Something had changed my people politically in the 20 years since my then teenage mom had voted for Jimmy Carter when I was an infant, the year Reagan won. There I was to prove it – a liberally minded young person from the rural working class who had somehow voted Republican.

Whatever caused the change, it crystallized with the popularity of a new conservative cable TV network. We didn’t have cable at the farm, but in Wichita Mom had started listening to conservative talk radio. She’d nod along in the car as a host spewed venomous attacks on liberalism. Something in his apparent outrage about “government handouts” appealed to her. She was open-minded and progressive on most social issues but raised a defiant middle finger to the idea of so-called assistance, so I did, too. I voted for Kansas native Bob Dole in my rural high school’s 1996 mock presidential election. Mom and I cheered when the GOP retained a majority in both houses that year.

One of my aunts was the only person in our family who I recall refusing to budge from older affiliations between class and party. “The Democrats are for poor people, and the Republicans are for the rich,” she would declare and slam her beer on the table.

“No,” Mom would reply. “Democrats help people, and Republicans help people help themselves.”

People on welfare were presumed “lazy”, and for us there was no more hurtful word. Within that framework, financially comfortable liberals may rest assured that their fortunes result from personal merit while generously insisting they be taxed to help the “needy”. Impoverished people, then, must do one of two things: concede personal failure and vote for the party more inclined to assist them, or vote for the other party, whose rhetoric conveys hope that the labor of their lives is what will compensate them. It’s a hell of a choice, and initially I made mine based on my mother’s ideas at the time. My liberal peers were no different in that respect, for the most part having shown up on campus with their parents’ beliefs.

A sociology course the spring of my junior year dismantled my political views about fiscal policy. Study after study that I found in my research for the class plainly said in hard numbers that, if you are poor, you are likely to stay poor, no matter how hard you work. As I examined the graphs over and over, my heart sped up with shock and anger. On the matter of my own country’s economic system, for all my family wisdom about what something ought to cost and who was peddling a con, I had been sold a bill of goods.

The people I’d grown up with were missing that information. But the liberal people I met in college often were missing another sort of information: what it feels like to pee in a cup to qualify for public benefits to feed your children. A teenager’s frustration when a dilapidated textbook is missing a page and there’s no computer in the house for finding the lesson online. The impossibility of paying a citation for expired auto insurance, itself impossible to pay despite 50 hours a week holding metal frying baskets at KFC.

It wasn’t that I’d been wrong to be suspicious of government programs, I realized, but that I’d been wrong to believe in the American Dream. They were two sides of the same trick coin – one promising a good life in exchange for your labor and the other keeping you just alive enough to go on laboring.

My mother and other family members would soon make similar shifts just by following the news and seeing cracks in the political messages they had received. Without need for a college class, many abandoned their short-lived conservatism for progressive views.

As college experiences took me outside my home state, I realized that Kansas as a whole suffered from a disconnect with power that was similar to what I experienced on the farm. The broader country viewed states like mine as unimportant, liminal places. They yawned while driving through them, slept as they flew over them.

Published in the Guardian “Country pride: what I learned growing up in rural America.”

Copyright © 2018 by Sarah Smarsh. An edited and abridged excerpt from the forthcoming book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh, to be published by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission