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In rural north Georgia this week, Democrat Eric Gisler defeated Republican Mack Guest to flip Georgia House Seat 121. “I think we had the right message for the time,” Gisler told the AP. “A lot of what I would call traditional conservatives held their nose and voted Republican last year on the promise of low prices and whatever else they were selling,” Gisler said. “But they hadn’t received that.”
Instead of relief at the checkout line, the people of Oconee County have received a steady stream of propaganda from the White House, amplified by local Republican politicians, that blames immigrants for their troubles and offers cruelty as a distraction. It’s as if the tabloid covers from the grocery store’s check out aisle have come to life in 30 second reels from the Department of Homeland Security, begging Americans to ignore what they cannot afford to put in the cart and claim an attack on someone who doesn’t look like them as a win.
North Georgians aren’t buying it. It turns out, most Americans aren’t.
Oconee County is a lot like the rural communities where we grew up in North Carolina. Family farms and the communities of people that grew up around them have been declining in these places for decades. Their Baptist and Methodist churches hold graduation Sundays every spring to celebrate their best and brightest, but they also mourn a little bit. They know their young people are leaving and won’t be coming back, except maybe for Christmas and funerals.
The life that was in these places has been passing away for some time, but new things are also happening in places like north Georgia. Jonathan happens to know this corner of the South fairly well because, for the better part of a decade, his wife served on the board of a Christian refugee resettlement nonprofit the next county over, on the east side of Athens. When she was in meetings all those years, Jonathan used to take their kids around the farm and the county, feeling like he’d ended up back home in another state - a familiar landscape peopled with folks who didn’t know all of his kin.
He remembers the year he noticed a new Asian food mart that had opened in an old storefront in a little north Georgia town. Refugees from Myanmar had been resettled in the US by the local nonprofit. The rolling hills of North Georgia reminded these Baptist farmers of home. Rather than head to Clarksville or Atlanta for jobs and an apartment, they saved their money and bought farm houses at auctions. They fixed up the old places themselves, enrolled their kids in the local schools, joined local churches, and built the community that the local food mart was serving.
For the past generation, the kids who’ve grown up in many so-called “red counties” have been as racially and ethnically diverse as their peers in urban communities. They don’t believe the propaganda they hear about immigrants because, in many cases, the people the memes try to demonize are the families they grew up playing soccer with on the weekends.
At the beginning of this year, as the Trump regime was setting its agenda, they thought immigration was their strongest political issue. Years of fear mongering seemed to have paid off. Dramatically increasing extreme enforcement became a central policy issue. They tripled the budget of ICE in the same reconciliation package that slashed Medicaid and SNAP while giving tax breaks to billionaires. They bet that the red meat of racist attacks on immigrants would satisfy the real hunger of hurting people. Turns out, they were wrong.
After the 2020 census, when Republicans in the Georgia legislature felt confident enough in their control of the public narrative that they could re-draw the state house districts to favor more Republicans, they gerrymandered Athens - a college town - to dilute the power of its Black and younger voters by splitting them into districts that stretch out into the surrounding counties. Because they assumed those counties to be safely “red,” the Republicans thought they’d found a way to lock themselves into power.
But their math didn’t account for the moral collapse of MAGA.
The map-makers in Atlanta assumed that the distorted moral narrative that created the mirage of rural red counties would continue to prop up their political careers. By passing racist maps to dilute the power of Black voters and spreading racist propaganda that demonizes non-white immigrants, they thought they could pump up the political power of a shrinking white minority. They didn’t count on white folks in rural Georgia waking up the fact that racism hasn’t done very much to help them either.
This story is, in a nut shell, the moral fusion movement that we wrote about in our book White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy [ [link removed] ]. It is possible in every state in America - and, increasingly, it is happening. The moral collapse that we have witnessed under the Trump regime has been excruciating, outrageous, and exhausting. The damage is real, and it demands mourning, accountability, and work toward a viable alternative. But this level of collapse also reveals the possibility for a Third Reconstruction. Now is the time to build the movement that not only says, “No” to extremism but also says, “Yes” to the work of building a political economy where everyone can thrive.
This week offers more concrete evidence that we can build a moral fusion coalition for that work anywhere.
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We hope you can join us next Tuesday, December 16, at noon ET for the next conversation in our Advent in a Time of Authoritarianism with Bill McKibben .
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