Even armchair psephologists will know it wasn’t always like this. A swing state since before the Civil War, Ohio was once a presidential coin-flip, the national bellwether. As late as 2008, Barack Obama won Ohio by a comfy 4.5 points, with a strong union vote sweeping him along. Then came Trump, who over the last decade has transformed the Buckeye State into something approaching a personal fief, upending electoral wisdom and wonkish certainties as he went. “I wrote a book called The Bellwether about Ohio in advance of 2016,” laughs Kyle Kondik, a long-time electoral analyst, “and the thing was obsolete within a few months.”

That journey, that realignment, has by now been dissected to death. Yet it still feels wholly appropriate that Ohio, that archetypal MAGA conquest, should be voting the same week as the silver jubilee of Nickel and Dimed, published in May 2001. The author, muckraking journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, saw the Trumpian revolution years before Trump. “Someday,” she said of her working-class subjects, “they are bound to tire of getting so little in return and to demand to be paid what they’re worth.” A Leftie to her core, the author was hoping her reportage would inspire unions and healthcare-for-all. Instead we got Trumpism — and reading Ehrenreich tells us why.

At its root, Nickel and Dimed is a work of hard-hitting journalism. Going undercover, Ehrenreich threw herself into America’s underbelly, working as a waitress in Florida, a housekeeper in Maine, and a Walmart clerk in Minnesota. What she called “old-fashioned reporting” laid bare the exploited lives of those 30% of American workers who in 1998 earned less than $8 an hour (the equivalent of $16.35 today). Low pay was shadowed by other indignities. From janitors to cleaning ladies to ditchdiggers, the writer discovered, “these are the untouchables of a supposedly caste-free and democratic society”.

Through a first-person narrative, Ehrenreich makes these people whole. There’s Holly, the dogged Maine cleaner who scrubs tiles on one foot, and George, the friendly immigrant dishwasher fired for “stealing” saltines from the restaurant storeroom. Divided into three acts, the author narrates her journey across the vastness of America, always on the hunt for low-wage work and a budget-priced hovel. Yet through all this, and as Ehrenreich readily admits, no job, no matter how lowly, is truly “unskilled”. Quite the opposite: whether it’s slinging ham-and-eggs or scouring grout, success requires poise and grit.

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The daughter of a Montana copper miner, Ehrenreich was reared in the postwar working class  — a time when people like her enjoyed real security. In 1975, nearly a quarter of US jobs were in manufacturing, where wages averaged $6.24 an hour. When adjusted for inflation, that’s the equivalent of $80,000, and you didn’t even need a college degree. Post-industrial America changed that equation. Between 1979 and 2005, the wages of those with a bachelor’s or post-graduate degree jumped by nearly 25%; their household wealth leapt by $4 trillion. For their part, the pay of those with mere high-school degrees fell. By 2023, the median weekly wage for a working-class man was, adjusted for inflation, only a smidgen higher than in 1979.

This national story was Ohio’s too. Fifty years ago, the state was the world’s source for rubber, glass, steel. Goodyear, Owens-Corning, and Youngstown Sheet & Tube — these grand Ohio firms employed tens of thousands of people. Justin Gest, an expert on transatlantic working-class despair, tells me that steel in somewhere like Youngstown, a steel center not far from the Pennsylvania border, was the 20th-century equivalent to Silicon Valley. A George Mason University professor and author of a book on the city, he describes how locals used to say that as long as graphite from the mills fell like black snow onto their windshields each morning, they knew times were good. “They would wipe it off with their fingers,” Gest recalls, “and look at each other and say, ‘this is gold dust’.”

In September 1977, the dust dried up. Youngstown Sheet & Tube shuttered. Automation, globalization, and dated, uncompetitive factories meant that 5,000 workers became jobless overnight. Over the next few years, another 41,000 lost their jobs in Youngstown’s Mahoning Valley, alongside another 1.2 million manufacturing posts across the ex-industrial Midwest. From 2000-2011, a further 5.4 million American manufacturing jobs vanished too. Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed chronicles the world of low-paying, low-status gigs that arose in the aftermath.

Perhaps that timing explains the book’s success. The author of 21 books and a regular contributor to all the “right” publications — The New York Times, Harper’s, The Nation — Ehrenreich was for decades a staple of liberal American life. Yet Nickel and Dimed was without doubt her critical and commercial hit, becoming a cultural sensation basically overnight. Educated literati gobbled up so many copies you’d think a tofu smashburger lay hidden in its pages. A Times bestseller for weeks, it became a staple of college courses right across the country.

Yet if we “anywheres” wallowed in the opportunities for performative empathy that Nickel and Dimed provided, former Ohio giants like Akron and Toledo — and Youngstown — remained what Gest calls “post-traumatic” communities. This isn’t merely a question of lost income. Rather, vanished respectability and self-value spawned a kind of spiritual vertigo. “They seemed unmoored, untethered from their families and communities,” says Andrew Cherlin, a Johns Hopkins sociologist, of America’s white working class. Without purposeful labor and social ties, divorce, alcoholism, and anomie enveloped whole towns. Sure enough, Youngstown became famous not for its black gold, but for drugs and divorce. By the Eighties, it had become the murder capital of the United States.

Nickel and Dimed appeared just as the second wave of deindustrialization crested — leaving millions of Americans stranded in its wake. One of Ehrenreich’s most powerful interviews is with a woman called Colleen, who cleans the homes of rich folk in Cape Cod. “I don’t want what they have… But what I would like is to be able to take a day off now and then… and still be able to buy groceries.” Yet if stories like these inspired millions of Americans to wring their hands in tandem, Ehrenreich’s book did not, as its blurb proclaimed, “change the way America perceives its working poor”. Elections came and candidates went and nothing changed for the working class, except for the slow downward spiral. All the while, many liberals were content with putting “Hope” posters in their front-facing windows, safe in the knowledge that Obama’s post-racial utopia was just around the corner. As for economics, it turned out that neoliberalism had its upsides, especially for that class of nimble, educated workers that gravitated towards Ehrenreich’s book in the first place.

At the tail end of the Great Recession, 60% of college-educated Americans described their personal finances as “excellent” or “good”. Non-college whites, and non-college minorities for that matter, felt very differently. Things were especially tough in Ohio. If its footballing woes weren’t bad enough, Cleveland became known as the “ground zero” for the nation’s foreclosure crisis. Once the calamity ebbed, nearly half of the state’s remaining manufacturing jobs had disappeared. By 2013, Ohio’s median income was a fifth lower than what it had been in 2000.

Voting twice for Obama, Ohio’s working-class voters hardly expected miracles. Yet back in 2009, America’s first black president possessed both a mandate and massive congressional majorities. He could have used that authority to empower labor, not least by repealing the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which significantly restricted union activities. And if that was a bridge too far, a robust form of negative income tax could have offered Americans like Colleen a future. A less ambitious subsidized childcare program would, at least, have made low-wage work pay. But if Obamacare was surely a good start, it finally proved rather weak sauce.

And as Ehrenreich warned us, “they are bound to tire of getting so little in return and to demand to be paid what they’re worth”. So when Donald Trump came to Ohio in 2015, pledging to bring back jobs — so fervently that even he urged the MAGA faithful not to “sell your house” before the good times returned — the state’s economic losers understandably responded. “They’ve tried absolutely everything,” is how Gest puts it. “And they continue to feel like globalization’s losers. And you can’t really blame them.” Outraged that their lives and communities were upended, they voted for the one candidate who spoke most directly to their concerns. And more than once too: in the three presidential elections from 2016, Trump has won Ohio, that erstwhile bellwether, by an average of nine points.

That first triumph in the Rust Belt shocked America’s liberal professional class. And, in another moment of publishing kismet, it was at this point that Gest’s study of transatlantic working-class populism appeared. He recalls the earnest book tours during Trump’s first term. As he puts of white working-class America: “There was this sort of receptivity to better understanding their viewpoint, their perspectives and their life experiences.” Then came 2020, the Capitol riot, and 2024. In the aftermath, Gest observes a sea change in the liberal professional class. “There was a sense,” Gest suggests, “that no one was prepared to make the political compromises required to appeal to them.” Nearly half of liberal voters refuse to even share the same air as a Trump supporter. I’ve seen this transition myself. To quote one of my former grad-school colleagues: “Fuck you, if you voted for [Trump].”

Sure, Democratic elites say the right words. “The majority of Americans,” the party’s National Committee Chair lately conceded, “now believe the Republican Party best represents the interests of the working class and the poor, and the Democratic Party is the party of the wealthy and the elites.” But words, not action, tell the tale. And, in Congress, the number of working-class Democrats is almost nil. The party’s most high-profile “working-class” avatars, Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman and Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, are private-school preppies cosplaying in Carhartt and hoodies. Fetterman, a Harvard grad, famously used his mayorship of hardscrabble Braddock, Pennsylvania as a political launching pad. Other than turning an abandoned car dealership into his groovy loft, his adopted town is still on its back.

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As for Ohio, the Democrats’ best hope — and a faint one at that — is Sherrod Brown. To be fair, the gravel-voiced former senator holds policy positions that jibe with working-class voters. An opponent of free trade, he delights what remains of organized labor. Yet Brown is also married to a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and recently relocated from blue-collar Cleveland to Bexley, a smart Columbus suburb. The party’s frontrunner for Secretary of State, meanwhile, is a self-funding cancer doctor. At least Amy Acton, the likely Democratic candidate for governor, is a working-class kid from Youngstown. It’s just a pity she led Ohio’s Covid response, gaining praise from The New York Times and earning a “Profile in Courage” prize from the Kennedys. Needless to say, many working-class Ohioans weren’t amused, with public pressure ultimately forcing Acton to resign her post as the state’s public health honcho.

Of course, the midterms are guaranteed for MAGA. Gas is up. Trump’s polls are down. And, more fundamentally, the President’s promises of a heartland revival have proved largely illusory. At the end of his first term, manufacturing jobs had slightly declined from 12.4 to 12.2 million. Even a pro-Trump analyst admits that any pre-Covid surge in industrial jobs happened outside the Rust Belt. A year into Trump’s second term, meanwhile, America is down 100,000 factory jobs. In short, the Democrats could easily score a Buckeye State upset come November. In the long-term, though, a party of, by, and for the professional middle class will lose working-class Ohio, the industrial Midwest, and, with it, America. Kyle Kondik is surely right when he says that “the old labor-Left tradition amongst white [working class] ethnics just died out, and Trump was the kill shot to it”.

To Ehrenreich’s credit, she grasped all this. Growing up working class, and then sweating and toiling with her Nickel and Dimed colleagues, she developed real sympathy for social untouchables. As she admitted of blue-collar support for MAGA: “My tradition — the tradition I come from of white working-class people — did not look well on billionaires or bosses or anybody in charge.” The difference between Ehrenreich and my tribe is that we have no problem with bosses and elites so long as it’s us commanding the heights.

Ehrenreich died in 2022, aged 81, her dream of a new America unrealized. All the same, she remains prophetic — just not in the way she hoped. She had longed for a politics that put the dignity of the working man and woman at the center. What she got was Trump, using hollowed-out factories for photo-ops. Even so, her book remains a vivid chronicle of the nation’s largest voting demographic’s fall from economic stability, social respectability, and existential meaning. Until rich liberals take the time to understand that other America, let alone start fixing things, they’ll remain the Cleveland Browns of politics.

Not everyone here sees the game as literally miraculous. But it’s hard not to feel that Opening Day in St. Louis is life-giving, the crack of batted ball the moment spring’s green shoots defeat the prairie chill. This year, over 100,000 are here to party. And why not? The St. Louis Cardinals are the bishops of baseball, with a near-mystical relationship with their fans. “You’re going back to the late 1800s, handed down to generations of fans,” explains Tom Ackerman, program director at KMOX, a local radio super-station that’s broadcast Cardinals games for a century. “If you grow up in a Cardinal’s family that’s what you know. The loyalty goes back through the generations, the history, the success of the franchise.”

And what success: with 11 World Series, the Cardinals are historically one of elite franchises across American sport. Technically, too, the team is impressive. Embracing what’s known as the “Cardinal Way” — a robust training style involving crisp defense, speed on the basepaths, and putting savvy play over big payrolls — the team is equally famed for its sportsmanship. As Jan Daniels says, former players returning in different jerseys will always get applauded if they play well. “Whenever there’s a good play from the other team that deserves a hand, we do that. That’s what the St. Louis fans do, we just like good ball playing.”

Yet if fans love vibes and a winner, the Cardinals are ultimately so beloved thanks to KMOX: a 50,000-watt mega-station that broadcasts games to over a dozen states. Because of St. Louis’s prime location in America’s heartland, some 700 miles from the sea, it gathers in supporters from right across the south and Midwest. For 71 years to 2021, a series of radio icons called the Cardinals’ games. Sure, on TV, the graphics and images tell the story. But on radio, the announcers can paint a picture in prose. Phrases like Jack Buck’s iconic “That’s a Winner!” now serve as city-wide maxims. For three quarters of a century, these greats were the sound of the summer. They were more than broadcasters; the intimacy of radio made them friends; their warmth and talent made them family.

To that extent, then, Opening Day is a city-wide family reunion. “They’re our glue, the glue of the city,” says Al Crenshaw. 34 years old with a broad smile, he’s hanging out with some pals, tailgating as it’s known in America, standing by a grill of smoking meat and holding a can of Budweiser, St. Louis’s hometown beer. “They are our glue, the glue to the city,” Crenshaw adds of his team. “You can’t think of St. Louis without thinking of the Cardinals first.”

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Fair enough. Yet amid the joys of Opening Day, you don’t really get the sense that St. Louis’s communal spirit survives the rest of the year. “That’s part of our problem as a region,” says Tony Messenger, a veteran local journalist. “We aren’t literally invested in the success of downtown St. Louis. And if we were, Opening Day would be more meaningful.” Separated by city and county, middle-class suburbanites adore the St. Louis Cardinals. But their tax dollars do not pay for the streets abutting the team’s stadium, nor for derelict city schools. United on Opening Day, St. Louis is divided on most others.

 Around the turn of the century, some 60% of St. Louis residents were immigrants or their children. Many found work in the city’s famous breweries — both Budweiser and Anheuser-Busch, the latter giving the Cardinal’s stadium its name. Home also to the nation’s eighth-largest African-American urban population, St. Louis soon became a hodgepodge of ethnic enclaves. The Hill, a neighborhood famed for its migrants from the Lombard plains, was typical. Amid this diversity, the Cardinals were the city’s social glue. For an immigrant kid whose parents spoke with an accent, donning a red hat meant near-instant assimilation. The baseball diamond is where two Hall of Fame baseballers, the Hill’s Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola, shed their ethnic origins and became plain-spoken Middle Americans.

All the while, the city boomed. As late as 1975, St. Louis hosted eight Fortune 500 corporate firms. Aerospace, cars, biotechnology, food — all these, alongside beer, fueled the local economy. Corporate execs enjoyed cushy expense accounts; organized labor gave workers security. Even now, this wealth can be seen on the city’s streets. Think, here, of the “painted ladies” of Lafayette Square — their iron balconies and double-sloped mansard roofs evoking the city’s 18th-century French founding — or else the Siamese-Byzantine beauty of the Fabulous Fox Theatre. Then, of course, there’s the Gateway Arch, 630 feet high and a symbol of the city since 1965.

Yet as so often in Middle America, the good times wouldn’t last. From the Sixties, residents started fleeing the urban core for the suburbs. Crime, urban riots, and integrated schools drove them out; cars and interstates made the exodus easy. That was bad news for the institutions that drove St. Louis’s economic growth: the universities, the corporate headquarters, and, indeed, the Cardinal’s downtown stadium. Mirroring the city’s wider decline, attendance rates collapsed through the Seventies, even as the team itself stopped winning.

In some ways, things are even worse today. In 1950, roughly a million people lived in St. Louis. Now, there are barely a quarter, with white-collar workers, alongside their tax dollars, fleeing to ever-more distant exurbs. For Messenger, indeed, the city’s vast scale is part of the problem. Bestriding the mighty Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, Greater St. Louis is an 8,500-square-mile region that spans 15 counties and, in Illinois and Missouri, two states. Yet if that means the central core has long struggled with money — residents can easily commute to jobs far away — St. Louis also has to contend with the shadow of its hyper-local, polyglot history. “Where did you go to high school”, the city’s standard icebreaker, is a remnant of a past when neighborhood was a core marker of identity. But that hardly chimes with a place where whole districts are ghost towns. As Messenger puts it, St. Louis has the “bones” of a big city, but without enough people to fill it.

And if that causes a host of downstream problems — city schools are only “provisionally” accredited; the state recently assumed control over the police department — none feel as pressing as crime. Messenger says it permeates every discussion of the city, and with 139 murders a year, it’s not hard to see why. This brutal reality is impossible to separate from the question of race, itself, in a sense, the unfortunate flipside to the city’s central location. If, after all, the Cardinals boasts fans from right across the country, St. Louis also blends the post-industrial black ghettos of the Midwest with the sharper racial legacy of the South.

Practicing a semi-official form of Jim Crow, with schools and hospitals segregated until the Sixties, the 2014 Ferguson Riots suggest that the city’s wounds are far from healed. And if the proportion of black people murdered in Missouri is the highest in the nation, that’s shadowed by less vicious but no-less disruptive crime. During Covid, teens staged “street takeovers” where drivers performed dangerous stunts, while onlookers tossed fireworks and even mobbed police cars. Dr Mike Tsichlis, a St. Louis native who studies the city’s history, laments. If things continue, he worries, “the city itself will not be a viable sustainable place for living.” That’s a far cry from lily-white suburbs like Ladue, where donors put gold-plated nameplates on school water fountains. Meanwhile, the black kids in 30 city schools go thirsty from shut water fountains fed by lead pipes.

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And though crime has now returned to pre-Covid levels, Messenger concedes that the “crime narrative” drives residents from the city — or, decades after the mafia bombings or garden-variety street robberies of the Seventies, from attending a Cardinals game. Go to any drinking hole in Greater St. Louis, the journalist guarantees, and you’ll find “an old white guy” saying “‘I gave up my ticket, so I’m not going down there.’” Such sentiments are based on headline-grabbing incidents. In 2025, for instance, a visiting kid from Tennessee lost both his legs when an unlicensed St. Louis teenager, out on bail for robbery, sped through a yield sign and caused a major crash.

Not that everything’s hopeless. The Cardinals, Messenger argues, are dealing with the city’s crime-soaked “narrative” — a narrative he thinks they can beat. Well, maybe it was Super Fan Jan leading the cheers of a sellout crowd. Or perhaps it was “Don’t Stop Believing” blaring through Downtown. It could also have been the Budweiser Clydesdales, a team of eight draft horses pulling a red, white, and gold beer wagon around the pre-game field. But, whatever the reason, on this Opening Day, St. Louis beat the narrative. Down 7-1 in the sixth inning, the Cardinals came roaring back for a 9-7 win. The St. Louis family erupted.

It’s a joy Daniels knows from her 60th and final Opening Day with her husband Dan. On that 2017 day, they were celebrated on the stadium Jumbotron. Fans roared for the couple and their six-decade streak. Leaving the stadium after the game, the 85-year-old Dan Daniels struggled to walk. He panicked. Yet at this moment of fright and anxiety, the Cardinal Way intervened. Dan, with his walker, and Jan, carrying two-dozen roses, were easy to spot. So just as a terrified Daniels shuffled his way through the crowd, his son Daniels recalls, “you hear this clapping, and then another person’s clapping, and another person. And the sea of red parted. And all the people lined up to one side and started clapping.” In the center of this parted sea were Jan and Dan, who walked back to their car past lines of cheering fans. “And as we get to the end,” Stephen recalls, “these girls came up and said, ‘thank you, you gave us something to believe in’.” They’re not alone there.

At a combined 13,200 pounds, Lisa and Tracy make the wiry Royal seem like a Christmas pixie. But here in Hugo, such elephantine size is unsurprising. A windswept Oklahoma town, the jumbos come each winter, as much a festive tradition as the donkeys and the shepherds. With around 5,000 permanent residents, Hugo has long been known as “Circus City, USA”, and was once the Christmas home of nearly two-dozen circus troupes. These days, festive visitors are far less common. Yet like Lisa and Tracy, some old stalwarts endure, as much for family as business — even if there may be little to replace the elephants once they finally hang up their hats.

Hugo’s three-ring history dates back almost a century. In 1941, cheap land, warm winters, and a promise of free water attracted the Al G. Kelly and Miller Brothers Circus. Hugo’s own name, borrowed from the 19th-century novelist, may also have been a draw, lending a dash of Gallic sophistication to a corner of hardscrabble prairie. Soon enough, other groups arrived, with names like ​​Famous Cole and Circus Chimera, and even today circus life is everywhere in Hugo. Statues of performing elephants decorate the streets. A section of the local cemetery — “Showmen’s Rest” — is dedicated to vanished circus greats. It acts, one grave marker reads, as “A Tribute to All Showmen Under God’s Big Top Home”.

These bonds have been strengthened by money. In small-town America, the circus is both entertainment and fundraiser. Schools and Rotary Clubs will co-sponsor a circus and push tickets in exchange for a cut of the gate. Through regular routes, a group will tour the same hamlets again and again, with philanthropy guaranteeing warm welcomes. What started off, for instance, as a one-time benefit for a blind child is now a permanent partnership between Culpepper & Merriwether Circus and the Visual Bucket List Foundation. Altogether, America’s circuses give millions to good causes, with Circus Smirkus, a youth non-profit, raising $2.7 million alone.

As for the punters themselves? All year round, but especially in Hugo at Christmas, they come for the elephants. A handful still winter in Hugo, while others, like Lisa and Tracy, now live here year-round. Semi-retired, the duo spend their golden years at the 270-acre Endangered Arc, a community for aging circus beasts. Not that they’ve lost any of their enthusiasm, swaying excitedly at the sight of a visitor. The bobbing and weaving is a disarming non-verbal plea: “pet me.” Sweet nothings and a stroke of their trunks elicit what’s best described as a purr. Kids, pogo-sticks of excitement, squeal. Parents swoon. But these circus cut-ups are professionals to the tips of their tusks. At the appointed moment, Lisa strikes her “blue steel” pose. In a Christmas snap with visitors, Santa and Mrs Claus alongside, she’s as still as a statue, her bobble hat symmetrical, her dignity intact.

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Of course, Hugo’s magic is about more than its pachyderms. Take Armando Loyal, Lisa and Tracy’s minder. “They’ve provided entertainment and happiness for people all over the country, all over the world,” he says of his charges. “So, it’s their turn.” Listen to him speak, in fact, and they sound almost like family, with Loyal explaining how he cares for them on Christmas morning even before his own children.

That sense of the circus as something more than work is common here in Hugo. In Loyal’s case, it’s literally true. A ninth-generation showman, his grandparents were brought over from Italy by legendary impresario John Ringling. Some households make dentistry their lineage; for the Loyals, the “family staple”, as Armando puts it, is Roman equestrian riding, or standing atop two galloping draft horses while vaulting into a handstand. Tavana Luvas has lived a similar life. “I grew up with my family all day long,” says the fourth-generation trapeze artist, who learned her craft at her grandmother’s feet. Later, when Luvas had a husband and kids, she wondered how people could live like this.

It’s a question John Kennedy Kane, or “Eggroll” to his friends, has asked many times. Aging and balding, his career as “Canaan: the Human Volcano” feels like ancient history now. Yet his wry humor endures, as he describes the tensions of spending years on end with the same set of people. “You are with each other 24 hours a day,” Eggroll explains. “If you have an asshole that you work with, you only see them eight hours a day. I go back and his feet are hanging in my face because he’s on the upper bunk.”

But like all families, rowdy and rambunctious, circusers find a way — with every member vital to a show’s success. That means performers, yes, both four-legged and two, but also the backstage help. How could it be otherwise with such a grueling schedule? Consider a group like Culpepper & Merriwether, which over an eight-month season plays some 200 shows. The rhythm is relentless: arrive at dawn, bring down the house, then depart to do it all again tomorrow. And, in each new town, the big top must go up — without it, says Dave Williams, the Culpepper booker, “you don’t get to play”. Little wonder he reserves special praise for “the true stars of the show”: those tough folk who drive 120 stakes into the ground to hold and harness the tent.

For decades, this family effort, this “with it and for it”, paid off. Focusing on communities of less than 3,000 people, circuses like Culpepper brought out crowds — eager for some fun, but hinting again at the deep connections between big tops and small towns. “Nothing else goes there,” Williams says. “But the circus does. I think that’s part of it, another big part is that they are supporting their local group, whoever is bringing it to town. This is about civic pride.” When a circus came to Hugo in the old days, a pageant of animals and performers would parade down Broadway, the town’s main thoroughfare. Schools closed, businesses shuttered, and local celebrities rode elephants as part of the pomp.

Such festivities are getting rarer. A century ago, nearly 100 circuses and their menageries toured the nation. Today, there are 50, and that’s on a good day. Bad news for Hugo: winter retail has collapsed, and a once-bustling downtown, with its 11 department stores, now feels ominously still. Television and smart phones have doubtless played their parts here, but so too have changing mores toward the circus’s four-legged titans. “My God, protesters would be out there trying to stop us,” Eggroll says of animal-rights activists, with grand parades increasingly swapped for furtive night-time setups. “When did we become the bad guys?” Eggroll adds. “When did we become the villains?”

To be fair, there are genuine problems here, or anyway there used to be. In 2011, for instance, the Ringling Brothers circus was fined $270,000 after revelations that its elephants were chained, whipped and left in cages full of feces. By 2017, the iconic group had ended its 146-year run, though has since reopened with an animal-free show. Other challenges are harder to resolve. In September, a 37-year-old animal tamer, related to Loyal by marriage, was killed by his own tiger as his wife and daughter watched ringside.

On this second tragedy, Loyal is grimly philosophical. “We all know what we signed up for.” On the broader question of abuse, he concedes that “bad apples” will always exist: but emphasizes that throwing “everybody into one single pot” is wrong too. Turning to Lisa and Tracy, he shrugs and smiles. “Come and meet me. See how I take care of them. See how I love them.” Eggroll makes a similar point, suggesting that activism has actually changed the circus for the better. “We all saw animal treatment improved on shows because of the spotlight being on it,” he says. “Well, now — the elephants can roam free.”

The circus is modernizing in other ways too. Once upon a time, the big top was about clean-cut fun, all mimes and magic. Now, audiences craving some post-Covid liveliness go for something bawdier, with groups offering blue-humored clowns and strip teases. It may help, too, that the circus has remained gloriously apolitical, perfect for punters desperate to escape the bitterness of American politics. No wonder Royal the ringmaster describes his work as a “reply to our terrible times”.

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Whether that’s enough to save Circus City, USA is another matter. With only three circuses now wintering in Hugo, it could soon become just another prairie town, with its rodeo team and its Walmart. Even so, circus lifers remain sure of their work. “Nobody’s farther away than about 40 feet from the ring,” Williams says. “So, you’re right on top of it. You can see them sweat. I think that’s the whole thing, and it’s the joy.” There are financial calculations here too. A ticket for four will set you back a mere $50, a godsend for people in places like Hugo, where 25% live below the poverty line and where per-capita income is less than $12,000.

Not that anyone really cares about the money. “You don’t go into show business wanting to get rich,” Williams says, who quit a stable job in accounting to book circus acts. “That’s not what it’s about. You either feel it in your heart, or you can’t do it.” Loyal is just as romantic, explaining how he can tell whether someone is a would-be circuser just by looking at them. You’re either the type to love “good trouble” — or you’re not. “Let me tell you,” Loyal says, “you can look in the crowd, and somebody that’s from the circus can tell. You can just look at people and know.” Being “with it and for it” means connection, a spiritual bond that’s invisible to most — but rainbow clear if you’re a member for life.

And, perhaps, for even for longer than that. When he dies, Jim Royal will be buried in Showmen’s Rest, and his plot will come with an inscription: “He knew how to read a lot.” Not that Royal, or the circus he so loves, is quite there yet. This, after all, is Hugo at Christmastime, a place where “with it and for it” is sung as loud as any carol. And so, for the moment, the festive parades go on, with their face paint, and floats, and a pickup truck pulling the Grinch on a flatbed. And, at the center of it all come Lisa and Tracy, swinging their trunks for all they’re worth, the Santas on their backs a sideshow for once. Oklahoma smiles a Christmas Day grin, and the circus family does too. “Look at where we are,” says Luvas. “We’re watching Santa on an elephant. Where are you going to see that? Just here.”

The problem, for Blakeman and his fellow Republican activists, was that it wasn’t over yet. Gore could still ensure a manual recount in Democratic parts of Florida: and chose four stalwart blue counties around Miami and Orlando. Hence that ominous feeling of being screwed — and hence what happened next. On 22 November, 2000, desperate to secure a Dubya presidency, Blakeman led a dozen unlikely revolutionaries — white 30-something dressed in chinos and Oxfords — to the 19th floor of Miami-Dade’s Stephen P. Clark Government Center. There, site of the recount in Florida’s most populous county, they engaged in a strange act of civil disobedience.

Shouting “no justice, no peace!” and other slogans not heard before or since from bespectacled men in collared polos, Blakeman and his gang were unsurprisingly easy to mock. Yet what wryly became known as the “Brooks Brothers Riot” — so named after the stuffily upmarket clothes brand — ended up changing the course of history. “It worked,” laughs the 67-year-old Blakeman, now greyer and paunchier than he was a quarter of a century ago. “It worked so well that the people back in office had thought we had lost our minds. It put a chill through the rest of the recount.” And so it proved: the recount was soon halted, Bush won Florida, and the United States continued on its merry path of foreign peace and domestic prosperity.

Well, not quite. But if it’s tempting, almost exactly 25 years on, to see parallels between Blakeman’s experiment and the far angrier insurrections of more recent times, the true lesson of the Brooks Brothers Riot is how it’s remembered. For the fact is that, whatever progressives claimed both then and since, it was Democrats who abused democracy in the 2000 election — one of the opening salvos in a political war that has displaced integrity for an endless nightmare of hyper-partisanship.

It’s hard to remember now, but the 2000 presidential race really did feel like the “most important election of our lifetime”. Pitting Bush, the folksy governor of Texas, against Gore, Bill Clinton’s patrician vice president, it was the first race where “liar”, “major league asshole”, and “fascist” all entered America’s political lexicon. The irony is that the parties had never been closer. “We always talk about meeting in the middle,” Dr Andrew Busch, a presidential historian at the University of Tennessee says, “and there was a meeting in the middle”. From free trade and balanced budgets to hawkish foreign policy, with Pax Americana still unsullied by events the next September, Bush versus Gore was a match made in Davos heaven.

Yet prodded, perhaps, by the stylistic differences between the two candidates — Bush: a baseball-loving “bro man”; Gore: a wonkish environmentalist — election day divided America almost exactly down the middle. Over 100 million people cast their votes in a race eventually decided by just 537. And, as so often, where the country waddled, Florida barreled headfirst with a Cuba libre in its fist. In this microcosm of the 50-50 nation, the machine recount saw Bush lead by a mere 0.00005%. All eyes, alongside packs of lawyers from the pair of rival parties, trooped down south for a manual try-again. Duane Gibson was among those Republican congressional aides who took unpaid leave and a $25 per diem in return for umpiring chaos. Before he left his DC home, Duane Gibson told his wife he’d be gone for “a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving”. Not quite: the election would not be called for another 37 days, three full weeks after the holiday.

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By the time half of Washington had reached the Sunshine State, the battlelines were drawn. With their slim machine-counted advantage, the Republicans were in a stronger position, even as the Democrats were reduced to haggling over ballot designs. Here enters a true icon of our story: the “hanging chad”. In Palm Beach County, in Florida’s prosperous southeast, voters did their democratic duty via machines, which punched holes next to the names of their preferred candidates. But faulty devices — or else the arthritic hands of Palm Beach’s famously geriatric residents — led some punch holes to only partially pierce. Hence those “hanging” chads, making it unclear exactly who thousands of Floridians had wanted to elect. All that before you factor in the so-called “impregnated” chads: where the punch holes had been dented but not pushed through.

