Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist, seems even gloomier than usual these days, especially about the state of rural America. He recently went up with a column headlined “The Mystery of White Rural Rage,” which he called “arguably the single greatest threat facing American democracy.” He added: “I have no good ideas about how to fight it.”

Lord knows, Krugman isn’t the first person to throw up his hands in frustration about the state of rural America.  I’ve been studying Georgia’s urban-rural divide (what I now call “Atlanna versus Notlanna”) for an embarrassing amount of time and certainly haven’t found any silver bullets.  The one thing I’m sure of is that the status quo isn’t working.  It’s time to break glass and start throwing spaghetti at every wall in sight.

Much of rural Georgia is on a downhill slide toward Third World status. That’s especially true of the counties south of the gnat line. Many are losing population, usually to a combination of out-migration and a precipitous drop in the number of births; as actual demographers would point out, rural Georgians are doing a lousy job of replacing themselves.

About a decade ago, when academics and statisticians were starting to notice a drop in birth rates globally, the demographic community worked itself into a bit of dither. I remember reading an article that quoted one demographer as saying something close to: “We’re going to have to reorganize society.”

That struck me as a tad hysterical, but it’s aged pretty well. Prosperity and progress have historically depended on population growth. Our Social Security System, for instance, depends on ever-growing generations of new workers to help keep the nation’s retirement pot right.

In his column, Krugman is reacting to a new book called “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy” by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman (I haven’t read it yet but will). Krugman says Schaller and Waldman lay out the problems in “devastating, terrifying and baffling detail” and confesses that “at some level I still don’t get the politics.”

Maybe I can help him there, at least where Georgia is concerned. I agree with Krugman that rural folks are mad at the wrong people, but then pissed-off country boys aren’t always the most rational people in the bar.

It’s important to understand just how quickly all this happened. Georgia’s roots are nearly 300 years deep. They go back to 1732, when James Oglethorpe landed at what would become Savannah with a boatload of English debtors. Over the next 250 years, Georgia grew and for the most part prospered with a strong agrarian economy. Politicians still like to brag that agriculture is the state’s biggest industry. Farms have been in rural Georgia families for generations and have provided good livings and at least some economic stability for entire communities.

Then came breathtaking technological advances and international trade agreements like NAFTA and the USMCA. The effect of all that was that the farm fields emptied out, small-town factories shut down, and jobs moved to Mexico and points south. That all started toward the end of the last century. In other words, 250 years of relative economic stability was upended in a little more than quarter of a century.

Then you’ve got Atlanta. The Metropolitan Atlanta region has evolved into the socioeconomic equivalent of an ever-expanding intergalactic black hole. Even before advancing technology and free trade deals were throttling rural Georgia, the ATL was sucking up the vast majority of the state’s college-educated population and with it the overwhelming share of the state’s economy.

So, back to Krugman’s conundrum: What to do? Well, let’s start by giving that “reorganizing society” quote another think. The one thing that’s certain is that what we’re doing now (or maybe not doing) isn’t working. What kind of change might make a difference? What might it entail? How would you go about it? Where would you even start?

Let’s begin by sorting out some of the obstacles to change, which, of course, gets us back to politics. It also gets us back to a look at the components of the state’s urban-rural divide and the rural problem. The state’s rural ailments aren’t confined to rural areas and can’t be remedied by focusing exclusively on those areas. As I’ve written before, nearly every major hub city in Georgia is suffering from various types of socioeconomic deterioration. And as the Albanys and Macons and Valdostas of the state decline, so do the rural counties and communities around them.

But dealing with that would require Georgia’s Republican overlords to collaborate with the Democratic leaders of the state’s urban fiefdoms, and — in today’s hyperpartisan environment — that may be a bridge too far.  But failing to even attempt to cross that bridge is a sure formula for continued failure and rural rot.  And the Georgians paying the biggest price are predominantly GOP voters: Rural Georgia is overwhelmingly Republican Georgia.

For what it’s worth (and he certainly hasn’t asked for my opinion), I think Brian Kemp may be uniquely positioned to lead the state across that bridge. I also think it could be a political winner for the governor. Let me be clear: I disagree with Kemp on almost every major public policy issue facing the state (gun safety, women’s reproductive rights, Medicaid expansion, etc.). But I also think he’s one of the canniest and most effective politicians of my lifetime.

