BLESS ITS HEART: TENNESSEE AND THE POLITICS OF LOSING YOUR DAMN MIND

 

The red states have apparently been holding an unofficial competition to determine which one can turn representative government into the most elaborate traveling carnival, and I have been waiting patiently for my home state of Tennessee to receive the recognition it deserves. Florida gets most of the publicity because Florida has beaches, alligators and a natural gift for producing news stories that begin with the words “a man wearing only.” Texas has size working for it, and Alabama remains Alabama, which is really all the explanation necessary. But Tennessee has quietly assembled a political stable capable of competing with anybody, and I think it is time we quit being modest about it. We may not always lead the nation in health, education or economic opportunity, but by God we can manufacture political theater with the best of them.

Take Marsha Blackburn, Tennessee's senior senator and, as of August, the Republican nominee for governor. She has mastered that peculiar Southern political art of delivering impending apocalypse with the pleasant demeanor of somebody offering you another piece of pecan pie. Everything is under attack. The border is under attack, Christianity is under attack, children are under attack, Western civilization is under attack, and somewhere presumably an undocumented transgender librarian is preparing the final assault on Dollywood. Blackburn won the Republican gubernatorial primary on August 6 and now enters November as the favorite in a state where Republicans have dominated statewide politics for roughly two decades.

Then Tennessee sends Tim Burchett to Congress, a man who somehow manages to make UFO hearings seem like one of his more conventional interests. Burchett has spent serious congressional energy on unidentified anomalous phenomena, which is not necessarily foolish because governments should investigate things they cannot explain. The difficulty is that Tennessee politics occasionally makes it unclear whether the unexplained object is hovering over Oak Ridge or sitting behind the microphone. Give Burchett credit for authenticity, however. Nobody watches him speak and thinks a team of consultants spent three weeks polishing the edges.

Andy Ogles provided Middle Tennessee with another form of entertainment: the résumé as speculative fiction. Questions followed him into Congress about claims involving his education, economic expertise and law-enforcement background, producing that distinctly modern political phenomenon in which biography becomes less a record of what one actually did than a collection of things one feels spiritually qualified to have done. Tennessee Republicans finally displayed a detectable threshold for embarrassment on August 6, when former Agriculture Commissioner Charlie Hatcher defeated Ogles in the Republican primary. So let us give the state credit where credit is due. Even a political fever occasionally breaks.

The temptation would be to conclude that Tennessee's problem is simply Republicans, but that explanation is too easy, too tribal and, frankly, historically inaccurate. Tennessee has elected conservative Republicans who believed government was supposed to accomplish something besides irritating liberals. Bill Haslam was one of them. His administration created Tennessee Promise, guaranteeing eligible high-school graduates two years of tuition-free community or technical college, then expanded the idea through Tennessee Reconnect for adults without degrees. Tennessee became the first state to offer tuition-free community-college opportunity to both graduating students and adults.

Think about how radical that sounds in the present atmosphere: identify a problem, develop a practical solution, pass legislation and improve people's opportunities. No culture war was required. Nobody needed to ban a book, investigate a drag queen or announce that Western civilization would collapse because somebody checked the wrong box on a government form. Haslam was conservative, and plenty of Tennesseans disagreed with him on plenty of things, but the governing philosophy at least began with the assumption that government ought to produce measurable results. That distinction matters because criticism becomes intellectually lazy when every Republican is treated as interchangeable. Tennessee's real political decline is not from conservatism to liberalism or liberalism to conservatism. It is from governing to performing.

Performance politics thrives because it gives people emotional satisfaction without demanding results. Fear is wonderfully efficient that way. Tell people their identity, religion, community or children are under siege and the nervous system responds long before reason bothers putting on its shoes. Once politics becomes fused with identity, admitting that your preferred leaders are failing feels less like changing your mind and more like betraying yourself. People will therefore defend the politician who disappoints them rather than confront the uncomfortable possibility that they have been conned. The ego would rather invent another enemy than admit it bought a bad horse.

Meanwhile, Tennessee keeps producing measurements that stubbornly refuse to watch cable television. America's Health Rankings placed Tennessee 44th overall and 46th in health outcomes in its 2025 report. Those numbers do not mean Tennessee is some Appalachian wasteland, because it plainly is not, nor do they prove every Republican policy failed. They do raise the embarrassingly old-fashioned question that politics increasingly avoids: after years of overwhelming political control, what exactly are Tennesseans getting for it?