With the benefit of hindsight, of course, it all sounds like the kind of bureaucratic hoohaa that makes you want to down a keg with the nearest Florida Man. But, at the time, what happened here gripped the nation, with both camps soon becoming masters in judicial skullduggery. Under Florida law, each of the state’s 67 county election boards could order a laborious hand recount of undervotes. But the statute also mandated that results be certified one week after election day: 14 November. Jeb Bush, the Florida governor and Dubya’s kid brother, kiboshed an informal agreement on a state-wide recount. Republicans, after all, had the lead, and why would they help Gore?

Hardly very gentlemanly — but the Democrats would more than out-do their opponents on that score. Unable to secure a statewide recount, Gore instead picked four large progressive counties, Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade, and Volusia, in which Democratic election boards would certify a hand recount of 1.8 million votes. The process called for Republican observers to sit across from a Democratic counterpart, while courthouse employees hand-counted ballots and judges kept an eye on things. Most chads clearly fell one way or the other — but some didn’t. Democrats rightly argued that impregnated chads were not immaculately conceived: a voter must have caused the dent. Republicans countered that impregnated chads could only be tabulated if statutes allowed. Unfortunately, Florida law was mute on the specifics.

In the end, such calculations were based on grubby politics. “Somebody’s going to try to take advantage of the rules one way or the other,” Gibson says. “And your job is to be the roadblock against that.” Yet as he continues, what the Democrats tried that long-ago autumn went far beyond the rough-and-tumble of party politics. In these recount counties, after all, the judges and much of the courthouse staff were card-carrying Democrats, with some more than happy to put views on the table.

Consider, for instance, how the recount rooms worked. In theory, any observer was allowed to watch the process — in silence. But, as Gibson says, these rules were unevenly applied, with one Democratic observer cheerfully telling counters to challenge ballots that didn’t suit her politics. Tom Pyle, another Rioter who worked for a Republican House whip, says he saw similar mischief. At one point, he noticed a discrepancy between the actual vote tally and the formal ballot number. But, when Pyle objected, the Democratic judge didn’t seem to care. And when that 14 November certification deadline came and went — suits and countersuits made it impossible to tally 1.8 million ballots in time — there was other nakedly partisan behavior: with a Democratic Palm Beach County judge ordering canvassers to count impregnated chads, contradicting the area’s previous standard.

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In the end, Florida’s Supreme Court, composed of several Democratic-appointed judges, extended the certification deadline to 26 November. But even that, and the Miami-Dade’s election board’s frantic decision to recount a mere 10,750 ballots, out of the roughly 650,000 available, left little time for the Gore campaign to find the votes it needed. As pressure mounted, things got even more surreal, like when the board dismissed 25 pairs of volunteer counters to tally the ballots themselves, or else when they moved proceedings to what they grandly called a “tabulation room” on the 19th floor of the Stephen P. Clark Government Center — but which resembled little more than a poky old storeroom. As if designed to add to the Republican ignominy, Blakeman and the others were reduced to hanging about outside, peering in, one anonymous Rioter recalls, through “a tiny window.”

This, then, was the moment that history collided with sleep deprivation and vicious political partisanship: and a revolution erupted. The first chants — “let the press in!” — caused the election board to allow journalists into the counting room. “‘Heck, we are making progress,’” the anonymous Republican remembers thinking. “So, we started with ‘let us in, let us in!’” At that moment, like some latter-day version of Delacroix, the press played its part. And why not: well-coiffed rabble-rousers made for great televised theater. “We were playing to the cameras,” Pyle admits. But, as Blakeman repeats, shouting worked. By 10:30am, the hubbub caused the board to stop the count.

If the scene inside the Government Center was a zoo, the streets outside it were a jungle, as thousands of Republicans arrived to join in the fun. Marchers wore t-shirts emblazoned with “Who Let the Chads Out?” Some dressed as Pilgrims — even in sticky Florida, it was still Thanksgiving — while others held signs saying “Stuff Turkeys, Not Ballots”. “We were making fun of hippie protesting type stuff,” Pyle says, “but honestly after a while we were really getting into it.”

And, again, the antics worked. The Miami-Dade election board stopped its recount, Palm Beach County missed the court’s deadline, and Florida Republicans duly certified Bush the winner. Belatedly, on 8 December, Florida’s Supreme Court ordered a statewide recount — but you get the sense that, by this point, the wind had gone from Democratic sails. The following day, the US Supreme Court intervened, voiding the recount on the grounds that the state lacked any uniform standard for tabulating fuzzy votes. Given federal law explicitly said electors had to choose the president by 12 December, the upshot was clear: Gore was out of time and Dubya was heading to the White House.

What happened first, though, was that Democrats lost their minds. I was one of them. The Brooks Brothers, to me, were a mashup of every cinematic preppy bully come to life. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Congressman, thought they goose-stepped Bush to the White House, denouncing the Rioters’ “fascist tactics” and for “trashing every institution that gets in their way.” Joe Geller, the chair of Miami-Dade Democrats agreed. “These people,” he said, “reminded me of the Brownshirts in Germany.”

For the Rioters themselves, such abuse was distinctly welcome. “It kind of irked me,” Pyle recalls, “that I was being called a fascist for just exercising my rights.” Is that fair? Not entirely. Republicans were hardly straightforward white hats in this American showdown. Early on, Dubya had refused a one-on-one meetup with Gore to broker a vote-counting compromise. His kid brother — ya’ know, the governor of Florida — was anything but impartial. More Floridians probably had intended to vote Gore. But Florida law was mute on the specifics of “intent”. And besides, politics ain’t a game, and Republicans were playing for keeps.

There’s a more fundamental point here too. Whatever me and every liberal I knew claimed at the time, the Brooks Brothers Rioters didn’t try to steal the White House. The Democrats did — with their dodgy ballots, their procedural shenanigans, their last-minute venue shifts to the 19th floor of the Stephen P. Clark Government Center. And all this in a race that the Republicans almost certainly won, as subsequent non-partisan studies showed.

And yet, my party’s “big lie” continues. Somehow, the standard liberal narrative is that Gore, like an episode of Scooby-Doo, was cheated by a gang of chino-clad kids. Every 22 November, Left-leaning journalists twist the past to their liking, with both The Washington Post and the Guardian accusing the Brooks Brothers Rioters of stealing the election. After the far nastier 2021 riot at the Capitol, these claims unsurprisingly took on a still-more pungent tone, with The Nation arguing that you can trace a direct line from the 2000 farrago to the mob, the shaman, the violence. As the magazine put it in August 2022: “The post-election uprising in Miami-Dade County gives the lie to the depiction of the failed Trumpian coup as an isolated event.”

That’s true — just not in the way The Nation thinks. For the Brooks Brothers Riot really was a watershed moment, in that it heralded a broad culture of dishonesty on both sides of America’s fractured political spectrum. The big lie is wrong, Left and Right. Whatever he and his supporters might claim, Trump lost 2020 in a relative rout. On the other hand, Bush won in 2000, by the hair of his chinny-chin-chin, and the Brooks Brothers Rioters were understandably suspicious of Democratic election boards counting votes with no clear standards. American democracy is, and will continue to be, a rambunctious experimental mess of gridlock, intersecting interests, and head-on political collisions. We keep it by telling the truth, even when it hurts. Just be thankful that collared polos remain optional.

In December 1979, a perfect storm of global competition, outmoded factories, and recession slammed into America’s industrial heartland. US Steel, for a century the jewel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s crown, shuttered 15 plants. Seemingly overnight, the 27,000 steel mill jobs across the city’s Monongahela Valley vanished with them. By 1980, one-in-five Pittsburghers was jobless, and they weren’t alone. In 1950, the industrial Midwest, a seven-state region stretching from Appalachia to Wisconsin, was home to 43% of all American jobs. Starting in the Seventies, steel shed 350,000 jobs, carmakers 500,000; 1.2 million blue-collar jobs disappeared, and Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, Pittsburgh lost nearly half of their populations. 

The “Steel City” of the Thirties forged the Empire State Building and Golden Gate Bridge. But by the Eighties, Pittsburgh’s once-tidy working-class neighborhoods were shooting-dens of bullets and heroin. Prostitutes walked the streets. Patrons queued outside bars at 10 in the morning. “I was watching my city die,” Peduto says again. “I mean, right before my eyes.” But family is family, and Peduto, a big man with a booming voice, saved his kin and kiln. The longtime councilman and city mayor from 2014 to 2022, he engineered America’s gold standard in urban revitalization, with Pittsburgh now widely regarded as the country’s “most livable city”.

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Pittsburgh now teems with the creative types who drive startups and young firms. Nearly half of local Zoomers hold college degrees. Their ingenuity pushed city GDP from $79 billion in 2012 to $109 billion by 2021, a 37% jump. On a warm autumn evening, I walk the streets of downtown and can almost taste the wealth. Forty-somethings crowd the August Wilson theater. Twenty-somethings sip cocktails in the dusk. The Steel City is now the Smart City, a center of new tech boasting three billion-dollar AI firms. Pittsburgh’s legacy companies have come back too: the gleaming offices of Heinz, PPG and even US Steel dominate what locals call the “Golden Triangle” of the downtown, squeezed into the spit of land where the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio rivers all meet. The rivers mean bridges, 446 of them, many of which are painted black and gold: in Pittsburgh, even the infrastructure roots for hometown teams. 

Through all this, Pittsburgh hasn’t become some bougie theme park. Instead, it is the most affordable city across the US, Australia, Canada, and the UK. That, of course, still leaves one more question: how did Peduto’s dead city come roaring back to life? For Ken Heineman, the answer starts with history. As far back as the 19th century, explains the author of a book on the city, Pittsburgh’s early industrialists lent a “special flavor” to the local elite. Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon, Scots-Irish Presbyterians both, practiced a civic stewardship that defined the Pittsburgh’s establishment, a code that meshed with the social responsibility of the Catholic working class. Pursuit of the common good became the steel running down the city’s spine, creating social cohesion — and, if you like, a Pittsburgh family. 

To educate his kin, Carnegie built 19 libraries across Pittsburgh. Nor did he stop at the city limits. Over 1,600 architectural masterpieces, together known as the Carnegie Libraries, dot the region and the nation. Following suit, the Catholic Church brokered deals between its laborer parishioners and Protestant industrialists. This cooperative, do-gooding impulse helped forge an economic miracle. Blessed with three rivers of water and peace between unions and management, Pittsburgh became the steel capital of the world. By 1944, it was forging more steel than all America’s Axis enemies put together. 

Yet the Steel City nearly choked on its success. A thick smog blanketed the city. Streetlights were illuminated by noon. In October 1948, a “death smog” killed 20. Today’s Golden Triangle was a filthy goulash of pollution and decay. At a crossroads, Pittsburgh, as families do, came together. Mayor David Lawrence, the son of Irish immigrants, worked with the scion of the Mellon fortune, Richard King Mellon. The result was the Pittsburgh Renaissance. A $600 million master plan, underwritten by $400 million of Mellon’s fortune, built today’s gleaming Golden Triangle. Colleges and banks dominate what was once an industrial trash heap; all that remains of the area’s rough-hewn past is the Iron City Beer headquarters.

Working-class, Catholic, immigrant America — Poles, Slovaks, Italians — also joined with a WASP aristocracy to set the stage for Pittsburgh’s contemporary revival. A “meeting of the minds” is how Heineman puts it, one that cut across class and religious lines and developed a distinct civic tradition focused on growth for the commonweal. 

Like in Carnegie’s time, this ethos began with elites rubbing shoulders with the hoi polloi. By the 2000s, Peduto was a powerful city councilman. And rather than “manage decline”, he saw his city’s promise in the diverse East End neighborhood. “I not only represented that area,” he says, “I lived it.” As in the past, proximity mattered. Drinking buddies with Richard Florida, an urbanist and Carnegie Mellon University professor, Peduto frequented a grubby East End dive. Downing beers next to him were working stiffs, but also Johannes Bonatti, a scientist who developed micro-robots for open-heart surgeries. Across the bar was Luis von Ahn, who invented the programming language for Duolingo. 

Aware of the “crazy potential” in this single dive, Peduto reinvigorated Pittsburgh’s family links. City Hall, foundations, universities, and the private sector all collaborated. A memorandum of understanding between the city and Carnegie Mellon, the first ever between a municipality and university, meant Mayor Peduto had world-class R&D just a text message away. This is how Pittsburgh became home to the planet’s smartest traffic signals, with a task force devoting itself to connecting entrepreneurs to resources, then marketing their services to Silicon Valley. When Uber needed a city to test driverless cars, it was Pittsburgh that grabbed the billion-dollar investment. Soon enough, the city became an urban laboratory for tech, jobs and investment. Just like in 1979, Pittsburgh was “famalee” — albeit with slightly less disco. 

Pittsburgh, of course, is far from the only city to experience economic trauma. Yet if the family here rallied and recovered, not everyone was so lucky. To understand what I mean, drive 130 miles up the I-76 to Cleveland, Ohio, which, in a way, lived Pittsburgh’s experience without the family twist. 

Both cities were deeply defined by waves of immigration. In 1910, 25% of Pittsburghers were born in Southern or Eastern Europe. By 1920, a jaw-dropping three-quarters of Clevelanders had come from overseas. There are other similarities too, especially in how both cities became defined by belching factories. Just as Heinz became synonymous with Pittsburgh, for instance, Cleveland enjoyed a long relationship with General Motors. Yet where Peduto and his city slumped but then revived, Cleveland took a different path, and is now the second poorest large city in the nation. 

How did Cleveland become what Heineman calls “the un-Pittsburgh”? One way of understanding this is by comparing the cities’ moguls. For if Carnegie and Mellon set the tone by the Ohio, John D. Rockefeller long dominated life by Lake Erie. Dr Jon Wlasiuk, a Michigan State University professor who authored An Alternative History of Cleveland, says that Rockefeller’s Standard Oil helped make Cleveland “the engine that drove the American economy”. From 1900 to 1930, the city’s population nearly tripled, making it the nation’s sixth most populous. Shaker Heights, a suburb east of downtown, enjoyed the nation’s highest per capita income. Its manicured leafy, tree-lined streets and mock-Tudor houses were all designed to evoke the cozy feel of a European village.

In the postwar era, US Steel, General Electric, Ford, Chevy, and even NASA came to Cleveland, making the city, in the words of civic boosters, “The Best Location in the Nation”. You get a sense of this past grandeur in the art deco and Beaux Arts buildings that ring Playhouse Square, the nation’s second-largest theater district, or by gazing up at the Superman Statue on Ontario Street. Clevelanders Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster created the superhero in 1938, a reflection of the city’s brawny optimism.

Yet in the end, the Cleveland family fell apart. Whereas Carnegie and Mellon invested in education alongside their factories, founding institutions that would eventually become Carnegie Mellon University, Rockefeller largely ignored civic Cleveland. Rather than gifting his adopted city with a college of its own, he instead endowed the University of Chicago, before promptly bolting for Manhattan. In 1913, the city got its revenge by filing suit against Rockefeller for unpaid residential taxes, with a judge issuing a subpoena preventing the magnate from even entering the state. 

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Civic incompetence has stalked Cleveland ever since. For Michael DeAloia, the city’s former tech tsar, one good example is the ominous report civic fathers received in 1959, predicting an imminent end to the long industrial boom. Aware of “1979” two decades in advance, officials founded the Cuyahoga Community College to train young Clevelanders for the white-collar future — but the curriculum, maddeningly, remained focused on manufacturing. DeAloia, who read the 1959 study while writing the college’s official history, was astounded. “I sat there slack-jawed reading this damn thing!” 

City leaders were warned. But the 306,000 Clevelanders who worked in manufacturing enjoyed no such notice. By all appearances, it was all blue skies and puppy dogs. Through the Sixties, their wages surged by 22%. Cleveland placed in the top 10% of US cities by per capita income. But, as predicted, it wasn’t to last. By the late Eighties, 40% of Cleveland’s factory jobs had vanished. Median income fell by nearly a third. Strife enveloped the city. Mafia bombings became so common that a Cleveland Plain Dealer headline quipped “Bombing Business Booming Here”. In 1978, Cleveland became the first American city to default on its debt since the Great Depression. The “Best Location in the Nation” was now the “Mistake on the Lake”. 

Deindustrialization caused Cleveland’s demise. But a historic lack of social solidarity made its fall all the worse. Class conflict defined the relationship between elites and the working class, typified by Elliot Ness, the city’s director of public safety. Ness viewed organized labor and the unemployed as he did Al Capone: a threat to be beaten. In a 1937 steel strike, Ness sent his goons to smash the union. But Cleveland’s labor movement, infused with communist organizers, responded in kind, and indeed had been shipped out of Pittsburgh to more fertile revolutionary turf. 

