Scaling Post-Neoliberalism: A Crisis of Neoliberal Hegemony and the Rise of Authoritarian Populism in Appalachian Post-Coal Politics

Abstract

In this paper, I investigate how hegemony operates at regional scales. Studying the politics of post-coal mining economic transition in the Appalachian region of the United States, I find distinct but intertwined crises of hegemony shaping regional politics. The collapse of the Appalachian coal industry, and a crisis of coal industry hegemony, is articulating with a transnational crisis of neoliberal hegemony. Drawing on debates about the crisis of neoliberal hegemony (Fraser 2019; Brown 2019) and potential emergence of post-neoliberalism (Hall, Massey, and Rustin 2015; Peck and Theodore 2019; Davies and Gane 2021; Cooper 2021; Slobodian 2021; Geva 2021), I examine how the rise of regional authoritarian populist politics occurs within a wider-scale crisis of neoliberal hegemony. Presenting data from eighteen months of ethnographic research in the coalfields, I show how local politicians and policymakers enact policies that evidence ‘actually existing nihilism’ (Peck and Theodore 2019, 263; see also Brown 2019) in the face of a collapsing regional economy. I find performative resource populism and nihilist developmentalism from state governor’s offices to county courthouse. I conclude that, in a moment of hegemonic ‘interregnum’ (Gramsci 1971, 276; see also Fraser 2019) at multiple scales, mainstream neoliberal policymakers in Appalachia are failing to provide visions of a future that people can believe in. This failure of neoliberal ideology has created the conditions for the emergence of authoritarian populist political figures offering short term, hyperreactionary, and ultra-conservative politics. What is unclear, however, is whether such politics offer sustaining visions for Appalachia’s future.