The Middle Kingdom
I am writing a book about the future of democracy
In early 2017, I began traveling around the Midwest to write a book about religion, the Midwest, and America’s political divide. I went skeet shooting with Evangelical pastors and attended a potluck at a church in rural Minnesota, where the building served five different congregations in five different languages. I interviewed a woman who was alienated from her church in Indiana, so she started her own church online.
America was unraveling, and so was my marriage. But it made sense to me. Some things had to be destroyed. Some bridges shouldn’t be built. I wrote at the time, “I don’t believe in bridges anymore. I don’t even believe in fixing all broken things. Instead, what I believe is that we need to stare deep into the darkness of loss and to see the divine.”
When the book was published in 2019, everyone wanted to ask me: How can we win red states back? For me, the question was beside the point.
Dividing America into red and blue, assigning moral and political value to places and people through an electoral lens, misses the reality of what it means to live in America. As Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said, “We need to find the first person who put that red-blue map up and beat the hell out of them for putting that on, because it divided the country.”
Around this time, everyone was reading Hillbilly Elegy, a book that purported to explain America through the lens of white rural grievance. It offered a neoliberal bootstrap solution to the problems of America, blaming individuals for their own poverty and arguing that government assistance doesn’t help anyone.
Liberals believed the book offered insight into the rural Trump voter. Conservatives loved that it confirmed all their biases.
The premise of Hillbilly Elegy relies on strategic amnesia. Gone is the culture of Appalachia, its joys, and its beauty. Gone is any acknowledgment of the strip-mining of land and natural resources, which left companies rich and residents poor. The book ignores the legacy of Jim Crow laws, the struggle for civil rights, and the long history of disenfranchising the working poor.
That book sold because it offered something for nothing: a poor kid makes good and says those who don’t have only themselves to blame.
Now, in 2025, the author of Hillbilly Elegy is now the co-architect of our disenfranchisement. And here we all are again. Nothing has been learned.
This month, I sold another book of my own. What that means is that for the past seven months, I have been working on a book proposal. My editor Libby Burton, who also edited This American Ex-Wife, has purchased that book and it will be published through Dey House, which is a division of HarperCollins. Libby is an actual genius, and I am thrilled to be working with her again. But the book itself is not written yet. I’ll spend the next year and some change reporting, researching and writing it. As with my first book, I’ll be doing so as our nation feels like it’s coming undone.
The book is titled The Middle Kingdom and will seek to answer questions like, What does democracy look like? What the hell happened to America? And how do we survive?
My agent, the incredible Anna Sproul Latimer, described it as Somebody Somewhere but for the future of democracy.
The book is a call for collective action, for radical mutual aid, for loving this land in all its contradictions — from its deep problems to its weird Jell-O salads. From gas station pizza to ranch dressing to the secret feminist history of butter cows, the Midwest is a land that finds its way back, again and again, to community. I will argue for loving this heartland while envisioning an America bound not by red and blue, but by community, potlucks, and shared stories.
Recently, a former reader told me they were too busy focusing on the future of democracy to read my “little personal stories.” I am not entitled to anyone’s loyalty. But the note bothered me because it implied that our personal stories, our lives, the messy intersections of community and systems, are somehow different from democracy.
They aren’t.
The man keeping his rural fire department together. The woman leaving her husband. The woman refusing to marry. Butter cows. Gas stations. Running an abortion fund. Or running across Iowa. This is democracy. Care. Love. Community. These are radically political acts.
Why the Midwest?
Listen, I grew up in Texas, so I know this country is big and there are a lot of regions, each with their own personality, problems, and potential. I don’t write about the Midwest to devalue other places.
But I do think there is something special about this region.
For conservatives, the Midwest is the last great agricultural stronghold in a country founded by white agrarian settlers — a site of nostalgia. For descendants of oppressed people — from Ellis Island immigrants to Black families fleeing Jim Crow — the region is an ancestral refuge. And for millions of middle-class Americans, it represents the last glimmer of the American Dream.
During the economic boom years of the 20th century, when working people still had a chance at upward mobility, the Midwest was where that mobility happened. In cities like Detroit and Chicago, high-paying manufacturing jobs and affordable real estate were within reach. Like the dream itself, that promise still flickers in our collective memory.
What do all these examples have in common? Belonging. Americans on the left and right idealize the Midwest because it was, within living memory, a place where they felt they belonged, or could belong. Today, most Americans are boxed out of power and opportunity, but once, in this place, they had it all.
We want the America of hotdish and bridge clubs, bowling leagues and baby showers. We want to run into friends on the street and dip pizza into ranch dressing at the local Pizza Ranch.
That’s the fantasy: simple belonging.
Of course, the reality of the Midwest is far from paradise. It is a land of profound contradictions. It is the place where George Floyd’s murder sparked an international movement for civil rights, and it’s a breeding ground for white supremacist militias. Iowa was the second state in the nation to legalize gay marriage; it was also one of the first to ban LGBTQ books in schools and restrict gender-affirming care for trans kids. In Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer has been a groundbreaking governor, so some of her constituents plotted to kidnap and kill her. Barack Obama won the Midwest, but so did Donald Trump.
The Midwest is Tim Walz, the progressive governor of Minnesota; it’s Kim Reynolds, the hard-right governor of Iowa. It’s Kansas, with a conservative legislature and voters who rejected an abortion ban, and Illinois, where Gov. J.B. Pritzker is rising to prominence as one of the only courageous Democrats left. It is a place of bounty and brutality. And it has somehow simultaneously become a metaphor for what it means to be a “normal” American.
So, for the next couple of years, this is my project. But I will not be abandoning the newsletter. The reality of being an independent journalist in America means I cannot live on book money alone. Very few writers not named Stephen King actually can.
I need this newsletter. But not just because of the money. I also need you. My last book, This American Ex-Wife, was made better by the conversations we had while I was writing the book. And I know The Middle Kingdom will benefit from them, too. Because it’s not bootstraps we need, but belonging.
This is wonderful news, Lyz! I appreciate the collective and community spirit that you are uplifting in how you are envisioning Middle Kingdom. One element that felt conspicuously missing from your description of the book is the role of Native communities and ways of being, which have deeply influences some of the best of Midwestern culture. I'm mixed German settler/Anishinaabe (White Earth nation descendant), and Indigenous culture and collaboration is also the story of the Midwest. Some of the origins of our Midwestern collectivist focus of sharing food and ideas (not without conflicts) - from the old time rendezvous at Grand Portage to neighborhood potlucks). I hope this is also a part of your forthcoming book. Some resources could include: Minneapolis American Indian Center, NDN Collective, tribal cultural centers and museums, and movements like the protests at Standing Rock, as well as elders, activists, scholars, and authors, like David Treuer who wrote Heartbeat of Wounded Knee or Diane Wilson who wrote the Seed Keeper or the incomparable Louise Erdrich...there are so many! Thanks, miigwetch!
I look forward to this as I have to your other 3, all purchased in hardback since sarah Weinman mentioned your first book. You are my first paid substack and will always be as long as you continue to write. Thanks for also seeing and mentioning the voices in between the two far poles, this nuance is what we always need to remind us that things are complicated.