Without these bonds of solidarity, race became ever more divisive: especially once the civil rights movement arrived. Because Cleveland enjoyed an earlier and heartier industrial boom, the city attracted more African-American migrants than Pittsburgh; by 1970, nearly four-in-ten locals were black. And though racial turmoil also roiled Pittsburgh through the postwar period, it was nothing compared to Cleveland’s 1966 Hough Riots, or the 1968 Glenville Shootout, a deadly gunfight between the police and a cell of Black Nationalists. For Heineman, meanwhile, even geography can explain the cities’ varied fates. Divided by three rivers, deep ravines, and steep foothills, he suggests Pittsburgh is really a series of “small towns with communities with a great deal of social cohesion”. Cleveland, by contrast, was built on a flat plane, meaning its different ethnic neighborhoods were always “running up against each other”. 

Whatever the cause, the consequences are starkly clear in Cleveland today. Between islands of architectural wonders lies a sea of empty streets and half-occupied buildings. For many Rust Belt residents, such urban blight can become almost pathological, with Heineman witnessing the drug-spurred aimlessness that enveloped his working-class generation. “Symbolically,” he says, “I went to high school with Eminem’s mother and JD Vance’s mom.” Vince Guerrieri, another Rust Belt native who has lived in both cities, makes a similar point. “People will tell you that it’s not healthy to derive your identity from what you do for a living,” he concedes, “but there are a lot of people who became unmoored because they weren’t working at the auto plant or the steel mill. And now they’ve got to figure out what this all means.” If elections in the Rust Belt show any pattern, certainly, they reveal a people dazed by capitalism’s creative destruction. Like a boxer woozy from upper cuts, they bobble from Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama to Donald Trump. 

Pittsburgh is the exception. The lone Rust Belt city to rise from deindustrialization’s ashes, it is also the only one to remain as solidly Democratic as it was in the Sixties. Yet as the Golden Triangle gleams, and the downtown bars are packed, and the Steelers record their 23rd straight winning season, Pittsburgh’s second renaissance isn’t quite perfect. Born to a Rust Belt coal miner, Allen Dieterich-Ward now studies his native region. And if the city’s lost industrial world could be brutal, it did at least offer vast opportunities across the region. Miners dug the coal. Labor smelted the iron and forged the steel. And Pittsburgh’s elites counted the money, with at least one eye on the little guy. For Deiterich-Ward, however, that world of a democratic capitalism is gone. 

The numbers prove him right. Today, 34 of the 100 Pennsylvania towns with the highest per-capita poverty are in the state’s western portion: in other words the Pittsburgh hinterland. One survey of 18-29-year-old rural southwest Pennsylvanians revealed 70% planned to leave. The Ohio Valley, a region anchored by Pittsburgh and Cleveland, leads the nation in deaths of despair. Rural counties that were once the backbone of Pennsylvania’s Democratic Party have swung hard to Trump, not out of racism but despair. “The postindustrial city just does not achieve that level of integration,” Dieterich-Ward adds. “There are pockets of wealth. There are pockets of renewal.” Pittsburgh is just such a pocket — but if the city family thrives, its cousins and uncles seem broken and forgotten. Perhaps, then, modern America can learn from 1979 Pittsburgh: we are family, so let’s act like it.

Nor is Rolling Fork, with its 1,800 residents, really alone: when it comes to national dysfunction, Mississippi is America’s champion. “First in everything bad, and last in everything good,” says Danyelle Holmes, an organizer for the Poor People’s Campaign. If you’re familiar with the numbers, it’s hard to disagree, with the Magnolia State beating its 49 peers in infant mortality and mass incarceration — and coming dead last in healthcare.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Raised in a shack on the edge of Rolling Fork, Ty Pinkins is convinced he can remake politics in his native state. A Georgetown Law grad, and a war hero who won a Bronze Star in Iraq, he’s already performed admirably in two statewide races for the Democrats. Especially with an unpopular GOP incumbent in the Senate, Pinkins feels the time is ripe to turn red Mississippi blue. “Voters are on the edge of their seats,” he tells me, arguing that all he’d need to win is a paltry $500,000 from Democratic bosses in Washington.

Good luck with that. Both national and state Democrats have aligned against Pinkins in favor of a 43-year-old district attorney named Scott Colom. Unlike his rival, Colom lacks name recognition, or indeed ties to the Mississippi Delta, a bulwark of Democratic support in this, America’s poorest state. What Scott Colom does have, however, is the right surname. Scott, after all, is the son of Will Colom, a major Democratic Party donor.

Now, finally, Pinkins has had enough, forsaking the Democrats and announcing plans to run for the Senate as an independent. Yet if he’s abandoned the party his family has backed since black Mississippians gained the right to vote, back in 1965, his tale is anything but done.

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Whoever you ask in Mississippi, they’ll tell you that the Republicans are vulnerable. In 2020, Cindy Hyde-Smith earned the GOP’s narrowest Senate victory in Mississippi in almost four decades. And, five years later, she isn’t doing much better, saddled with dreary poll ratings after a somnolent tenure. Yes, Republicans hold all eight statewide offices, and huge majorities in the statehouse and senate. But Democrats have a path forward in a state that is 39% African American: strong black turnout, alongside just 22% of the white vote, could make a liberal competitive.

In 2023, Brandon Presley used that very formula to come within 26,600 votes of defeating his Republican opponent for governor — with Pinkins hot on his heels. Certainly, his Delta roots are an electoral boon. A vast alluvial floodplain, home to 13 of Mississippi’s 82 counties, the region’s swamps and cotton fields host a third of Mississippi’s black residents. And if that’s significant from an electoral perspective, Pinkins can also use his upbringing to understand voter fears.

“Ty came from the bottom of the bottom,” says Lenora Wynn, his cousin. We met at “Pinkinville”, the plot of land outside Rolling Rock where the extended family once lived. “There’s only so much you can see from the cottonfield,” Wynn adds. “We had a simple beginning.” In this, Pinkins shared much with his neighbors: around 40% of all Deltans are poor.

But if that shared background helps Pinkins secure his black base, his horizon spans far beyond the Delta. An 21-year army veteran, he left Mississippi for tours in Germany, Okinawa, Iraq, as well as a stint in the White House as a military aide. Unlike many southern politicians, that makes him equally comfortable in black and white spaces. At a rally in Jackson, the state capital, Pinkins thrilled his white audience with bits of his grandmother’s wisdom. “‘Baby,’” he cried, “‘when the storm comes don’t cuss the wind, gather the neighbors and sing louder than the thunder.’” Afterwards, a white lesbian in a rainbow t-shirt wrapped him in a bear hug. As one relative puts it, “Ty can code switch.”

All the same, politics in Mississippi is about more than bear hugs. In his 2024 Senate campaign, Pinkins recruited team leaders across every Mississippi county — what Matt Barron, a political strategist, calls “cutting turf”. But when the general election came around, Pinkins lost by 25%. Why? Because by leaping into the race, Pinkins upset what many insiders here call the “gatekeepers” of the Democratic Party. A case in point here in Bennie Thompson. He may have made a name for himself nationally, chairing a Capitol Hill committee into the January 6 violence, but Mississippi’s lone Democratic congressman apparently continues to pull strings back home. According to Pinkins, Thompson withheld vital campaign funds and endorsements after he dared run without official backing, allegedly refusing to even acknowledge the upstart former soldier at campaign events. Neither Thompson nor his media representatives replied to a request for comment.

Yet despite going bankrupt bankrolling his 2024 Senate run without party help, Pinkins promptly announced his candidacy for the 2026 race, before breaking with the Democrats altogether. Leon Brown, another cousin, isn’t surprised. “He’s one that don’t quit.” And, truth be told, gatekeepers have defined Pinkins’ whole life. Back in 1986, it was a racist seventh-grade math teacher, who failed him out of spite. At the time, it seemed like Pinkins was destined to a lifetime chopping cotton — just like his parents, and his grandparents before them. When he read his grade that humid afternoon, Pinkins fell to his knees and cried. Even 39 years later, the incident still stings. “I was ready to give up,” he says.

But racism wasn’t Pinkins’ only obstacle — and here we arguably get closer to understanding the seeming elevation of people like Scott Colom. “There is a class structure in Rolling Fork,” says Shawonder Harris, yet another Pinkins’ cousin. “And our parents chopped cotton.” In the Delta, the region’s tiny black professional class connives with whites to keep poor blacks at the bottom of the socioeconomic pile. That’s hardly new: W.E.B. DuBois was infamous for making his peace with the racist white establishment, accepting that a “talented tenth” of African Americans might eventually achieve racial uplift.

Desperate to escape places like Pinkinville, these attitudes die hard, with DuBois’s teachers and grocers replaced by elected politicians. With hard-won sinecures vanishingly rare, self-service in Mississippi too often trumps the public good. “You have to navigate agendas to amass power and influence,” says Eva Posner, a liberal political tactician. “Over time, you do that enough, the person in the mirror changes. That line in the sand moves. In an industry powered by power, it is very easy to be corrupted.”

Taken together, it’s little wonder that the Pinkins clan characterizes these gatekeepers as the “Black Boulé”. Officially, the Boulé is an invitation-only organization of prominent African Americans. In practice, says Harris, it symbolizes the “intersection of classism and racism” that so exemplifies Mississippi’s Democratic gatekeepers. Never mind that Thompson and Will Colom, a lawyer and car dealer, sharpened their political teeth under civil rights icons like John Lewis. By the Nineties, they’d morphed into complacent members of the Black Boulé, more than happy to cut thrusting newcomers down to size. As Posner vividly puts it, it all speaks to a political class willing to “get dementia on national television” rather than simply retire.

In this, of course, Mississippi is far from unusual. How else to explain Joe Biden’s doddering attempts at re-election last year? But, as so often in the Deep South, the price of gatekeeping feels especially stark. “Mississippi is a crime scene,” says Holmes, “and the gatekeepers are the accomplices” — even suggesting that the state’s African American establishment is built on the exploitation of poor blacks. In Holmes’ telling, that goes far beyond dolling out campaign contributions. Rather, she claims, as does Delta whistleblower Fred Chambliss, that Thompson heads up a thoroughgoing political machine, one greased by thick wedges of cash.

“For the gatekeepers to let you in,” Pinkins agrees, “you better be like Santa Claus, with a sack of money to give to the national party and Bennie Thompson’s friends.” Will Colom, to be sure, has plenty of sacks. Since 2016, he has given many thousands to both state and national Democrats. There’s no evidence of any illegality here, but Colom’s generosity appears well-timed: around the same time that he made a substantial donation to the DNC, President Biden nominated his son for a Mississippi federal judgeship, a bid ultimately blocked by none other than Cindy Hyde-Smith. Three years on, it’s hard not to get the sense that other sacks of money are boosting Scott’s Senate bid.

Colom rejects any such links. “I am not one of the largest contributors to the Mississippi Democratic Party,” he tells me. “I stepped down as member Democratic National Committee representing Mississippi,” adding that he’s not yet sure if his son is even running for the Senate.

Thompson himself is at the center of other allegations. According to staffers, he once used his chairmanship of Congress’s Homeland Security Committee to threaten credit card companies with regulation in return for campaign donations. Current and former Thompson staffers have also operated a party-planning side hustle, in which they earned $20,000 from lobbyists for events they staged in their boss’s honour. As for the man himself, Thompson is one of the richest DC politicians in Mississippi, with an estimated net worth of $3.25 million. “This is a normal pattern and practice,” says Holmes, suggesting that if Thompson, or his close associates, can’t gain from a municipality, he simply has no interest. John Walker exemplifies these cozy arrangements. Thompson’s personal attorney and campaign advisor — as well as godfather to his daughter — Walker headed the firm that has represented both the state’s biggest airports and Thompson’s hometown.

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Whatever the truth, and as so often in Mississippi, this is a persistent problem. Local Republicans are hardly free of scandal themselves, with the local GOP implicated in a $77 million welfare scandal, one allegedly promoted by football hall-of-famer Brett Favre. Little wonder experts say it’s a coin toss between the Magnolia State and neighboring Louisiana for the most corrupt in the union. Either way, this explains why the arrival of a clean-slate candidate like Pinkins is such a threat to the Democratic establishment — especially when he can woo blacks and whites both, thereby breaking the Thompson machine’s hold over the Delta and the state’s Democratic Party.

That still leaves one more question: why would the Democratic establishment in DC indulge such behavior? The answer comes with a strange kind of logic. Long used to being short of funds, compared to plutocrat-friendly Republicans anyway, establishment Democrats still believe every candidate failing can be fixed by campaign cash. “It is donor relations, not a campaign strategy,” says Posner, arguing that though party poohbahs know Scott Colom is bound to lose his Senate race in Mississippi, that doesn’t matter as long as his father stumps up the funds for more winnable races in other states.

Not that Mississippi is necessarily destined to remain in hoc to dubious candidates forever. As insurgents like Donald Trump so vividly prove, peppering voters with pricey TV ads is no longer a guarantee of success, while the walking disaster that was Kamala Harris shows that funding isn’t everything. To be sure, money remains a vital ingredient in the American political stew: but cash without the grassroots won’t win campaigns. Besides, Democrats these days generally have enough funds to be competitive. The problem, Posner says, is that they never invest in the necessary political infrastructure, instead relying on the tried-and-tested Boulé.

For the moment, then, money and power remain the language of Mississippi’s political class. In mid-June, Will Colom is meant to have phoned Pinkins with a promise of future campaign funds — apparently wrapped in a warning. “Ty,” Colom allegedly said, “you know I have accumulated a lot of resources over the years. They are available to you. If you and Scott go against each other, I don’t want it to get dirty.” As far as Pinkins himself is concerned, the threatening subtext is clear: “‘If you don’t drop-out, it will get dirty.’” Colom denies making any threat, implied or otherwise. “I never said anything to Pinkins about running against Scott Colom for Senate,” he tells me. “Not a word.”

Either way, such allegations don’t surprise Holmes. “Nothing,” she says, “will go to the Mississippi Delta if you aren’t part of the in-crowd.” As for Ty Pinkins himself, he doesn’t seem willing to sell his integrity cheap. The night before he announced his independent bid, I spoke to him from his Vicksburg home. On that muggy Mississippi night, he sounded buoyant for tomorrow — even as he offers a warning to his former party’s gatekeepers. “If Tyrone from the Mississippi Delta says, ‘I’m no longer a Democrat,’ there’s a problem.” That’s surely true from a moral perspective. But depending on how the next few months go, it could soon pose vast electoral issues for the likes of Bennie Thompson too.

With over 3,000 tons of water cascading down every single second, that’s a lot of lithium baths. No wonder 14 million jolly tourists cram here each year, together contributing $2 billion to the local economy. But pass a little time in Niagara, where Ontario meets New York, and you’ll realize this Canadian town is about more than river spray and mist. There are other reasons to be cheerful, too, from the ziplines to dinosaurs to the motels, 165 at the last count, together wallowing in a veritable lithium bath of kitschiness. It all speaks to an instinctive rejection of middle-class “curation”, in favor of good-old-fashioned garish dazzle — elitist snobs be damned.

The sheer power of Niagara panicked the first Europeans to see it. In 1678, an early Belgian visitor described the “surprising and astonishing manner” in which the water barrelled down. But, by the 19th century, the Falls became popular. In 1801, Vice President Aaron Burr’s daughter chose Niagara for her bridal tour. Three years later, Napoleon’s little brother Jérôme did the same. Those proto-influencers soon turned Niagara Falls into the honeymoon capital of North America, a title it’s retained ever since. Perhaps it’s that gigantic lithium bath, or else the easy drive from Toronto, but 50,000 happy couples still flock here each year.

The Falls are surely part of the romantic allure. Bob Fitzgerald, who runs the Falls Wedding Chapel on the New York side of the border with his wife Sally, has wedded everyone from popstars to WWE wrestlers. Regular punters from as far away as Singapore arrive to tie the knot here too, as well as one Australian in her 20s, who came to Niagara to wed her beloved before passing away from a terminal disease. “The Falls,” says Strand, “are a giant magnet that attracts human impulses.”

