorging on Washington’s dollars.”
His solution is to tie federal dollars to promised adherence to progressive policies – an idea that seems eerily similar to the undemocratic ultimatums that Trump has given Blue State governors in the past.
I was shaking as I read the last sentences: “Red states are not the heartland. They are the dead weight. They are the anchor dragging America backwards while blue America tries to sail forward. … The day we stop paying their bills will be the day they experience the self-reliance they fetishize but have never once practiced.”
With trembling fingers, I scrolled down to the comments. I assumed that there I would find people pushing back and making some of the obvious counterpoints, pointing out that achieving this revenge fantasy would cause massive collective pain, and explaining the strategic, political, and moral bankruptcy of the whole proposition.
As a proud Democrat, I thought I’d see someone sticking their neck out for people like me.
Instead, I saw haughty cheers:
“Why should my brother in NJ be subsidizing welfare hillbillies in Kentucky and other states?”
“[T]hese people are like bratty teenagers that parents keep flush with money. They need to learn to accept responsibility for themselves.”
“[W]hile they wallow in failure and decline – their favorite pastime is biting the hands that feed them. Eff ’em – I’ve had it – the brutal truth is that the USA would be better off without them.”
My heart literally skipped a beat.
This kind of talk isn’t snappy political banter. It’s the kind of sneering contempt that has driven working-class Americans away from the Democratic Party for decades. It’s emotional napalm. And it’s exactly the wrong response to our current political crisis.
So allow me to, as gently as I can, explain why this kind of thinking is destructive. Why it ignores the history of huge chunks of the country that are right to be angry, and who have well-founded historical complaints with Democrats. Why its sanctimonious air feeds directly into Republican talking points and makes my job as a Red State Democratic organizer monumentally harder. And why it ignores the opportunity that we have to win back these voters.
But mostly why we need to be – and can be – better.
First, let me say that I understand the emotions that lead to this kind of talk. As a resident of a Blue District within a Red State, I’m intimately familiar with the intense frustration that comes from feeling under-appreciated for the benefits your Democratic policies provide for the collective – while simultaneously being maligned by Republican policies and politicians.
St. Louis, where I live, is the most liberal part of the state, and is also its economic engine. I can literally look around my neighborhood and see immediate infrastructure needs that are not being met because my tax dollars are being used for Republican initiatives in other parts of the state. So please know that I come at this from a familiar place, and from personal experience.
But, speaking as a Red State constituent, I can also tell you from experience that hurting Red States doesn’t hurt Red State politicians, which should be the subject of the ire. Republican politicians have proven time and again that they do not care about the people in their state as much as they care about power, and attention, and donors, and dollars. So cutting federal disaster relief, Medicaid expansion, or even agricultural subsidies won’t hurt those politicians one whit.
Frankly, it will only reinforce their narrative that Democrats don’t care about anyone but coastal elites and big corporate donors. Just voicing the idea gives Republicans something to point to on conservative radio, saying that Democrats are intolerant, sanctimonious, and anti-democratic – and that we don’t respect the autonomy of anyone we disagree with.
In other words, we give them the ability to brand us as the very thing we’re trying to fight.
But while hurting Red States doesn’t hurt the politicians, it does hurt the people living in those states. And lest you say that “Red State voters get what they vote for,” please understand that decades of gerrymandering and lack of engagement by Democrats has caused massive voter depression. These states are so gerrymandered into one-party rule that plenty of folks don’t think there’s any reason to get out and vote. In plenty of rural districts, Democrats don’t run nominees for local and state legislative races – and those who do run are woefully undersupported – leaving huge chunks of the country without a Democrat to vote for even if they wanted to.
It shows in Red State turnout. In 2024, of 4.4 million registered voters in Missouri, 1.7 million voted for Donald Trump. 1.2 million voted for Kamala Harris. And 1.4 million didn’t vote at all.
In Tennessee, of 4.8 million registered voters, 2 million for Trump, 1 million voted for Harris. And 1.8 million didn’t vote at all.
In both states, the second place winner in 2024 wasn’t Harris.
It was “did not vote.”
Should we really punish all 6.2 million Missouri residents (including the 1.2 million who voted for Harris) because less than a third of them voted for Donald Trump?
To further drive home the point, Republicans in Missouri are trying to jam through a change to our state constitution to make it harder to bring a citizen’s initiative petition. That’s because progressive ballot initiatives keep winning statewide and these Republicans don’t like that one bit. In 2024, even while Kamala Harris got 40% of Missouri’s vote, progressive ballot measures like protecting abortion and paid sick leave passed with over 50% of the vote.
Friend, when over 50% of the electorate agrees with you on policy but won’t vote for a person with a D behind their name, the issue isn’t that these people are ill-informed or sadistic. They’re not ignorant.
They’re angry.
And, frankly, plenty of folks living in Red States have historical reasons to distrust and be angry with Democrats.
