As an industry faces destruction, it grows a voting coalition.

 Imagine if you had a job. A good job, one that required skill and critical thinking and had a broad impact in the community where you lived. A job you didn't just show up to do. It was a job you were good at, and because of it, you were able to provide a roof over your family's head, put your children through college, or help pay for their wedding, and once a year, it gave you the ability to carve out a week or two to take the family on vacation.

Now, imagine that job becomes the center of political debate, one far removed from the Laurel Mountains, where this town sits. Within two decades, your profession goes from being championed by the Democratic Party and labor officials to one that they want to destroy....

Several things bother Fisher and Charles regarding how others look upon those in the mining industry. One is the stereotype of anyone in their business as either anti-intellectual or anti-clean environment. The former they consider insulting, the latter ridiculous.

"Not only do we drink the water and breathe the air here, but we also hunt, fish, and swim here. We are the first people who want whatever we do here to be safe," Fisher said. It is a common refrain from energy workers across the country.

The other thing that gets under their skin is when politicians flippantly suggest they can quickly get another job. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg recently said people who lost their job to climate justice might find a climate-conscious job.

And President Biden himself suggested coal miners should just learn to code. Last year in New Hampshire, in the middle of a brag of how Barack Obama had placed him in charge of judging what the jobs of the future would be, he said, "Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well."

It is still astounding to witness the contempt and disdain politicians and the press have toward the lives and livelihoods of people who aren't like them, people who don't live in their ZIP codes or attend the same universities they did.

People often asked after the 2020 election what will happen with the Trump voters (Fisher and Charles voted for him twice). The thing is, this complex conservative populist coalition existed long before it helped catapult Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016.

Harvey Charles's hands after working in the mine.

(Justin Merriman / for the Washington Examiner)

His win was, in part, the result of a culture that became detached from the people they served in various institutions, whether it was the government, the entertainment industry, or the college campus. Many people ultimately rejected all of them.

But if you never understood that. If you always thought it was about Trump, you never understood who they were and why they voted the way they do.

And you never understood how someone who lives in the suburbs of Arizona or Kenosha or Miami could have anything in common with someone who works the mines in Appalachia. And you didn't understand that because you didn't care to, because you hoped for its destruction.