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Spend time gazing at the torrent — “At last, fortissimo!” quipped Mahler when he first laid eyes on it — and it’s hard not to be impressed. Yet chat to the Fitzgeralds and it’s clear Niagara is about more than nature unleashed. Consider, if nothing else, the helicopter ceremonies the couple offer above the Falls, with newlyweds exchanging vows in the cabin. And if that hints at a town comfortable with showiness, there’s plenty more where that came from.

A great example here is the Zipline to the Falls, carrying daredevils 2,200 feet down over the abyss. Rebecca and Elizabeth, who work at the attraction, giggle as they recall the 98-year-old woman who took her own high-flying lithium shower. It’s unlikely even she could have managed other Niagara pastimes. Since 1850, 11 stunters have tightroped across the gorge, while 15 have barrelled over and survived.

Such kookiness is clear away from the Falls themselves. On the Canadian side of the border, you can golf with a Brontosaurus at Dinosaur Adventure Golf, or encounter Vlad the Impaler at the Castle Dracula Wax Museum, or take aim at moonshine jugs at the Hillbilly Shooting Gallery. Until 2002, the local museum even boasted the mummified remains of Pharaoh Rameses I, which somehow turned up in the mid-19th century.

But the true apotheosis of Niagara kitsch is in the accommodation. Visit the Cadillac Motel and you’ll see what I mean. Pinch-your-cheek cute, the tidy retro property features 23 themed rooms, ranging from “Ghostbusters” to “Marilyn Monroe” — who, according to local lore, once stayed the night. Ray and Lisa Brock, the owners, regularly rent half the place out to hockey teams and stag dos, who happily gorge themselves on home-cooked barbecue and what Lisa calls a “pig trough” full of beer.

“A fascinating accretion of human culture and goofiness that piles up around the Falls,” is how Strand summarizes the town. “It is a fun place that illustrates a side of human absurdity.” But if that explains the what, we’re still left with the how — how is it that, amid the unending march of neoliberal drabness, places like Dinosaur Adventure Golf and the Ghostbusters room survive? The price is probably a good place to start, even with the Falls themselves. There are crowds, sure, but the torrent is visible a half a mile down the Niagara Parkway, making for a cheap day out. “You don’t have to stand in line,” Bob Fitzgerald says. “It isn’t Disneyland. You don’t have to pay or elbow people aside.”

Yet if the accommodation is similarly light on the pockets — a night at the Cadillac will set you back just $85 Canadian dollars a night in the off-season — Niagara is about more than fun on a budget. “People like the unique,” Lisa Brock says. “The big hotel chains don’t care.” Certainly, it’s hard to imagine the Hilton putting out pig troughs full of LaBatt Blue pilsner for thirsty hockey bros.

And I wonder, too, if Niagara thrives on something else: nostalgia. Fast capitalism delivers boutique “experiences”. But even us globalist anywheres are ultimately from somewhere, and Niagara’s kitsch taps into that nostalgic impulse that pines for the authenticity of yesterday. A “Zombie Attack” interactive theatre is not your grandmother’s country fried steak — or, as we’re in Canada, a classic poutine. But retro connects us to our history. A round of mini-golf with vinyl dinosaurs evokes memories of vacations past. In Niagara, vacationers have that rare thing: fun. Rewilding or yoga retreats may offer a “bespoke wellness experience”, but they’re ultimately just contrived excuses to clamber back on the hamster wheel of self-improvement. Nostalgia, meanwhile, answers that simple yearning for gentler times.

Not that Niagara is stuck entirely in the past. A mile from what the Brocks affectionately call the “Caddy” is Basell’s Restaurant and Tavern. Like other spots in town, it’s dripping in Sixties atmosphere, all neon signs and checkerboard floors. In other ways, however, Basell’s feels strikingly modern. Founded by two Greek brothers, the spot is now run by Fang. Indian-born and of Chinese descent, the recent Canadian immigrant has kept the booths, the steel-stainless counter, and the “evil eye” keeping watch.

At this point, Strand once more returns to the power of the Falls, bestowing the spray with almost mystical power. “It is a pilgrimage that helps define you as an American and Canadian,” she says. “Like the 19th-century Grand Tour, when elites went to the Falls to embrace their new nation. Bathing in the spray of the Falls it naturalizes you. It is almost like a baptism.”

A case in point is Fred Fakouri. Tall and affable, the 27-year-old owns and runs the Persepolis Inn with his father. Typical of old-school Niagara, the 52-room motel is small and intimate, with heart-shaped baths aplenty. As the property’s name suggests, the Fakouri clan hail from Iran, fleeing the Islamic Republic to gentle Ontario. “The hotel is a healing process for us,” he explains. “The family is pouring everything into the hotel and Niagara Falls.” A town settled by the British, Niagara beckoned as a path to freedom for enslaved African Americans. This welcoming tradition continued into the 20th century, when the Falls powered industry that attracted migrants from Eastern Europe.

Yet if nearly 20% of Niagara’s population come from an immigrant background, and many, like the Fakouris, are integrated and happy, it’s wrong to see the town as a haven from all the world’s woes. Niagara Falls is the temporary home to more than 5,000 asylum seekers, the highest per capita rate of any Canadian city. Mayor Jim Diodati warns it’s at “breaking point” — telling reporters that the shelters are full, the transitional housing is full, and the drug problem is “like it’s never been before”.

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There are other challenges too. Before Covid, the Fitzgeralds once averaged 701 weddings a year. These days, they hope these numbers will return, so they can pass the business to their daughter. Fakhori tells a similar tale. Since the pandemic, he says, business is down 50%, and refusing to fully rebound. Last year, overall tourist numbers were still down 7% from their 2019 peak, a shortfall of 1.5 million visitors and tens of millions in spending.

Of course, Niagara Falls isn’t alone in feeling the legacy of lockdowns. But the town is arguably at particular risk thanks to the very nostalgia that lends it strength. Those mom-and-pop joints may bring in customers, Lisa Brock says, but they’re also vulnerable to being snatched up by big Toronto investors — who strip their new assets for upscale customers unenthusiastic about heart-shaped baths.

These days, indeed, the bulk of accommodations at Niagara are now classified as “high-end”. A local newspaper editorial even bragged that the town is “positioning itself to become a more substantial player in the upscale hotel market”. These high-end chains replace a series of iconic establishments that were utterly unique to the town. Among these were the Foxhead Motor Inn, made famous by the Jim Crow-era Green Book travel guide, and the Inn on the Niagara Parkway, a late-Fifties gem that styled itself a “modern resort motel”. Nor is this just a Niagara phenomenon. In 1964, more than 61,000 motels, largely of the mom-and-pop variety, dotted the North American roadside. A generation later, that number is 16,000 and dropping.

The forces of globalization and gentrification, then, are at the gate. But at least the Falls remain. Inspired, perhaps, by their unending roar, the Fitzgeralds still have ambitions to make Niagara Falls the “wedding capital of the world”. And, at places like the Cadillac, the old charm endures for at least a while longer. “See how old fashioned we are,” the receptionist tells me proudly. “We still use a key.” I can’t think of a better lithium bath.

I meet Hoots by an intersection in Greenfield, an impoverished town in Weakley County, Tennessee. The motorists this chilly weekend morning don’t seem particularly interested — beyond the rough weather, the evangelists also face a few obscene gestures — but there’s plenty of agape to go round. That’s partly of the Christian variety: open-air ministries like this thrive all over the state’s western fringe, where Tennessee hits Kentucky. Yet time and again, over my time in Weakley, I saw agape of a different kind, with many here willing to make vast sacrifices for their blond-haired messiah.

In 2016, Donald Trump secured over almost three quarters of Weakley votes. Yet the President’s 2018 tariffs cost farmers billions, with bankruptcies spiraling by a fifth and Tennessee’s lucrative soybean markets ceded to competition abroad. In 2024, meanwhile, Trump pledged school vouchers, inevitably shutting country schools. But despite the hurt, both promised and delivered, Trump again won four-fifths of locals. Nor is this just a Weakley phenomenon. As I learned, what happens here speaks poignantly to the republic’s rising tribalism, as Americans increasingly use politics as a badge of identity, even if they suffer the impact themselves.

For rural Tennesseans, backing Trump has become something of a tradition. Beyond Weakley, the President won at least 75% of the vote in nearly every one of the state’s back-country counties. It’s a similar story nationwide: in both 2016 and 2024, Trump secured the backing of 62% of rural Americans. On the ground, too, this affection shines through. As I crisscrossed Weakley County, I met dozens of people who see Trump as somewhere between a protector and a profit. “You Can’t Fix Stupid, But You Can Vote it Out” read the pro-Trump signs that line the roads. “Democrats kill babies and let the immigrants enter,” one local Republican told me. “You can’t possibly be a Democrat because you are a Christian.”

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To an extent, this enthusiasm can be understood in policy terms. In a county that has the state’s second-highest rate of sexual assaults against minors, the President’s promise to “protect kids” is popular in Weakley. Tariffs doubtless hit farmers — but they could also boost auto production at Blue Oval City, an upcoming $5.6 billion Ford factory a few counties over. “Trump is addressing issues that have animated Tennessee’s rural voters for a great deal of time,” says Daryl Carter, a history professor at East Tennessee State University. “These rural areas have been hollowed out. Jobs gone. Hospitals closed. Opioid abuse. They have a lot of reasons to be pessimistic about America.”

Yet if Trump, the man, is popular, and his rhetoric is too, it’s also clear that his actions are unwelcome in spots like Weakley. One good example is education. In January, the President tweeted support for a Tennessee school voucher scheme. The bill extends 20,000 vouchers to rural and urban school districts, encompassing both private and public institutions. It’s also opposed by 77% of rural Tennesseans, who fear losing students, and public money, to private schools. Yet these reservations didn’t deter state Republicans. In a hastily convened special legislative session, the party rammed through the so-called Education Freedom Act, which Governor Bill Lee duly signed into law in February. Local Republicans are far from pleased. “It was a mean trick to railroad the bill through before folks could learn about it,” says Steven Vantrease, a conservative member of the Weakley County school board.

At root, the furore suggests the Tennessee GOP is willing to betray its rural base — if it can secure more votes statewide. In the past, conservatives traditionally aimed vouchers at low-income parents, often racial minorities in big cities, offering them added flexibility in picking quality charter schools for their children. But with rising fears around “woke” curriculums, there’s an electoral incentive to expand the scheme statewide. The problem for rural voters, typified by their broad opposition to the plan, is that added choice can wreck local education. With kids increasingly scarce in places like Weakley, added choice can close small town schools that rely on a handful of students.

It’s an issue that transcends brick-and-mortar buildings. “School consolidation is a small-town killer,” says Dale Hutcherson, a handsome 31 year old, and Weakley County’s Republican mayor. “If a school dies, then the heart and soul of a community dies.” As Hutcherson explains, hometown teachers go to all the football games, supervise clubs, and keep tabs on their kids beyond class. In rural Tennessee, it really does take a village. No wonder defending public schools is an issue that crosses political boundaries. A case in point is Nicolle Gallagher, former chair of the Weakley County Democrats, who calls them “the pride and joy” of a local community. Fair enough: ranked sixth in the state, students here score in the top 25 counties nationwide in math, science and social studies.

That begs the question: with bipartisan opposition, why aren’t Tennessee Republicans reaping an electoral whirlwind for their cynicism? For Gallagher, the answer begins not in policy but in place. “Politics,” she says, “is about tribal belonging” — and I certainly got that sense during my time in Weakley. I’m told that Martin, home to the University of Tennessee branch campus, is “where all the liberals live.” But even here, Trump wins in a landslide and locals flew upside-down American flags during the Biden era. As one Martin Republican says: “It is us versus them.”

Being outside the tent can be painful. In these small, tight-knit communities, voting blue can bring a form of social death. Friends from high school no longer acknowledge you. Meanwhile, no one new moves to town — so who will you befriend? “People will know you are a Democrat,” Gallagher says. “It can hurt you personally and professionally.” As she continues, that can bring more than loneliness, noting that Weakley County no longer has any actively Democratic teachers. Amazed, I ask Jess Piper, a former educator and a rural Democratic organizer for the Blue Missouri campaign group. She guffaws at my question, before telling me that her politics meant she lost her career. “I got my husband fired,” she adds. “He was a teacher too.” Though certainly illegal, such discrimination is nearly impossible to prove without costly lawyers who anyway live miles away.

Tribalism can be nasty even if you’re apolitical. Shannon Taylor, who lives in Dresden, the Weakley County seat, tells me that face-to-face encounters are pleasant enough. Locals embrace the lesbian bartender at the American Legion. Momz Honky Tonk, in nearby Cumberland, hosts a monthly drag show, and no one blinks an eye. Online, though, some locals express their ire at those who trespass what Taylor calls their group mentality. “They care about their community and care so much that they spew hateful rhetoric,” she says. “They think they are protecting their communities.”

It didn’t used to be like this. As recently as 2008, Weakley County, like much of western Tennessee, was a Democratic stronghold. Democrats occupied every local office. But when it moved blue to red, the transformation was devastating. In 2006, Tennessee Democrats controlled the governorship, congressional delegation, and both general assembly chambers. But by 2013, everything had changed. Once in the minority, the GOP now dominated both houses of the Volunteer State’s legislature. Democratic state senate leader Reginal Tate put it best: “Man, we could have caucus meetings in my car.” Today, no Weakley Democrat inhabits a local office. What happened here was a national phenomenon too. From 2008 to 2016, Democrats lost 13 seats in the Senate and 69 in the House, as well as 11 governorships, 913 state legislative seats and 30 state legislative chambers. Weakley, then, was merely a microcosm of a national political earthquake. “I knew that was the end of the Democratic Party around here,” Gallagher admits. “It was like the lights went out.”

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As the timeline implies, this shift can partly be understood by the Obama effect. Yet if there’s surely a racial element here, Carter stresses that isn’t the whole story. In 2008, after all, Obama invested heavily in rural America. On election day, he made small yet significant inroads with rural voters from Montana to Virginia. Even in those states he lost, his efforts helped Democrats win seats nationwide. Yet eight years on, the bottom collapsed, giving Trump the White House and both houses of Congress. Why? Because, insiders say, the party got drunk on “yes, we can” and rested on its laurels. Carter witnessed this duality in rural Tennessee. Obama, he says, “scared the bejesus out of people” — but was also a “piss-poor party leader.” Without inspiring candidates or local organization, Tennessee Republicans had a free hand, branding Democrats the “them” and conservatives the “us.”

Carolyn Ideus, a Democratic official in Weakley County, says the Republican wave created “huge social pressure” to join the “us” party. And quite aside from all that small-town browbeating, some experts suggest rural Americans are especially prone to partisanship. “Rurality is an identity and worldview that transcends income and education,” argues Nick Jacobs, a political scientist and co-author of The Rural Voter. “A rural worldview is classed by geography not occupation.” Once more, it’s something I witnessed firsthand. On Martin’s main drag, a giant Donald Trump cardboard cut-out stands in the window of the GOP headquarters. A local Republican, who asks to stay anonymous, laments that even school board elections are now increasingly partisan.

Little wonder, then, that Carter says the Trump movement is much bigger than bickering over charter schools, especially when bias in big cities only fuels the reaction in places like Weakley. “There are perverse incentives to malign Trump voters,” is how Lisa Peruitt, a professor at UC-Davis puts it. “It helps accrue social capital.” That’s especially when the man himself cheerfully bashes powerful corporations, media elites and East Coast political dynasties like the Clintons. These, Peruitt says, are the exact people Trump says “rigged the system for their benefit [and] will do anything and say anything to keep things exactly the way they are.”

Either way, there’s obviously far more to Weakley County Republicans than simply being deluded by “false consciousness” to vote against their own interests. With a fight for America’s soul on their hands, it’s little wonder that Jake Bynum, a former county mayor, should argue that “love of country and perceived way of life” naturally outweigh “pocketbook issues” — charter schools or soybean exports be damned. Nor should progressives really be surprised here either: there’s little Upper West Side liberals love more than sacrificing their paychecks for the poor. Agape, it seems, remains a bipartisan affair.

To this day, only the 1969 Moon landing has drawn more American eyeballs than the Super Bowl, with the 57th set to be played between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday night. Now, though, the old college teams want to attract the eyeballs too, together with the billions in advertising revenue they inevitably bring. In practice, that means marketers, and trainers, and wages, and the end of an amateur tradition that’s survived, in one form or another, since the end of the Civil War.

