Shortly after Donald Trump’s election, a video of Nic Smith, a 21-year-old activist from coal country, went viral. People like Smith and places like his hometown of Trammel in Dickenson County, Virginia, were suddenly thrust into the media spotlight. In the video—titled “Think This Coal Country Southerner Voted for Trump?”—Smith wears a camo hat, sports thick sideburns, and uses a bullhorn to address a crowd. About a minute and a half in, an off-camera reporter asks Smith if he was persuaded by Donald Trump’s promise to bring back coal jobs. Smith looks right into the camera and says, “Oh, hell no.”
 

Smith isn’t the kind of Democratic Socialist who spouts off at Brooklyn parties about the “means of production.” He’s the kind of Socialist who has actually worked in a factory. He comes from a long line of union coal workers, once seen as the foundation of the Democratic Party, but he doesn’t fit the image of the typical millennial activist. He pulls ten-hour shifts at a Waffle House while studying for a college degree and fighting for a $15 minimum wage in his free time. Coastal liberals often paint rural voters in broad strokes, but the truth is there are large groups of socially aware and intelligent young people living in forgotten rural areas all over the country. But with each passing generation, many young, educated people leave those rural areas for more hospitable places. “A brain drain,” Smith called it over the phone. He’s blunt with his ideas but extremely polite and likable in conversation. When we spoke, he even said, “Yes, sir,” and stopped midstory to say things like, “My mom is one of the best goddamn nurses I’ve ever seen.”

When I asked him about the history of Trammel, Smith told me to look up a video on YouTube called “Trammel, a Town for Sale.” The grainy footage shows a 1986 news feature from a local station about Trammel’s decline and its eventual auction. Trammel began as a coal camp and became a company town: The coal company owned everything from the houses to the stores. At the end of the day, employees ended up giving most of their paychecks back to their employers in rent. When coal jobs left, the town went under. Everything went up for auction in 1986 under a huge revival tent beside a church. Residents desperately bid on homes that had been in their families for generations. In the video, one mother smiles for the camera. She’d won her home by lobbying out-of-towners not to buy it. “I don’t really like Trammel all that much,” she says. “But it’s home to me.” The reporter ends the video on a hopeful note, positing that natural gas might provide a way to get Trammel out of poverty.

Smith was born a decade after the town went up for sale, and the area’s been in sharp decline ever since. “I don’t want to bad-mouth Trammel,” Smith said. “I love it, but it’s almost a populated meth lab at this point. There are no more jobs there.” During childhood, he said that his family was either in poverty or his parents were struggling to find work. When I asked if his father worked in the mines, he launched into a history of his family and coal. “All my papaws and great-papaws worked in the mines,” he told me. “Baby boomers worked the mines, too, but the jobs declined before my father was old enough to work in them. But coal mining is more about the culture and less and less about the jobs.” He said Appalachia has a case of Stockholm syndrome with the coal industry.