On Monday night, Chris Hayes brought his electric teevee show to McDowell County, a battered corner of West Virginia with an awful economy, a catastrophic problem with opioid addiction, a dearth of hope, and a majority of voters who took a chance on Donald Trump in November. Hayes brought along Bernie Sanders, who'd carried the county and the state in the Democratic primary. The people in the audience were in terrible trouble; one woman, apparently in her early-30s, explained that there was nothing in her life on which she could look back with nostalgia. She was not a Forgotten American. She was an Invisible American, and she always had been.

West Virginia is ground zero for those of us who empathize, but who do not sympathize. The state went big for the president*, who promised to bring back the coal industry and reopen the mines and otherwise revive a local economy that had vanished decades ago. Since then, he has freed up not the miners and the workers, but the people who own the companies. He and the Congress have demolished the protections the people of McDowell County had against coal waste products in their drinking water.

And now, spectacularly, we see what's going to happen when his "reorganized" federal government abandons its regulatory functions and hands things back to the states because, as we know, that's where the real work of governmentin' gets done. From The Charleston Daily Mail:

Violations of health and safety standards wouldn't produce state citations and fines, either. Mine operators would receive "compliance assistance visit notices." And West Virginia regulators wouldn't have authority to write safety and health regulations. Instead, they could only "adopt policies ... [for] improving compliance assistance" in the state's mines. Those and other significant changes in a new industry-backed bill would produce a wholesale elimination of most enforcement of longstanding laws and rules put in place over many years — as a result of hundreds of deaths — to protect the health and safety of West Virginia's coal miners. Opponents are furious about the proposed changes but also fearful that backers of the bill could easily have the votes to push through any language they want. Longtime mine safety experts and advocates are shocked at the breadth of the attack on current authorities of the state Office of Miners' Health, Safety and Training and the Board of Coal Mine Health and Safety.

There are a surprising number of people who think this is a good idea, just as there were a surprising number of people that thought The Man On The Golden Throne was going to wave his magic 3-iron and bring back an industry that died of a thousand wounds. People, of course, will die if this becomes law, and they won't be the people who lobbied for it, and they won't be the people who voted for it. They will be the people who voted for the people who voted for it, and nothing will stop them from dying.

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They will die whether or not they trusted Hillary Rodham Clinton, or thought Barack Obama was a tool of the Kenyan Chinese Communists, or whether or not they believe in the climate crisis. The companies are going to laugh off these toothless "compliance reviews" and be as heedless of the safety of their employees as they've ever been. Then there will be an explosion, or a fire, or a cave-in, and people will die, and there won't even be a sufficient investigation into why because there will be nobody to conduct it, and no new regulations will result because there won't be anyone there to write them or enforce them.

This is the profound emptiness at the heart of conservatism when it gets into government. Even in triumph, it can't turn off the autonomic anti-government nerve system that has animated modern conservatism for the past 50 years. It has relied on so much that is contrary to human nature and human experience that it doesn't know how to relate to the world any other way.

This is the profound emptiness at the heart of conservatism.

This is a movement that believes that, to be free, a 68-year-old Alzheimer's patient should shop for his own health insurance, which will be provided to him at a reasonable price because, if it isn't, some market magic will make the health insurance company go bankrupt for being mean to its customers. This is the movement that produces critters like Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, who, when asked why he voted against the Violence Against Women Act, replied that violence against women was a state issue and not a federal one. When asked, and I'm paraphrasing here, whether or not he realized how very stupid his first answer was, Barton replied, Shut up.

This is a movement that believes that government's relationship with industry should be a silk hand in a velvet glove, that corporations like those which mine and sell coal have a vigorous social conscience, and, therefore, when they find that they are endangering their workers, they will spend what it takes to make them safe. There are people who believe this bunk, just as there are people who believed Donald Trump. God, and they say liberals are the ones who don't know the real world.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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