This matters, and not merely in the way it transforms college football into a disfigured, commercialized echo of the NFL. For in the professionalization of university sport, there’s a broader story too. I mean how, in modern America, money burrows into every facet of life, a process that squashes the variety from our continent-wide culture — even as it hints at the hard limits of our big-is-best mentality.

Americans love competition. Every year, 100 million of us attend a professional baseball, football, hockey or basketball game. Yet in this sports-crazed republic, amateur college football is distinct — not least in the passion of its fans. In 2024, the 10 highest-rated games had a collective TV viewership of 122 million, while 31 teams averaged a remarkable 100% in-person attendance rate. Yet even these numbers don’t really do the sport justice. Visit somewhere like the University of Alabama and you’ll soon see what I mean. Starting at breakfast, 100,000 fans get stuffed and buzzed at “tailgate” parties outside the ground. Expect an orgy of beer, hickory-fired ribs and Krispy Kreme donuts. Once you’re good and full, dash into the “Walk of Champions”, where fans greet the team as they enter Bryant-Denny Stadium. You’ve already had a packed day, and it is not even kickoff.

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How, then, to explain this mania, one that fires spasms of emotion from Alaska to Maine? For Kurt Kemper, the answer begins less with the teams — and more with the universities that host them. “College, to Americans, is synonymous with the middle class,” argues Kemper, a professor of American history at Dakota State University. “College football is an idealized part of the college experience.” That’s partly a function of history. Rutgers played Princeton in the first-ever college football game way back in 1869. Today, though, college football is mostly a working-class game, one particularly popular among African-Americans. It doubtless helps, Kemper adds, that university, and university football, have long been admired as engines of social mobility. Compared to their classmates, football stars disproportionately hail from disadvantaged backgrounds, and graduate at higher rates than average.

In the end, though, college football is about more than a path to a picket fence. As Randy Roberts, a Purdue University historian explains, the institution ultimately speaks to America’s bewildering range of regional identities. Who you root for doesn’t just denote your alma mater: but rather your local sensibility and class. Forget those Alabama ribs — at Presbyterian College, in South Carolina, the team mascot is a Scottish highlander, blasting the bagpipes as he leads the team on. In America’s heartland, meanwhile, teams are famed for embracing the Midwest’s agricultural heritage. In Wisconsin, for instance, fans wear cheese hats on their heads, appropriate enough in the Dairy State. In Nebraska, for its part, supporters swap camembert for corn. Little wonder their team is nicknamed the Cornhuskers.

I don’t wish to insult readers in Madison or Lincoln — but this regional spirit is undoubtedly clearest at Appalachian State University. Nestled amid the hills and hollers of Boone, a hardscrabble town in North Carolina’s High Country, App State boasts the highest average attendance percentage in college football: a spectacular 115.78%. To zoom past capacity, students cram onto the “Grassy Hill” overlooking the field. They’re joined by 25,000 alums, who drive hours down treacherous two-lane highways to return “home” for six Saturdays every fall. Between the third and fourth quarter, millionaires, college kids, and working-class locals all celebrate their rough-hewn identity through a 35,000-person sing-along of an iconic rock-country anthem.

For Adam Cole, none of this is surprising. “Maybe you love your hometown, maybe you hate it,” says the beat reporter covering college football in the southeast. “But it sticks with you.” It’s a love that can easily veer into hatred. A case in point is when the University of Michigan plays their next door neighbor and Big Ten nemesis Ohio State University, in a matchup ominously known as “The Game”. In one recent meeting, the players started a melee, a battle complete with pepper spray. He’s never got quite that angry, but Cole understands the red mist himself. A native of Topeka, Kansas, he once overheard a passenger at an airport insult a local university. As he puts it: “It took everything in me not to say, ‘Hey fucker, don’t talk about my town!’”

Now, though, this lively amateurism is threatened — by the mighty greenback. Already, the top 10 grossing college football programs collectively earn $571 million a year, largely through free media exposure when big games are shown on TV. It’s a bonanza that smaller teams can sometimes grasp at too. In 2007, for instance, Appalachian State shocked the college football world by defeating the University of Michigan. Practically overnight, enrollment jumped by 6,000. No wonder Joey Jones, the Appalachian State football team’s director of strategic communications, calls college football the “front porch” of his university.

With figures like these floating about, it’s equally unsurprising that cash now stalks other corners of college football too. For decades, student-athletes were mostly unpaid. All they could expect was paid tuition and a tiny dorm room, alongside drab cafeteria meals. But, in 2015, federal courts finally cut students in on the action. These days, college athletes secure compensation via “Name, Image, and Likeness” (NIL) deals. By appearing in commercials, or signing a jersey, a top-flight college quarterback can earn $1 million a year; elite teams altogether cost upwards of $10 million. All the while, universities increasingly employ “general managers” to raise money from wealthy donors and ink deals with the private sector.

There’s plenty more where that came from. Since the launch of an NFL-style playoff competition, in 2014, a system that’s since expanded to 12 teams, the biggest universities together gorge on media deals together worth $7.8 billion. And with a gaggle of lesser schools keen to get in on the action, the top sides have fought to control their monopoly by forming into 11 mega-conferences. Strikingly, these groupings no longer correspond by region: the Big Ten has transcended its Midwestern roots to encompass 20 schools, spanning from Jersey to Cali, securing it a media footprint in five of the nation’s seven biggest markets.

With so many potential viewers, the Big Ten TV network fills the coffers of its members with $100 million a year. Yet if that makes general managers rich, and ensures students are fairly remunerated, it’s also having a real impact on how college football actually feels from the stands. One good example — you might almost call it NFL-lite — came last month. One chilly Monday evening, the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame played the Ohio State Buckeyes in what’s increasingly known as the “Super Bowl” of college football. Each team bagged a cool $20 million from the game, but beyond the dollars and cents, the professionalization practically oozed from the touchline. Players and coaches are hired guns who move from team to team in search of greater pay. Will Howard, Ohio’s winning quarterback, had just transferred from Kansas State the previous January. Days after Ohio State’s victory, the team’s defensive coordinator jumped ship to Pennsylvania State, lured by an annual paycheck worth $3.2 million.

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It goes without saying, meanwhile, that those mega-conferences are bringing their own changes. “Conferences are losing college football’s parochialism,” says Roberts, adding that the passion animating games like the Ole Miss-Mississippi State “Egg Bowl” is ultimately down to the narcissism of small differences. Kemper agrees. Until the inception of the college football playoff, he suggests that crowning a national champion wasn’t really the sport’s primary aim. Rather, beating a rival defined a “winning” season. Nowadays, though, with teams duking it out for a national trophy, college football risks becoming a clinical, antiseptic game, one devoid of the parochial hatreds learned at your grandfather’s knee.

Of course, this heady blend of nationalization and money isn’t limited to college football. Post-1945 America has been standardized by transport and telecoms, which together flatten regional accents, dump regional foods, and altogether homogenize the American experience. As late as the Carter presidency, you could visit Nebraska to watch the Cornhuskers, munching a runza from a dairy bar as you went. No longer, even as Kemper argues that the arrival of a winner-takes-all college Super Bowl speaks to a broader economic model that lavishes rewards upon a select few. “In the old system,” he says, “10-15 teams finished a season feeling like a winner. In the new system there is one winner.”

To be fair, greed has yet to fully crush the college game. “Tough people who work with their hands and football is their way out,” is how Roberts characterizes it. “Football is a tough game. You see where the players are from.” At Appalachian State, certainly, that toughness is epitomized by quarterback Chase Brice. Failing to achieve on-field success at two bigger schools, the burly blonde transferred here in 2021. Self-effacing and eager for success, Jones says that the mountain people here “saw something of themselves” in the 27-year-old Georgian.

That’s just as well — for college football can still be special. On 7 September, 2022, Appalachian State hosted ESPN’s College GameDay show. Broadcast live from the university’s campus, it brought the university $500 million dollars in free advertising. Not that the fans cared much about that, as tiny Boone became the center of the football universe. A back-and-forth game against a conference rival came down to one final play. Behind two points, with two seconds remaining, Brice heaved a 53-yard “Hail Mary” touchdown for a remarkable victory. The crowd exploded. Yet amid the mayhem, Brice, the star quarterback on the national stage, ran straight past reporters. Instead, he rushed to the student section of the stands, where he helped classmates climb down onto the field. A wonderfully intimate moment, amid a sport that grows and grows.

This isn’t just a personal story. For if last year’s election saw Perez — who spoke to me using a pseudonym — go red for the first time ever, his brothers did too, alongside 42% of all Latino voters. That, it goes without saying, should really worry Democrats. For decades, they relied on the group to cross the electoral line in the sand, and as recently as August, the CEO of Voto Latino predicted a wave of young Hispanic registrants would push Harris to victory. Now, though, it’s clear that strategy is dead. And if the white liberal establishment hopes to revive it, it must finally take people like Perez seriously, viewing them as go-getting individuals rather than faceless members of a passive ethnic bloc.

On the surface, it was inflation that pushed Latinos like Perez to the Republicans. “My business runs on gas,” the 28-year-old says, explaining how rising energy bills were costing his firm $10,000 a year. Quite aside from his own family, you can spot similar sentiments right across his state and hometown. In November, Trump won 42% of Pennsylvania’s Hispanic vote, up 15 points from 2020. In Erie, a chilly Pennsylvania town nuzzling the Great Lakes, voter turnout surged across several Hispanic areas. Erie’s Latino voters followed Perez in plumping for Trump, with many clearly drawn to the Republicans promise to “drill, baby, drill” and keep cost-raising regulations to a minimum.

In truth, though, the Democrats’ problems with Latino men goes way beyond the transient vagaries of economic policy. Speak to Perez, a stout, baby-faced 28-year-old, and that challenge can be grasped in a single word: immigration. “No human is illegal” may pass muster at the local gastropub. But 54% of Americans oppose liberal border policies, and Perez is among them. As he puts it: “Biden’s open borders really pissed me off.”

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Learn a little about Perez’s background and this may seem surprising. Nico and his parents, Juan and Maria, came to America illegally, wrapping their ankles in garlic to ward off snakes and sleeping in caves at night. From there, like so many immigrants, they worked in the shadows. In the summer, they picked apples. In the fall and winter, they labored in northwest Pennsylvania’s vineyards. “As a kid,” Perez recalls, “I didn’t know much about it [the family’s legal status]. I just knew I couldn’t go to Mexico and to stay out of trouble.” The second part, at least, was easy. A good student himself, his mom was “big” on education. “There is no need to work,” his dad always told him. “You have to go to college.”

In 2011, Nico’s father, with the backing of an employer, started the green card process. He eventually earned citizenship, which was conferred to his children. Nico’s mom, who lacked effective legal counsel but possessed plenty of reflexive honesty, confessed to carrying her baby boy across the border. This inadvertent admission to “human smuggling” caused her to be extradited, and earned her an automatic 10-year ban on returning. “She didn’t even think of the repercussions of admitting she smuggled her son,” Nico sighs, looking away to keep his composure. “If she had lied, then no 10-year ban.” Since 2011, Maria Perez has lived with her sister in central Mexico. The family is still waiting on the appeals process. Nico, for his part, tries to be stoical. “It is hard,” he says. “We talk to mom two-to-three times per week.” But his eyes betray a pain that goes deep.

Eight years later, in 2019, Perez again encountered the immigration system, when he married his sweetheart. Hailing from a village near his birthplace of Manuel Doblado, a sleepy town of 40,000 in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, he met Sofia online. It helped, too, that the pair had friends in common. For three years, he traveled to Mexico to see his wife, and later their daughter Luciana. It was very hard for him, he concedes, but even tougher on his wife. “She was very isolated.”

Eventually, Sofia and Gianna got their citizenship. Apart from his mother, waiting for a judgment from US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the family is now reunited. But that leaves an obvious question: as an illegal immigrant himself, albeit one who finally regulated his status, why is Perez skeptical of more recent arrivals? The answer, perhaps, has something to do with the way immigration policy has changed over recent years. Yes, they snuck across the border, but the Perez family earned their way later. His mother even paid for her honesty with deportation. These days, though, Perez argues the system discourages discipline. Though immigrants can expect to wait up to a decade for their asylum claims to be processed, many are eligible for federal and state funds. “In my dad’s neighborhood,” he says, “nobody works, they don’t have jobs.”

It’s tempting to be skeptical of this rhetoric. The United States has always been built by immigrants — English, Irish, Italian — reaching the city on the hill before slamming the drawbridge behind them. Yet study the numbers and Perez does seem to have a point. From 2021 to 2023, over six million people arrived at the southern border, up from 1.7 million between 2018 and 2020. Almost half of these were released into the US pending adjudication of their asylum claims. More than that, Perez’s claims about funding do appear to jibe with the facts. In the past, undocumented immigrants were ineligible for state aid. Today, those who would have been undocumented are now asylum seekers, making them eligible for a driver’s license, work permits, and government support. Lin Manuel Miranda’s claim that “immigrants get things done” still holds true: the foreign-born work at higher rates than the native-born. But perception, especially in politics, is reality.

In short, then, “open borders” is far more than just a Right-wing talking point, something even Democrats are starting to concede. “The border is a mess,” says Adam Frisch, a candidate for Congress in Colorado. “That doesn’t make you a racist.” Will Marshall, the president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute, makes a similar point. “Biden opened the doors to the border and [faced] a huge backlash,” he tells me. “Polls show that people believe that illegal workers depress wages. They [also] resent that they get social benefits.”

Once again, these arguments are backed by numbers. Immigration unquestionably primes economic growth — but it also depresses wages for those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. One study estimated this loss at nearly 10% of a low-skilled laborer’s pay. Pro-Publica reports that Perez’s resentment is common in immigrant communities across the nation. Yes, it is ironic that those who were once were undocumented feel aggrieved because the path is now easier. But progressives have a choice. They can wail and stamp their feet, or accept that many recent arrivals have visceral reactions to the immigration issue born from emotional scars. Newsflash: humans are complicated.

Nor, of course, are these sentiments limited to immigrants. In 2020, less than a quarter of voters wanted more immigration restrictions. Today, that number has jumped to 55%. As Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow with the Migration Policy Institute, lately admitted: “There is no constituency left in this country that favors large-scale immigration.”

This poses another question. If open borders are so unpopular — not least among Latinos, a group vital to liberal success — why would Democrats go ahead and promote them anyway? Ironically enough, the answer can probably be found at the feet of another bloc: white liberals. A tiny sliver of the electorate, less than 10% of voters, they hold positions well to the Left of the average American. Yet by dominating the ranks of journalism, academics and politics, they set the parameters of left-of-center debate. I should know. I’m a liberal college professor. My wife is a renowned research scientist. We swim in the bright blue seas of white liberal groupthink, even if we collectively have no clue about how out-of-touch those “No Human is Illegal” yard signs truly are.

And if what Frisch calls the “cultural demagoguery of the high and mighty” is bad enough on the immigration debate, it’s equally damaging downstream. For if unfettered migration, and the generous state support that comes with it, implies a well-intentioned desire to turn the US into a European social democracy, it’s clear that Nico Perez and many other immigrants just aren’t interested. “I always had a hustle,” he says, evoking his capitalist spirit as he goes. In high school, that hustle started with buying and reselling old cellphones and new Air Jordans. During Covid, he bought and resold PlayStations and Xboxes. Consoles were in high demand during lockdown, allowing Perez to make up to $8,000 a month even as a student. Nor did he neglect his supply chain, getting to know his UPS driver and leaving drinks for him by the door.

Eventually, Perez and his dad started a landscaping business. It’s booming. Nico, his father, and their five full-time employees work 60-65 hours a week, landscaping in the summer and plowing snow through the long Erie winters. “They work their asses off,” he beams of his immigrant employees. “They say: ‘I don’t have a family. I want to work hard and help you. If you eat, we eat.’”