That question becomes especially uncomfortable outside Nashville's boomtown skyline. Drive through parts of rural East Tennessee and you encounter communities with extraordinary people, extraordinary beauty and problems that have survived administration after administration. Hospitals struggle, addiction hollowed out families, young people leave for opportunity elsewhere, infrastructure ages and small towns wonder why prosperity always seems to be arriving sometime next Thursday. Yet election season comes around and the conversation somehow becomes bathrooms, immigrants, books, pronouns and whichever cultural emergency has been freshly removed from the national outrage refrigerator. The magician keeps directing everyone's eyes toward the shiny object while somebody quietly walks away with the table.

Nothing illustrates the transformation of politics into raw power more clearly than redistricting. After the Supreme Court's 2026 Louisiana v. Callais ruling altered the legal landscape surrounding race and congressional districts, Tennessee's Republican legislature redrew the state's congressional map. Memphis, Tennessee's largest predominantly Black political center and the heart of the state's remaining Democratic congressional strength, was divided among three Republican-leaning districts. Republicans already controlled eight of Tennessee's nine congressional seats; the redesigned map gives them an opportunity to take the ninth.

Supporters can dress such maps in whatever legal tailoring they prefer, and partisan redistricting is hardly an invention unique to Republicans. Democrats have manipulated boundaries where they possessed the power to do so as well. But this is precisely the point: unchecked power behaves like unchecked power, regardless of which jersey it wears. Democracy depends upon competition because politicians are human beings, and human beings become remarkably philosophical about accountability right up until accountability might cost them their jobs.

The deeper Tennessee problem, then, is not Marsha Blackburn, Tim Burchett, Andy Ogles or the next personality who discovers that grievance television offers better career prospects than governing. Those people are expressions of a political culture that rewards spectacle. A democracy becomes unhealthy when voters stop judging leaders by outcomes and begin judging them by whether they infuriate the correct enemies. At that point competence becomes secondary. Failure itself can even become evidence of ideological purity because every disappointing result gets blamed on Washington, immigrants, liberals, universities, bureaucrats, minorities, foreigners or some other conveniently available demon.

This is where tribal politics performs its greatest psychological trick. People begin asking “Is he one of us?” instead of “Is he any damn good?” Once that substitution occurs, politicians are almost free from accountability because identity has replaced performance as the measurement of success. A football coach who went 3–9 every season would eventually be escorted out of Knoxville under armed guard, yet elected officials can preside over lousy outcomes for twenty years and simply announce that the opposition is coming for your freedom. Apparently football remains one of the few places where Tennessee still believes statistics matter.

I love Tennessee, which is precisely why its politics annoy me. I remember a state where independence meant something more than automatically checking the same box because your neighbor did. East Tennesseans in particular have never been famous for obedience; these are mountain people whose ancestors occasionally regarded government authority as a polite suggestion. Yet modern partisan politics has somehow convinced descendants of those stubborn people that loyalty means handing one political tribe permanent ownership of the courthouse and thanking them for the privilege.

Tennessee deserves better than that, and not because it needs to become Massachusetts with biscuits. Tennessee should remain Tennessee: conservative where conservatism makes sense, innovative where innovation works, suspicious of nonsense regardless of which party manufactures it, and stubborn enough to demand evidence before accepting another politician's explanation for why everything wrong is somebody else's fault. A state can defend tradition without becoming imprisoned by it. It can respect faith without weaponizing it, cherish rural culture without romanticizing poverty, support business without treating corporations as sacred cattle, and value personal liberty without conveniently forgetting that liberty belongs to people we dislike too.

Politics ultimately reveals something uncomfortable about human nature. What we repeatedly reward, we eventually become. Reward competence and politicians discover competence; reward outrage and they manufacture outrage. Reward compromise and compromise becomes possible; reward humiliation of the other tribe and government becomes professional wrestling with pensions. Identity is a rehearsed trance, and Tennessee has been rehearsing the same partisan identity long enough that too many people have forgotten politics is supposed to be transactional: you work for us, you produce results, or we replace you.

The Volunteer State once earned its nickname because Tennesseans showed up when something difficult had to be done. Perhaps the next difficult thing is simpler and harder at the same time: stop confusing political loyalty with virtue. Ask what works. Ask who benefits. Ask whether the town is stronger, whether the children are better educated, whether families can afford medical care, whether young people can build lives there and whether the government respects citizens enough to let their votes actually matter.

Because after all the flags, slogans, culture wars and televised indignation have finished echoing through the mountains, one question remains that no amount of political theater can answer:

What have you actually done for Tennessee?

That ought to be the question that scares politicians.

Instead of Tennesseans being scared of one another.