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"They went plumb down crazy in Washington. / They're talking about closing the mines. / They're gonna bleed us all dry from the inside out. / They don't care that much about the little man or the calloused hands. / It's a way of life 'round here, just like it's always been. / Coal keeps the lights on."
-Jimmy Rose, "Coal Keeps the Lights On," America's Got Talent, July 9, 2013
May 5, 2016. "And I'll tell you what folks," presidential candidate Donald Trump preaches to a crowd in Charleston, West Virginia, a striking mix of working-class and white-collar citizens attired in mining coveralls and hardhats, suits and dresses:
We're gonna put the miners back to work. We're gonna get those mines open. Ah, coal country, what they've done. And how 'bout Hillary Clinton? I was watching her three or four weeks ago. [crowd boos] See, I'm gonna put the miners back to work, and she said, "I'm gonna put the miners and the mines out of business" . . . . Folks, you're amazing people and we're gonna take care of a lot of years of horrible abuse. ("Donald")
As this excerpt and the "Make America Great Again" signs waving around the Charleston arena typify, Trump welcomes a class-striated electorate into a community of nostalgia: a diverse constituency united by pride in region and industry, longing to recover a golden age of jobs, and loss caused by years of "abusive" regulation and globalization. At first glance, such yearning doesn't seem to hold up to fact checking. It's "a sadness without an object," folklorist Susan Stewart describes, ". . . a longing that of necessity is inauthentic because it does not take part in lived experience" (23). Black lung, monopolistic company towns, homicidal Baldwin-Felts guards, and layoffs well before the EPA-there was no golden age of coal in Appalachia.
To be sure, outside of Trump's community of nostalgia, the press hasn't been silent about such "inauthentic" memories. Throughout 2016, '17, and '18, headlines asked, "Can We Stop the Politics of Nostalgia That Have Dominated 2016?" (Mudde); critiqued "Trump's Rhetoric ofWhite Nostalgia" (Brownstein); predicted, "Donald Trump's Budget is Nostalgic and Deeply Destructive-And It Will Backfire" (Shephard); and explained "How Nostalgia for White Christian America Drove So...