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And if this hard-scrabble approach speaks to why, rightly or wrongly, Perez sees himself as different to more recent immigrants, it also hints at the limits of liberal obsessions over “equity” — let alone the idea, remarkably popular among progressives, that worldly success is largely beyond an individual’s control. If, to be blunt, Perez’s father could dodge snakes and sweat picking grapes, and if Nico himself could make near six figures while still a teenager, why can’t everyone else? “You can’t just appeal to people’s material interests,” is how Marshall puts it. “You have to appeal to their moral interests. The overeducated classes breed people who are disgusted by American values and that conveys to voters. Working people don’t want handouts, they want prosperity and the American Dream.”

For Democrats, then, the way back starts with understanding bedrock American values, and building a political economy that balances collective security with personal prospects. In practice, this probably looks a lot like the “moral capitalism” that so anchored the liberal coalition during the post-war boom, even as it also shares much with Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting populism. Not that Nico Perez has time for such high-flung thinking. He’s far too busy, even after Trump’s recent executive order repealing birthright citizenship. “I have mixed emotions about it,” he says of the news. “The border is a mess. But I’m so busy running my business that I have not taken much time to consider it.”

It’s a telling ambivalence. If Trump follows his hardline rhetoric to its extremist conclusion, Democrats surely have a path back to power. Like Perez, after all, immigrants support immigration. But like their native-born peers, they also want boundaries and restraints, and the space to enjoy the fruits of their labor as ambitious new Americans. For Perez, at least, that’s nothing too grand. He tells me of a day last October, when he took his baseball-mad father to his first ever Major League game. There, amid the popcorn and the crowd, they watched their beloved Yankees take on the Cleveland Guardians. The elder Perez is a stoical man, for good reason. From the desert sun to the toil of manual labor, he’s spent his life fighting for his kids, even as he can’t now share in their success with his wife. Yet that day in the stands, Nico says his father was transformed. “He was yelling and screaming,” he recalls. “It was great to see.” The very image of an American Dream, albeit a modest one, and one liberals should surely take more seriously.

The answer, I think, is epitomised in a single book. Written by Ben Wattenberg and Richard M. Scammon in 1970, The Real Majority: An Extraordinary Examination of the American Electorate charted the political centre in the new Nixonian age. Over half a century on, it still offers deep insights for navigating a society in flux, even as it shrewdly leavens its electoral insights with clear and evocative language. Especially with Donald Trump the new American leviathan, moreover, The Real Majority offers another enduring truth — if liberals fail to occupy the heartland of American politics, wily conservatives will rush to get there first.

After their defeat in the 1968 election, Democrats pondered the future. The loudest insurgents were the so-called New Politics liberals, progressive activists who sought to push their party Leftwards. This meant replacing the New Deal coalition, anchored by middle-income voters, with the so-called McGovern coalition: a heady blend of youth voters, African Americans, the poor, and the educated middle class. Activists believed this grouping comprised a majority that could push the country in a more progressive direction.

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Scammon and Wattenberg dismissed these ideas as arithmetically foolish — and therefore politically hopeless. Insatiable data hounds, they made psephology The Real Majority’s foundation. The authors knew all the relevant players across Capitol Hill, yet rejected cocktails with senators for slogs through the electoral weeds. As they put it: “It is voters, not insiders, who elect candidates.”

Not that any of this theorising is hard to unpick. On the contrary, The Real Majority makes its case with literary aplomb. “The great majority of the voters in America are unyoung, unpoor, and unblack,” is how the authors put it: “they are middle-aged, middle-class, and middle-minded.” A generation before algorithms micro-targeted soccer moms, Scammon and Wattenberg macro-targeted America’s archetypal Middle Voter. She wasn’t a peacenik anthropology major, but rather a 47-year-old housewife, married to a machinist in Ohio. Her concerns, not that of the activist class, comprised the real “center of American politics”.

Far more than a postmortem, then, The Real Majority offered Democrats a roadmap back to power, one obliging the party to abandon decades of ideological baggage. Since the Great Depression, after all, its power had rested on the issue of economic prosperity. Yet by the late Sixties, the glory days of the New Deal felt very far away. From violent anti-war protests to Black Power radicalism, the authors argued there was now a new core in American politics, one less focused on unions or wages, and more on social cleavages. In this unfamiliar new era, the duo therefore urged for New Deal activism in economics, but also toughness on these new-fangled cultural pressures. As the duo warned, if they failed to get serious on what they called the “Social Issue” then they could wave their electoral future goodbye.

This is hardly surprising. Through the Sixties, after all, rates of violent crime had doubled or even tripled. And yet like the 2020s, liberals responded by equating law-and-order with racism. In one memorable passage, the authors brilliantly evoked the bleating progressive activist, one depressingly resonant five decades on. “Lady, you’re not really afraid of being mugged; you’re a bigot.” On Vietnam, meanwhile, liberals hemmed and hawed before finally dismissing Americans as imperialists — when what they should have done was take charge and explained how they’d end the war.

These insights, so fresh then and so familiar now, didn’t come from nothing. On the contrary, The Real Majority’s intoxicating blend of clear-eyed policy prescription and psephological analysis can be traced straight back to its authors. For the former, we have Scammon to thank. Born in 1915, to upper-class parents in Minneapolis, the precocious youngster once organised the entire globe into voting precincts. The Second World War interrupted his doctoral work in political science. But soon enough, the young Captain Scammon was devising West Germany’s postwar elections. That prompted a stint in the State Department and a 1961 appointment to head the Census Bureau.

By the late Sixties, Scammon was the nation’s preeminent source on all things statistical: but still needed help translating his deep electoral insights into something more tangible. Enter Joseph Ben Zion Wattenberg. Born in 1933 to East European Jewish immigrants, he came of age in a Bronx hothouse of Leftwing Zionism. A writer and editor, he dabbled in children’s literature and trade journals, and failed in two runs for local office. By 1962, Wattenberg discovered Scammon’s Census Bureau and its decennial Statistical Abstract of the United States. Drawn to this compendium of numerical facts, Wattenberg interviewed and then befriended Scammon.

This partnership would soon spawn The Real Majority, a project aimed at saving liberals from themselves. Scammon’s data allowed them to see beyond the facile McGovern coalition, even as Wattenberg’s vivid penmanship turned mountains of data into a page turner. “To know that the lady in Dayton is afraid to walk the streets alone at night,” he evocatively explained, “to know that that her brother-in-law is a policeman, to know that she does not have the money to move if her new neighborhood deteriorates, to know that she is deeply distressed that her son is going to community junior college where LSD can be found on the campus — to know all this is the beginning of contemporary political wisdom.”

When the book was finally published, in the fall of 1970, it raced up the New York Times bestseller list. A restless political animal, Richard Nixon read pre-publication excerpts of The Real Majority with a mixture of interest and alarm. And no wonder: it was written by Democrats to defeat him, even as aides warned the book offered a “workable blueprint for our defeat”. A lengthy White House memo on the work soon circulated. “Republicans,” it cautioned, “cannot allow the Democrats to get back on the right side of the social issue.” Soon enough, this became official White House strategy for the midterms and beyond.

Nixon, in an act of political jujitsu, used The Real Majority’s blueprint to do the unthinkable: win blue-collar Democrats. Through the Social Issue, he built an enduring Republican majority, making liberals into allies of disorder. To achieve this, Nixon searched his bag of political tricks. After a rally in San Jose, California, the president’s advance team stalled his exit to coincide with the appearance of anti-war protesters. With his enemies moving in, Nixon muttered “this is what they hate to see” and leapt onto the hood of his limo, thrusting both arms upward into his trademark Double-V. The crowd howled obscenities and hurled stones, eggs, and vegetables. Finally, Nixon’s motorcade drove away through a hail of debris. Windows were smashed, aides frightened; but Tricky Dicky got the media images he wanted. The corpulent Donald Trump could only dream of such a stunt.

The San Jose stunt enabled Nixon to pillory his “thousand haters”. Aligning himself with the Dayton housewife, he called for an end to “appeasement” of the “thugs and hoodlums”. Decades later, you can still almost hear the Glendas of America nodding vigorously in agreement. Nor did The Real Majority’s influence end there. William Safire, a Nixon aide and amateur linguist, noticed a change in the national lexicon. “Elitism” and “permissiveness” — long relegated to academic jargon — entered the mainstream. Just as The Real Majority predicted, a backlash against disorder had taken root. This allowed Nixon to paint himself as the moderate defender of what he himself called the “silent majority”.

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It took liberals far longer to grasp these lessons. In November 1972, George McGovern, the star of American progressivism and eponymous hero of that much-vaunted coalition, was thrashed by Nixon. In fact, the result would be the greatest landslide ever won by a Republican presidential nominee, with Nixon securing over 60% of the vote. The South Dakota senator’s antiwar activism, dovetailed with his support for universal basic income, may have thrilled the Left. But McGovern was, in the words of a political ally, the candidate of “acid, amnesty, and abortion”. As one Middle American bluntly told a journalist: “McGovern? He’s for dope.”

And if Democratic failure in the early Seventies soon paved the way for Reagan, The Real Majority is far from a historical artefact. For if our current moment has deep echoes to the late Sixties, the book remains eerily applicable to the age of Trump. Even now, the “great majority” of American voters remain “middle-aged, middle-class, and middle-minded”. That’s clear enough from the election last month: middle-income and middle-aged GenXers broke hard for Trump. To these Americans, inflation and crime outweighed the boutique worries of the activist class.

One enduring lesson of The Real Majority, then, is this: whoever wins the centre wins elections. Here’s another: if Democrats ignore Wattenberg and Scammon, repeating the mistakes of the New Politics and focusing on trans rights and climate catastrophism over bread-and-butter basics, conservatives will continue to dominate the national conversation. Even then, progressives aren’t sure to absorb the book’s wisdom. As Wattenberg once cracked, The Real Majority alienated “most every liberal in America — except those it converted”. Yet the facts are stubborn, whatever the year.

And while many in Webster came specifically to see Jamison, they also used his post office to visit each other. So, as their postmaster, he installed benches, a community bulletin board, and a library. I ask him to explain himself; Jamison aw-shucked. “I figure if folks are talking to each other, it is hard to hate each other.” In truth, though, the Webster postmaster was merely fulfilling Title 39 of the US Code: “The United States Postal Service’s (USPS) purpose is to bind the nation together”. Lord knows that, in the aftermath of a brutal election, America needs some neighbourly ties. And Lord knows that few organisations do that as well as the Post Office, even if its triumphs hint at state failure elsewhere.

By sheer numbers alone, USPS is an American giant. With 33,904 post offices, it’s burrowed into every nook and cranny of the nation, from Kaktovik in Alaska to Ochopee in the Florida swamps. The country’s single biggest non-military institution, every day its army of 525,469 employees delivers mail to 167 million unique addresses. That’s even as USPS retains the so-called “Postal Principle” — meaning users pay the same fee no matter how far their package travels. No wonder Americans love the Post Office, with an eye-popping 91% of us viewing it favourably. By comparison, 29% of Americans support public schools, which is about equal to the 32% of citizens who have a positive opinion of God. “The Post Office is the last bastion,” says Erica Etelson, co-founder of the Rural-Urban Bridge Initiative. “It is still something everyone loves”.

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For Professor Richard John, this isn’t incidental. As the Columbia professor and post office expert has written, the Founders always “intended the Postal Service to be a pillar of the republic, squeezing together millions of Americans, urban and rural, for the common good”. Created by Ben Franklin and the Continental Congress, the US Constitution explicitly calls for “Post Offices and Post Roads”. But, more than that, John says it’s the Post Office Act of 1792 that matters most. Because Congress deemed access to newspapers central to an informed public, the legislation kept postal rates low. This, John explains, ensured political parties wouldn’t dominate the news — while, as an apolitical institution, the Post Office could “follow the nation and stay close to the people”.

The Postal Service most certainly stayed close to the expanding republic. Between 1790 and 1840, the number of post offices exploded from just 75 to over 13,000. A few years after the Civil War, the service was operating over 76,000 offices. That, says Cameron Blevins, made it the largest “communication network” on earth. As the associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver explains, this was basically a function of 19th century expansionism. As the pioneers forced their way west, and Manifest Destiny rushed Americans from sea to shining sea, post connected the “whole nation together”. And so it proved in practice too. Consider Arizona’s Supai post office as an example. Established in 1896, it connected the Grand Canyon’s miners and the Havasupai nation of Native Americans to the wider world. 128 years later, mules still haul the outgoing mail three hours up steep, sandy passes to the next post at Peach Springs. Ten years after Supai’s founding, in 1906, free rural delivery integrated even more Americans. Just before the outbreak of the First World War, the Post Office started delivering parcels, further connecting people to the bounties of American life.

Public respect for the Postal Service reached further heights during the Great Depression, when FDR expanded its footprint still further. In truth, though, its acclaim during the first half of the last century isn’t really about numbers. In the Thirties, three-quarters of all Americans believed the federal government would “do the right thing almost always or most of the time”. Far from being naïve dupes, this civic faith was fired by depression and war, together creating remarkable social solidarity. At the core of this social trust were institutions, like the Post Office, that for Blevins represent the veritable cartilage and guts of the nation. “The US Post,” he says, “is a model of what an effective government could be.”

That, in turn, made Americans have more faith not just in far-off bureaucrats — but also in each other. For Americans born in the first half of the last century, neighbourliness and social trust flourished. Buttressing this sensibility was New Deal liberalism. More than a pastiche of programmes, the New Deal was grounded in a principle that Americans look beyond narrow self-interest and towards the common good. FDR, for his part, understood the Post Office was the one federal entity Americans most used, leveraging it as a tool of social solidarity.

During the Second World War, for instance, the Post Office offered “Victory Mail” to soldiers deployed overseas. Through the so-called V-Mail scheme, the Army Postal Service connected millions of troops to their families and loved ones — all free of charge. At home, the Post Office served as a hub for wartime information. Community boards posted draft posters, air raid instructions, and information about federal schemes. Postal workers added the sale of war bonds and war stamps to their duties.

It’s little surprise that public regard for the Postal Service reached its zenith in the early post-war era. As Richard John notes, the humble post office commanded so much respect that it’s used as a major plot device in the 1947 Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street. “Santa Claus exists because the Post Office says so,” John explains. “It had unassailable credentials”.

In 1970, the Post Office’s golden age came to a screeching halt. A confluence of forces — postal worker strikes; delivery inefficiencies; Richard Nixon — resulted in the Postal Reorganisation Act. This transformed the Post Office Department into the United States Postal Service (USPS). The Postmaster General was moved out of the cabinet and into a boardroom, even though the new “postal corporation” remains a public service. Blevins calls this new creature a Frankenstein monster. “It is expected to provide a universal service,” he says, “but it is not funded to do so”.

In 1975, Americans encountered Frankenstein. A deep recession spurred massive postal deficits. To cover costs, bureaucrats planned to close 12,000 post offices — mostly in rural areas. Popular uproar forced them to scrap the plan. But the situation has hardly remained stable. With the profit motive now king, postage stamp prices have typically been raised three or four times a decade since 1970. From the turn of the millennium, meanwhile, the cost of sending a first-class letter has increased 18 times, even as the number of USPS employees has been cut almost in half. That’s unsurprisingly led to shuttered branches, shortened opening hours, and a delivery window for First Class letters that’s almost doubled.

Not, of course, that post offices have suffered alone here. On the contrary, the squeeze on USPS has been witnessed across the public sector and beyond. Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory was merely a symptom of a sharp collapse in social solidarity. While Reagan’s neoliberals cut budgets aimed at the collective good, the proportion of unionised jobs had already fallen from a third in the Fifties to a quarter by 1980. Membership in civic clubs, from the Red Cross to the PTA, collapsed too. Unsurprisingly, time devoted to informal socialising spiralled downward. The ties that bind, from the Post Office to the coffee klatsch, withered.

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This collapse in unifying institutions has affected Americans psychologically. These days, and in a far cry from the halcyon days of the New Deal, just 2% of Americans believe the federal government does the right thing “just about always”. That, of course, begs the question: amid so much cynicism, so much disdain for the powers-that-be, how is it that USPS has retained its place in the hearts of the nation? Ironically, and especially in rural areas, the answer might have something to do with the decline of public institutions generally.

For while, in 1940, Americans in the hills of Appalachia or the flat lands of Nebraska would have counted on the Rural Electrification Administration for power, or the Farm Home Administration for loans, to say nothing of churches and social clubs — for thousands of isolated communities the post office is all that’s left. It hardly helps, Jacobs says, that rural Americans rely on USPS far more than their urban peers. “There is material dependency,” he says, not least when even Amazon upon the USPS for unprofitable “last mile” deliveries right across rural America.

