Why did the American heartland, once the engine of the world’s most dynamic economy, become the seedbed of its angriest politics? For more than twenty years, John Austin has pursued that question in Flint, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh—and now in Europe’s industrial regions, where many communities face the same reckoning. In Hope in the Heartlands he traces his journey from a minister’s son raised in West Virginia coal country to the man who made Flint and the industrial Midwest his adopted home. He shows how he came to see economic abandonment as the root of democratic decay—and what he and a network of like-minded leaders did about it. From coining the “Blue Economy” to championing “ally-shoring”—rebuilding supply chains across allied democracies—Austin offers a field-tested agenda for renewing left-behind regions. The stakes, he argues, could not be higher.