The economic struggles that led to Red States being so-called “moochers” didn’t happen in a vacuum. They’re the result of decades of trade policies – promoted and supported by Democrats – that prioritized financial centers over manufacturing communities, and resulted in corporate decisions to move production overseas. Red America didn’t choose to have their factories close and their young people leave for opportunities elsewhere – but that was the end result of policies that were forced down their throats by Democratic politicians who promised them their fears were overblown, and everything would be just grand.
Turns out, those fears were justified and everything wasn’t grand.
In 1993, Bill Clinton signed NAFTA into law, proclaiming that it would be a net job-creator within 5 years. Instead, literally millions of manufacturing jobs in small factory towns were lost when companies moved their operations from rural America to Mexico, where the labor and land was even cheaper than they’d been able to find in the states.
Then, in the waning days of the Clinton administration, the U.S. signed trade agreements that led to China joining the World Trade Organization. The resulting so-called “China trade shock” hit rural manufacturing towns hard. Together with NAFTA, it was a one-two punch that left small town America reeling – even while the rest of the country enjoyed lower prices and more trade.
So this whole idea that Red America is the “anchor dragging America backwards while blue America tries to sail forward” is rich, considering that “blue America” fashioned its sail from resources taken from the heartland.
This decades-long pain has not been forgotten by Rural Americans, in part because it’s their lived experience and in part because GOP politicians know to remind them.
Trump hooked right into that collective memory in a 2016 Ohio political rally: “Ohio has lost one in four manufacturing jobs since NAFTA, a deal signed by Bill Clinton and supported strongly by Hillary Clinton. Remember, every time you see a closed factory or a wiped-out community in Ohio, it was essentially caused by the Clintons.”
Is it any surprise that a person who shared the last name of the president who signed NAFTA didn’t inspire confidence of voters living in factory towns?
And at the 20-year anniversary of China’s entrance to the WTO, Senator Tom Cotton described it as “the Great Hollowing of our nation’s industrial base, economy, and working class.”
He continued:
“Millions of Americans lost good-paying, blue-collar jobs to the “China trade shock” in the years that followed [China’s entrance to the WTO]. Countless small towns, main streets, and working-class neighborhoods were gutted and boarded up. Michigan lost 24 percent of its manufacturing jobs, Ohio lost 27 percent of its manufacturing jobs, and my home state lost 26 percent of all of our manufacturing jobs since China joined the World Trade Organization. Families were shattered and communities crumbled. The opioid crisis then killed thousands of those who were left behind.”
People in these areas describe being hammered with wave after wave after wave – first by NAFTA, then the 2001 recession (which hit rural manufacturing especially hard), then the impact of importing cheap Chinese goods, then the opioid epidemic, then the 2008 financial crisis when they saw Barack Obama run on change – just to turn around and bail out bankers who were considered too important and “too big to fail” even as their neighbors lost their homes.
And – unlike the big public bailouts for banks and automobile manufacturing – nobody seemed to notice, let alone come up with a plan to help save Main Street.
Again reinforcing the (incorrect) idea that Democrats believe coastal elites are worth saving, while regular working class folks are worthless.
To this day, rural voters blame Democrats and NAFTA for decimating manufacturing towns. Perhaps now you can see how plenty of Red State voters believe Democrats are bad for jobs, even when all the charts and graphs and data say otherwise.
It’s because policies Democrats supported were bad for jobs in those communities. The people in those towns saw it firsthand.
And real life experience beats a slick chart any day.
It didn’t have to be this bad – Democrats could have done a lot more to help these communities, or at least listen to and reflect their struggles. But starting around 2008 Democrats left those areas – intentionally – using a strategy that focused on suburbs and “flippable” districts, presumably in an effort to be efficient with donor funding.
So right at the very time small rural communities were feeling massive pain and needed to know we’d be there for them, we stopped showing up. We stopped running in rural gerrymandered races, and stopped funding the races where a nominee did step up.
Even today, you’ll see national Democrats talking about running and investing in “the races that matter.”
You don’t have to be a political insider to understand what that means.
It means that my state – a Red State – doesn’t matter. And therefore, neither do I.
Let’s be clear, too, about what it means to “cut off Red States.”
That means abandoning Black communities in Birmingham, Latino families in Houston, labor organizers in St. Louis, and progressive activists in Little Rock. That means cutting off people working on some of the country’s most important voting rights cases, labor rights disputes, climate justice programs, and abortion access initiatives.
That’s both morally wrong and politically suicidal. We can’t build lasting majorities by writing off entire regions of the country, while turning our back on our most deeply held values of inclusion and mutual support.
And that leads me to the most damaging aspect of this argument: it perfectly validates every Republican talking point about Democratic elitism.
When rural voters say Democrats look down on them, dismiss their concerns, and don’t understand their lives, a Democratic voice literally calling them “dead weight” and advocating for cutting off their communities becomes their Exhibit A.
This kind of talk doesn’t just hurt feelings. It loses elections. It depresses enthusiasm. It makes the job of rural and Red State Democratic organizers vastly more difficult. How are you supposed to convince someone that Democrats care about their community when Democrats have not only failed to show up and run nominees in their elections for cycles, but are actually publicly calling for economic warfare against their state?