He’s now in the final half of his second and last term as governor, but, at the tender age of 60, he might still have some productive political years ahead of him. Conventional wisdom is that he’s pondering a 2026 run for the U.S. Senate against incumbent Democrat Jon Ossoff. He would obviously be a formidable candidate, and he has some street cred among soft Democrats and swing voters.

He may be the only significant GOP politician in the country to successfully stiff-arm Donald Trump. He refused to go along with the former president’s efforts to upend Georgia’s 2020 presidential election results and then out-performed Trump in his own 2022 reelection campaign against Democrat Stacey Abrams. He has also largely stayed out of GOP efforts to remove Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from the Trump prosecution and has built a political machine that doesn’t rely on the state’s MAGA-centric Republican Party.

So, if Kemp decided to take on this challenge and try to get across the bridge (and make Paul Krugman feel better in the process), how should he proceed?

First, completely rethink the way the state deals with dying rural areas.It’s no exaggeration to describe much of rural Georgia as socioeconomic disaster areas. The advancing technologies and free trade policies discussed above have combined to produce a perfect storm, a Category 5 economic hurricane that decimated much of rural Georgia – and that, maybe worst of all, shows no sign of playing itself out.  And if we’ve learned anything, it’s that the state government’s current bureaucracies – Economic Development, Community Affairs, and Education, to name a few – are incapable of responding to that hurricane.  My recommendation: deal with this economic hurricane the same way we would as an actual hurricane or other natural disaster.  Borrow lessons from the practice of emergency management that have evolved nationally over the last half-century. Create a State Department of Rural Disaster Management and establish standards for determining when a county or a community falls into a state of economic or socioeconomic disaster. Appoint a commissioner who would function as the state’s rural czar and give her a sufficient staff and operating budget to function — and, most importantly, the power to draw on resources of other state departments to serve counties that have been declared rural disaster zones.  Her department would become the point of interface between other state departments and rural disaster areas – by definition, local governments that lack the ability to manage those agency relationships on their own.  It won’t be easy.  Other bureaucracies will do their best to strangle the Department of Rural Disaster Management in its crib.  Job One for the governor (Kemp and, for that matter, his successors) will be to support the new agency and make it clear he doesn’t want any bureaucratic backstabbing.

Second, be prepared to make hard decisions about some communities’ prospects for survival. For as long as I’ve been watching Georgia politicians, their prevailing political impulse has been to do the most to help counties and communities that are in the worst straits. Maybe there was a time when that made sense. It no longer does. I’ve long thought we were already in a triage situation and that some counties and communities were doomed no matter how much of Atlanta’s money we throw at them. The focus instead should be on identifying and then supporting communities that at least have a realistic shot at survival and recovery. Part of the Department of Rural Disaster Management’s early work should be to develop a system for evaluating every municipality and county in the state to determine whether they are actually viable.  Are they fiscally stable?  Do they have a sufficient tax base?  Is there a way to assess the stability and competence of the local governing bodies?  (I was talking recently with a South Georgia legislator and asked him what would happen to a city or county government that ran out of money and could no longer pay its bills.  “We’re about to find out,” he told me.)

Third, be prepared to take radical actions to directly support residents of communities that have no realistic chance of survival or recovery.  This is probably the hardest part, and it gives rise to a new question: When a local government fails, does the state government have a duty to step in and aid that community’s citizens?  People whose biggest sin was that they had the lousy luck to be born and live in a dying community?  Who probably lack the wherewithal to pull up stakes and go anywhere else?  Should part of that response include decolonizing dying areas and at least giving their citizens the option (and the help) to move to areas with enough of a critical mass of humanity and economy to survive?  One thing is absolutely clear: below a certain population level, a community can’t survive – and efforts to keep such a community on life support aren’t fair to the more prosperous communities that are covering the cost for that life support.

I put the odds that Governor Kemp or any conventional politician will try something even remotely like what I’ve described here at less than one percent.  But it’s a sure bet – 100 percent – that refusing to try something different and, yes, radical will result in the continued collapse of rural Georgia.  Kemp owes the state – and his successors in the governor’s office – better than that.  Plus, it might turn down the temperature on Georgia’s rural white rage and make Paul Krugman feel better.