After twenty years of living on the East Coast, journalist Monica Potts returned to her rural Arkansas hometown. There, a struggle over a local library inspired her widely read New York Times op-ed “In the Land of Self-Defeat.” In it, she laments her childhood friends’ growing insularity, anti–public spiritedness, and anti-tax ideology — even when it hurts them materially.

To Potts, the town of Clinton, Arkansas’s acrimonious fight over a library indicates the futility, and even possible danger, of campaigning on redistributive “big government” policies like Medicare for All and tuition-free higher education in “self-defeating” places like Van Buren County.

“People like my neighbors hate that the government is spending money on those who don’t look like them and don’t live like them,” she writes, “but what I’ve learned since I came home is that they remain opposed even when they themselves stand to benefit.” In other words, there’s no use in trying to help people who have been brainwashed into not wanting any help. Trump’s appeal in these self-flagellating regions is simply “unbeatable.”