One of my friends, recently, referred to Indiana and Ohio as "lost". I have to say I agree with her. We have "lost" Indiana for certain, possibly also Ohio, for the foreseeable future.
What does it look like for a state to be "lost"? I can only tell you from my own experience. When I was 17, in my senior year of high school, I moved from New Jersey to Kentucky. I was very immediately struck by the stark and profound differences in my quality of education. Now, the high school in New Jersey was well and truly exceptional, yes, but the school in Louisville that I went to had a reputation for being one of the better public high schools. And there was no comparison. I had six classes, all of which were AP classes, and in five of them it barely mattered if I showed up or not. My "math" class consisted of the teacher standing up there for five minutes and then giving us the rest of the period to do our "homework". They didn't have anybody who could teach me German at my level of proficiency so they sent me in for "independent study", which meant that I went down to the library and spent the whole period goofing around on Usenet. The best you could get was somebody taking attendance. Because the appearance of education was more important than education. Most of my time during that senior year was spent in putting together my "portfolio", which was a bureaucratic requirement obliging me to give the appearance of having a basic education. It was essentially a paperwork exercise.
I did have one teacher who cared, my English teacher. Because of curriculum variances between states, most of what he covered was stuff I had already been taught, but I still learned more from him than I did from any of my other classes, classes where I was covering nominally "novel" material.
This is what it's like living in a "lost state". A "lost state" is more concerned about giving the appearance of success than of success itself. When I lived in Kentucky, when you drove into the state they had a big sign that said "Kentucky - where education pays!" From that I learned that whenever a locality puts up a sign on a particular issue, they are alerting you to a problem they have no idea how to handle. Please do not ever move to a town where the city limits have a sign saying that they do not tolerate domestic violence.
In a "lost state", the cost of living is very low. A very low percentage of people have a college education. Even when they do, jobs for them may or may not exist. I worked for a small company here in Indiana for seven years. For a long time our entire logistics department consisted of people with masters degrees or higher. We didn't really offer anything in the way of benefits, and the pay we offered wasn't very good either, but it was more than enough to get by here. My wife and I probably could even have bought a house here if we wanted.
"Lost states" are politically controlled by Republicans. They gerrymander and stack the deck, but even if the Republicans didn't do this they would easily have local supermajorities, because they not only control the majority of the people but the vast majority of the land. And the politics of these Republicans are the politics of resentment. They blame the cities, think of us as "rootless cosmopolitans", and their policies are specifically designed to weaken and punish us. They are suffering, and we can't help them, so they want us to share their pain.
States that are not "lost" have local resources to help them deal with problems and crises. I lived in Florida for three years, and during that time went through four major hurricanes. The experience quickly became routine, because after Hurricane Andrew in 1992 the state of Florida got very, very serious about mitigating hurricane damage. They strengthened building codes. They put robust emergency procedures in place. You get a bad hurricane and it does a lot of damage. Roofs everywhere are covered with blue tarps. Nobody has power for weeks and business shuts down while everybody sweats. But this is all right, because people are prepared for the emergency, and because the state acts strongly to deal with it.
So when I saw what happened with Katrina, when I saw how people were blaming the federal government for not helping, I saw that the federal government was helping them about as much as they helped Florida. The difference wasn't that FEMA was doing a materially worse job, it was that there was no support and aid on the state level in Louisiana, because Louisiana is a Lost State.
In fact, Lost States rely more on federal aid than a "blue state". They don't have the infrastructure to take care of themselves. Compare that to California, which, Californians will very quickly and saltily note to you, pays out more in federal tax than they receive back in services.
And the Republican representatives for Lost States, one of their strongest and most strongly supported beliefs is to end federal aid, wipe out taxes to fund the government, end public services, except for military services. One has to assume that the leaders, at least, know what they are doing, although if these policies have an end goal more specific than "making America great again" none of these representatives seem ever to have expressed it, and I certainly have no desire to put words in their mouths.
I will say, though, that in America we do see this combination of ethnic self-pride and determination for self-reliance. We see it on Native American lands - what gringos like me sometimes call "Indian reservations". And when I try to imagine what is going to happen to these "lost states", I do think that it is likely to be dogged by many of the same serious long-term problems experienced at present on Native American lands.
