Between the year 2000 and the end of that decade, North Carolina was the sixth-fastest growing state in the country. But even as the metros and resorts boomed, eight counties lost population. That divergence starkly illustrated the unfairness generated by a global economy that was hard on mill workers and farmers alike. Arguably, rural hardship contributed to the eruption of conservatism in the 2010 midterm elections. Since the GOP took the legislature, however, rural decline has not reversed but instead has markedly accelerated.

If eight counties losing population was a trend that cast a darker light on modern North Carolina demography, the emptying out of rural areas in the NCGOP era has escalated to crisis levels. In the decade since Republicans took control of state government, a shocking 51 counties have lost population. The vast majority of these stricken counties are rural, and a great many vote for conservative Republicans. They are experiencing profound loss and attendant human suffering at a time when the state’s new governing establishment has sharply reoriented political power toward homogeneous rural jurisdictions.

This has come about despite lavish promises by Republicans such as former state Senate Majority Leader Harry Brown that tax cuts, deregulation, and union-busting would bring vitality back to the North Carolina countryside. Site Selection magazine noted that industrial prospects are finding it hard to procure incentives for projects located in urban areas, as the city-haters in the legislative majority steered economic-development funding toward the rural districts that Republicans represent. But instead of a small-town renaissance, the austerity plans of Republican leaders have coincided with their own homes and constituents inexorably hollowing out.

Beyond their core economic failures, Republicans have slighted small-town North Carolina in the area of public investment. Lack of access to healthcare reflects the failure of government to meet a crucial human need, but rural-based Republicans like Senator Phil Berger have maintained a veritable blockade against Medicaid Expansion. Rural hospitals are closing, and rural Republicans remain resolutely indifferent. On another front, they refuse to fund a “Sound Basic Education” for students living in under-resourced rural school districts. North Carolina’s Depression-era Governor O. Max Gardner had the clairvoyance to centralize education funding so that the poor districts could keep up with the rich. Under GOP rule, urban districts have been able to partially compensate for state-level austerity by increasing their own investments. And yet rural schools languish.

In fairness, rural decline has much to do with forces beyond state government’s control–but then Republican state government should not have promised rural voters that state government would solve their decline. Fatuous dreams of free-market utopia were foisted upon the residents of our declining, decaying rural foundation, and the results came to naught. Sometimes voters get what they asked for, or what a cynic would say they deserve. In this case, I completely disagree. The people who live in rural North Carolina deserve a government that cares about them not just as a supposedly virtuous counterpoint to urban licentiousness, but as citizens whose prosperity matters, and whose communities should be saved.

Alexander H. Jones

Alexander Jones is an original contributor to PoliticsNC.