Bringing Back the Mines and a Way of Life: Populism and the Politics of Extraction

摘要

Conflicts over resource extraction are key political issues in the contemporary United States and are a mobilizing issue for right-wing populism exemplified by President Donald Trump's claims of ending the "war on coal." Through a political ecology framework attentive to culture, discourse, and history, I examine how mining is symbolic of broader cultural, geographic, and class divides. Mining is mobilized in extractive populism through rhetoric of giving power back to the people, insiders versus outsiders, resource nationalism, and cutting burdensome government regulations. I study the emblematic case of the rural Iron Range mining region in northern Minnesota and the recent rightward swing in this historically Democratic stronghold, which I argue is intertwined with the micropolitics of struggles over proposed copper mines. Through ethnographic observations and interviews with local community and political leaders, workers, and residents, I find that support for mining among white, working-class, and rural residents is made meaningful through nostalgia for preserving mining as a way of life and anger at outsiders disrupting their livelihoods and extractive moral economy. These discourses resonated with the populist, nationalist, and racist rhetoric of Trump's campaign. I argue that place-based and class identities and social imaginaries linked to mining are an important dynamic in emergent authoritarian populism and for understanding what motivates reactionary political movements and why populist politicians use mining to construct authenticity.