What happened to Ohio?
This article in The Atlantic (an excerpt from the author's upcoming book Paper Girl), draws a connection between the decline of Midwestern industrial towns and the rise in support for the far right:
Factories consolidated, too. After Grimes was sold and resold, it was acquired by the conglomerate now known as Honeywell Aerospace, its workforce having dwindled from 1,400 employees in its postwar heyday to roughly 650. In letters Mom sent me over the years, she described the closures of other factories where her friends worked, including the Windex maker and a union shop that made appliance parts. When the Corn Nuts facility shut down, it hurt not only workers but also local corn growers, she told me.
In a county where Donald Trump took 73 percent of the vote in 2020, readers regularly phoned the newspaperโs editor, Brenda Burns, to castigate her for running Associated Press wire copy, which they deemed fake news. โThe AP is a bunch of liberal wokesters not reporting the truth,โ one woman shouted on the phone, begging Burns to run copy from The Epoch Times, a far-right religious newspaper, instead. A schoolmate of mine from a prominent Republican family, the caller had taken her children out of school to attend the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. Some of my old friends were finding community not in religion but in QAnon, sharing links to stories about Tom Hanksโs alleged pedophilia and the belief that Michelle Obama is a trans woman. An ex-boyfriend, a liberal Deadhead I hadnโt seen in 38 years, was now an ardent fan of Vladimir Putin.
You have to notice a pattern, here.
It ends on a more optimistic note -- reminding us that perhaps we are not as divided as we seem.