Democratic politicians have been losing ground in rural America for decades, and this kind of attitude is a big reason why. You can’t build a political coalition while simultaneously expressing contempt for large chunks of the country.
We can – we must – do better.
Instead of posting misguided revenge fantasies about cutting off federal aid, we need to invest in the long-term organizing work needed to build political infrastructure in Red States. That means supporting local Democratic organizations, listening to rural organizers in the field about what they actually need, and recognizing that political change requires a long term commitment – not just showing up during presidential years.
It means understanding that many voters in Red States actually support progressive policies – higher minimum wages, expanded healthcare, infrastructure investment—even if they don’t vote for candidates with a “D” next to their name. The problem isn’t their values or their beliefs; it’s often because they don’t believe that Democratic politicians respect or understand them.
It means recognizing that federal spending on Red State infrastructure and disaster relief isn’t charity. It’s an investment in the economic foundation that supports the entire country.
Friend, the stakes are too high for this nonsense.
As a blue-district resident of a Red State, I understand the emotions that lead folks to throw up their hands and call for cutting off states like mine. But I use that rage as fuel – fuel to double down on my efforts to support people who are on the front lines running and organizing in Red States. After all, we only make progress by showing up.
Democracy isn’t a zero-sum game between regions. It’s a collective project that requires all of us – urban and rural, coastal and heartland, Blue and Red – to make it work.
The moment we start writing each other off is the moment we lose what makes America worth fighting for in the first place.
Let’s not let our frustration and anger blind us to the task at hand – and the people fighting at our side.
We’ve got enough work to do.
So let’s get to work.
Actions for the Week of September 9, 2025
Friend, things may be heavy – but you can lighten that load by doing something small – a “small deed” – to bring about the world that you want to see. In doing so we tell the world, the universe, our leaders – and most importantly, ourselves – that we will not go quietly into that good night.
I call it Action Therapy.
That’s why in each Tuesday post I share a few “small things” – usually a Small Thing to Read, a Small Event to Attend, and a Small Call to Make or Action to Take. My intention here is to give you actions you can tuck into your week with ease – and know that you’re doing something today to make tomorrow better.
Join me in doing so. It matters.
Small Call to Make or Action to Take
First, in case you were unaware, I lead a national organization called Every State Blue that crowdfunds for underfunded Democratic nominees running for state legislature in Missouri, Ohio, and Tennessee – and also supports underfunded Congressional nominees. If you believe we should run and support nominees in every corner of every state across the country, join one of our projects! Just go to https://everystateblue.org and click “projects” in the Menu. Or support our work here.
Second, let’s talk about RFK, Jr.
Last week I laid out some of the damage that RFK has done to our public health system, which really can’t be overstated. Since then, RFK appeared at a Senate hearing where he was challenged by Senators from both parties.
Now reporting shows that Republican pollsters “privately warned GOP lawmakers last week that overhauling vaccine policies is politically dangerous, citing data that nearly three-quarters of Trump voters believe vaccines save lives.”
This is literally a life-or-death situation for Americans.
It’s time to call your Senators and your Representative to demand the removal of RFK, Jr.
The capitol switchboard is 202-224-3121
Script: Hi, my name is [name] and I’m a constituent from [zip code/city]. I’m calling on the Senator/Congress(wo)man to demand that RFK, Jr. be removed as HHS Secretary. He is undermining public health – and is endangering my health and the health of my family. It is shocking to me that he could continue to dismantle our public health system and Americans’ confidence in that system without any action by the Senator/Congress(wo)man. Even if the Senator/Congress(wo)man didn’t believe that he would undermine public health to this extent when he was confirmed, that he is doing so is now very clear. Fire him.
Small Thing to Read: Everything the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative Has Written (Not Really Kidding)
There are a lot of great organizations doing good work trying to organize and message in rural America. One of those organizations is Rural Urban Bridge Initiative. Their working papers on how Democrats can message and win in Rural America are top-notch and if you found this content interesting I hope you’ll check them out.
Read Can Democrats Succeed in Rural America? here: https://ruralurbanbridge.org/our-work/distilling-best-practices
I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention Rural Organizing, Rural GroundGame, and the Rural Democracy Initiative, which has such an incredible dashboard that I bookmarked it during the 2024 election.
Small Event to Attend: Beyond Resistance
As it turns out RUBI is having an event on September 10 for their Beyond Resistance launch with Congressman Ro Khanna. Honestly, it sounds incredible: To preserve our democracy and to rebuild our fractured nation, we need to mobilize a much broader and more diverse base of people, and offer a compelling vision that addresses the grievances of rural communities and working-class people.
Stand with working-class Americans across race, in cities and the countryside, and advocate for local solutions and transformative policies that put economic and political power back in the hands of the people.
Hear from our featured speaker, Congressman Ro Khanna (D), CA-17 and others on why we need to go Beyond Resistance, and learn about actions you can take.
Read more about the initiative here: https://ruralurbanbridge.org/beyondresistance
And Register for the 7pm eastern zoom live event here.
Thanks for reading, friend – I’m glad to see you here! You’re making a difference, I promise.
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