Certainly all this — the way post offices tie Americans both to their rulers and each other — helps explain the abiding power of folks like Mark Jamison. But so too, surely, does their individual hard work. As postmaster, after all, Jamison lived next door to his office. At night, he sat on the front porch strumming his guitar, his five dogs all there at his side. Neighbours would stop and seek his counsel. “I drew the line at getting packages at 10pm,” Jamison says. But anyone in Webster who needed a neighbour had one in their postmaster.

It’s something that’s becoming rarer every year. Social solidarity begins with civic society and ends with private friendships. In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville was gobsmacked by Americans and their unerring sociability. But since 2000, the time Americans devote to socialising has collapsed by 30%. In 1990, nearly half of all Americans reported having five or more close friends. Today, slightly less than a quarter can say the same, even as 12% have no close pals at all.

That reality is surely true in Webster, North Carolina, a place that may yet lose even more. The town still has a building called a post office — but budget cuts mean it no longer has a postmaster. Now that Jamison has retired, there are no plans to replace him. Ultimately, then, the story of the post office speaks to a wider human disconnect. Those ties that bind, from postmasters up, are tattered and frayed. And without common places to meet, and chat, and get their jars opened, Americans have simply quit being neighbours. “I wish more neighbours trusted more,” Jamison says. “But they have good reason not to.”

The 2024 presidential race is one that will be decided at the margins. Democrats hope the Voting is Sacred mantra will produce a reprise of the 2020 Native American vote. Four years ago, a surge in Navajo and Hopi turnout proved the difference in Biden’s 10,000 vote victory in Arizona. In the Midwest, Menominee and Ojibwe voters proved decisive in Wisconsin, a contest ultimately decided by just 20,000 ballots. 

Yet if Voting is Sacred is a national effort aimed at the broad indigenous public, they in fact represent a kaleidoscope of lifestyles. All told, there are some 9.7 million Native Americans and Alaskans, scattered across some 573 federally recognised groups. Like John, some have built their homes in the country. Yet from Anchorage to Phoenix, 70% live in cities. Like John, meanwhile, about a quarter live on reservations or tribal trust lands, while the rest make their way independently. 

Given this spread, at any rate, native priorities are as varied as anywhere else in America, from casinos in New York to buffalo rights in Montana. Beyond that, Native Americans differ in one more vital respect: their power. A century on from the law that finally gave them citizenship, they’re now of course equal before the law. But if the Navajo can leverage their swing-state location, and tribes elsewhere have grown adept at encouraging strategic voting to achieve their goals, men like Ross John seem condemned by geography.

Native Americans, after all, are not just any other interest group. Expelled from much of their ancestral lands, tribal groups possess sovereignty and rights guaranteed by federal treaties. Yet as a dispersed people, they lack concentrated electoral power. And if Voting is Sacred is a strategy to give the indigenous vote some heft, in presidential politics at least, centuries of broken promises mean many aren’t sure politics can help.

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Ross John has lived his whole life in far southwestern New York. Amid the Alleghenies’ towering sugar maples, and the crumbling barns with their flecks of red paint, he’s one of 8,000 Seneca here, scattered across a pair of non-contiguous communities. In John’s Cattaraugus Reservation, the poverty rate is 65%. At the neighbouring Allegany Reservation, it’s 33%, but that’s still markedly higher than many nearby towns.

In nearby Salamanca, a ramshackle New York town of 6,000, just off the Southern Tier Expressway, a high-rise casino dominates the landscape. Salamanca offers legal pot, shabby gas stations for tax-free gas and cigarettes — and gambling. A dingy tourist trap with random signage in the Seneca language, it’s become a symbol of native struggles.

No wonder John threw himself into politics, serving 14 years on the tribal council. Yet despite seeing tribal sovereignty as the alpha and omega of local politics — by treaty, the Seneca is an independent nation distinct from the US — John was ultimately disappointed by his time in office. The basic problem, he explains, was the disdain of outsiders. “I wasn’t very successful at changing tribal politics,” he says. “There are just too many federal guidelines.” 

John Kane, a Mohawk who lives in Seneca territory, has similar complaints. “The Seneca pay 50% of their gaming revenue [to New York] to buy exclusivity that they don’t need,” laments the host of the Resistance Radio show. Problems started back in 2002, when the Seneca opened the first of three New York state casinos, all owned by Native Americans. To do this, Albany forced an agreement that has the Seneca pay the state one-quarter of all slot machine revenues. The Seneca, for their part, pay all operating expenses out of their share, which translates to a 50/50 split in profits with the state.

All told, the Seneca paid $1.4 billion to New York State between 2002-17. But Kane wonders what the tribe got in return. In 2002, the same year that the tribe opened their casino, the state constitution banned all gambling. In 2013, voters amended it to allow Las Vegas-style gaming. So $1.4 billion paid for an “exclusivity” that was already barred by law but is now allowed. Explaining all this, Kane sighs: “You can’t make this shit up.” In 2017, the Seneca quit their payments. To this day, the tribe and state remain locked in a legal battle. Unlike John, Kane doesn’t renounce his citizenship, but he’s nonetheless cynical about the Voting is Sacred movement. “The idea that we are a determinative voting bloc is blown out of proportion,” he says. “We just want to be left alone.”

Not everyone is so jaded. Unlike Kane, Tracie Garfield embraces Voting is Sacred. The Fort Peck Tribe member lives in Montana, where 6% of voting-age citizens are Native American. In 2006 and 2012, the native vote helped the Senate Democrat, Jon Tester, to narrow victories. For 2024, the communications director for her state’s Western Native Voice campaign has been running voter registration drives right across Montana. 

This time round, though, Garfield sees lots of voter fatigue. “I don’t see a lot of excitement.” What she senses in Montana is a national issue. Only 66% of voting-age Native Americans are even registered, a problem with deep roots. Native Americans were denied the right to cast their ballots until 1924, when Congress finally passed the Indian Citizenship Act. Even then, several Western states held out until the Fifties. 

As Garfield puts it: “We have to start from scratch, since most Natives are only in the second generation of voting.” That dovetails with other challenges. In Big Sky Country, a trip to the polling station can be a 100-mile round trip. And even once they arrive at the county seat, Garfield warns that would-be voters sometimes feel intimidated being the only native in town. 

Though the situation isn’t hopeless. One solution, Garfield suggests, is to turn voting into a tradition, like community bingo or a family dinner, something she believes will help Native Americans become enthused by politics. “As a tribal people,” she says, “we respect our elders. If we get families to vote together then that is our goal.”  

Yet more than the tangle of history, or the lure of custom, you get the sense that native electoral enthusiasm can ultimately be understood as a function of political heft. If, after all, John and the Seneca are understandably pessimistic in New York, a Democratic stronghold that anyway cleansed most of its indigenous population in the early 19th century, tribes further west have far more sway. 

Montana, with its 6% tribal bloc, is one thing. But that’s nothing compared to Oklahoma, where Native Americans comprise 13.4% of the population, and where low turnout generally bolsters their collective influence still further. “I am optimistic,” says Ben Barnes, Chief of the Shawnee in the Sooner State. “Native Americans can really make a dent. If we turnout, we can make a difference.” 

More to the point, numerical muscle seems to translate to real-world excitement. In conjunction with the United Indian Nations of Oklahoma group, Barnes has promoted a new turnout initiative. Known as Warrior Up to Vote, it’s already registered hundreds of new native voters right across the state.

And if that speaks, yet again, to the wildly diverse opportunities for Native Americans across the country, something similar might be said of what indigenous voters actually want. Liberals often imagine that the Native American vote is staunchly Democratic. But a 2021 report shows that indigenous voters lean Left by just 11%. That’s echoed by schisms elsewhere. As Garfield emphasises, Montana alone has 12 recognised tribes, each with distinct priorities. The Crow, for instance, exploit their coal and oil reserves, while neighbouring Blackfeet push environmental protections for their “buffalo brothers”.

Demographic discrepancies also affect how Native Americans make their voices heard. In swing states such as Wisconsin, the Ojibwe can appeal to national politicians when state and local authorities ignore them. In 2020, the Ojibwe, who were hit hard by Covid, voted for Biden to keep reservation health restrictions intact. Presidential candidates sometimes even come to them: in September, Donald Trump promised to formally recognise the Lumbee, a tribe in the crucial battleground of North Carolina. 

Interest from the big guns is harder to muster in Oklahoma, a one-party state where Trump has little to gain by playing nice. Yet the demographic power of natives in the Sooner State still matters — it’s just that leaders like Barnes need to be more subtle about exploiting their influence.

One tactic involves educating legislators on native concerns, especially that all-important issue of tribal sovereignty. “I find that in Oklahoma not every legislator or senator understands,” Barnes explains. “We have to vote for a Republican or Democrat that understands Indians are sovereign.” Another option is simply backing native candidates: Markwayne Mullin, Oklahoma’s junior senator, is both a fervent Trump supporter and a Cherokee.

“Don’t vote R, don’t vote D, vote I for Indian,” is how Barnes evocatively describes this approach — and certainly it’s one that’s bearing fruit. On Capitol Hill in Washington, the head of the House Appropriations Committee is Tom Cole, a conservative Oklahoma congressman. More importantly, he’s also an enrolled member of the Chickasaw nation, one with an intimate knowledge of Native American affairs. “How great is it,” Barnes says, “that we don’t have to explain why funding is necessary?” 

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This comprehensive plan has borne fruit: Cole is now sponsoring a landmark bill to investigate the horrors of Indian Boarding Schools. Not that Barnes and other Native Americans are exclusively putting their hopes on one side of the House. Cole also liaises closely on tribal concerns with Sharice Davids, a liberal Ho-Chunk congresswoman from Kansas. Barnes, for his part, is full of praise for this political odd couple. “How refreshing is that?” 

Despite these regional successes, and notwithstanding the gaggle of federal treaties impinging on indigenous groups, Barnes still argues that elections in “the tribal races” are most important for voters like him. It’s a point echoed elsewhere. For Cynthia LaMere, the former vice-chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party and member of the Yankton-Sioux, elections at the community level, in the reservation or tribal trust, are just more “tangible”. Considering the bewildering range of native concerns, that’s surely unsurprising, especially when the lowest rung of electoral politics is the arena where schools are run and casinos managed.

But where does that leave people like Ross John, flailing between an aggressive and sceptical state government on the one hand — and indifferent Congressional legislators on the other? For Stephen Knott, that strikes at the heart of the issue. As the emeritus professor at the US Naval War College says, Newt Gingrich “nationalised” every congressional race in the land way back in 1994. But if the media now obsesses endlessly about the antics on Capitol Hill, 536 federal officeholders still pale compared to the 500,000 elected officials nationwide. “It is a schizophrenic arrangement,” John admits of his native Seneca. “And we have to live with it.”

A generation ago, party affiliation played almost no role in American relationships. Today, only half of Republicans and one-third of Democrats report having a friend from the opposite party. What is true for platonic relations is even clear in love. In the Fifties, 10% of Americans expressed a partisan preference for their daughter’s spouse. That figure has since climbed to 60%. Parents need not be concerned: only 4% of marriages are now between a Republican and a Democrat. 

No longer friends or partners, liberals and conservatives instead eye one another warily. Nearly three of every four Republicans, and two-thirds of all Democrats, regard their political opposites as “immoral”. 

Jody Carlucci is not surprised. The 51-year-old Trump supporter refuses to put a GOP sticker on her Jeep Rubicon out of fear that someone would “throw a brick” at it. She’s surely right to be afraid: making her home in Erie, Pennsylvania, Carlucci lives in 2024 election’s political ground zero. 

Even amateur psephologists understand that as Erie goes, so goes Pennsylvania — and as the Keystone State goes, the nation goes too. Ethan Kibbe, a local reporter, puts it well: “Candidates learn quickly that they can’t win Pennsylvania without Erie County. If you want to appeal to the average Pennsylvanian, you have to appeal to the average Erieite.” 

The bellwether county of the bellwether state, Erie has voted for the winner in statewide races 23 of 25 times since 2008. In presidential races, meanwhile, the county has voted for the winner in all-but-one presidential race since the Second World War. 

In practice, then, Erie is America’s political no man’s land, as bitter and contested as anywhere in the republic. I should know. I live in Erie, and over the past four years have watched my lakeside home tear itself apart. 

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In 2020, the Ku Klux Klan left flyers on the lawns of Erieites with Biden signs. On election day, armed poll-watchers patrolled the neighbourhoods. Now, these tensions have returned. Joyce Mallet, an 81-year-old Erie resident, has a Trump sign in her yard. Passersby regularly give her the middle finger. Mallet’s husband seems unconcerned: “She gives it right back to them.” Yet if Mallet can handle it, this greying Rust Belt town remains the place in America where, borrowing Lincoln, the bonds of our affection are closest to breaking.

Of course, I have my own opinions here. The Trump phenomenon has always left me gobsmacked, and a second Trump term would ravage both Nato and my sanity. But if I can’t control who wins in November, what I can at least do is try and understand that other half of Erie that disagrees with me. 

Legacy journalists regularly don Safari hats and venture into Red America to categorise “The Five Types of Trump Voters”. But in Erie, I found that the 74 million Americans who last voted for Trump can’t be characterised, and instead run the gamut of class and education and race.

Before 2016, Carlucci was so apolitical she’d never voted before. As the self-described political cynic put it: “Why would I trust a politician, especially when they are all talking like the teachers, ‘wah, wah, wah,’ from the Peanuts cartoon?” In 2016, though, she finally registered to vote, believing it was time for a change. “Trump was different,” she says. “It was interesting to see a businessman. He says the things they all say. But it was how he said it.” 

Carlucci isn’t alone. For just as she revels in Trump’s pugilistic style, others agree. “Trump does go off on tangents. But they [his supporters] like this because he is unpredictable,” explains one journalist, who came to Erie to cover a Trump rally for a MAGA-friendly news site. “They like it that he jabs back and does the name-calling. They see it as an instinctual sign of strength. There is a real person under the blue suit and red tie.”  

For a generation, authenticity and tangible results have been missing ingredients in American politics. “I’m frustrated with electoral politics that are not responsive to the American people,” says Eva Posner, a liberal political strategist. “The Democratic Party should know better and do better. If you talk to most Democratic officials, they care. But the lack of political courage is astounding.” 

Certainly, Trump has made strange political hay out of this mistrust. Fewer than a third of Pennsylvania voters deem him a person of “strong moral character”. Yet polls also reveal that a majority of Republicans, like Carlucci, interpret his crassness as “tells-it-like-it-is” honesty. And this has real world consequences both in Erie and across the Commonwealth. Today, Pennsylvania Republicans now trust Trump more than the traditional media.

Beyond poking a pudgy finger into the liberal establishment’s eye, though, people like Carlucci also seem to admire Trump for his economic achievements — or anyway what she perceives as the failings of his successors.

A single mom who works as an administrative assistant at a local university, she plans to vote with her wallet. “I couldn’t rob Peter to pay Paul,” she says, “because Peter is broke too.” 

For similar reasons, Carlucci looks back to the Trump years with nostalgia. Spiralling rent and grocery prices means she struggles in a way she didn’t four years ago. This year, a relative paid her 11-year-old son’s Catholic school tuition. “Those four years under Trump my life was better, and I felt safe,” she says. “When you work at a great job you shouldn’t have to have a second or third job. That’s not fair to my kid.” 

Her memory isn’t faulty. Before Covid, the Trump economy featured steady 2.5% economic growth, low 1.9% inflation, a robust 2.1% spike in real wages, and the lowest unemployment rate since the mid-Sixties. Bookended by the Great Recession and post-pandemic inflation, the Trump years in hindsight feel remarkably prosperous, especially for the working and lower-middle classes hit hardest by price jumps.

As Posner adds, that explains a key reason for Trump’s enduring popularity. He may lie as easily as most people breathe, but for voters like Carlucci, his presidency improved their lives in tangible ways. “He is pompous and arrogant,” she concedes. “But he accomplished what he set out to accomplish.”

Perhaps. But in a town as divided as Erie, you have to be careful. In Carlucci’s neighbourhood, where Trump signs are common, partisans roll down their windows and hurl abuse from their cars. Carlucci rolls her eyes. “You aren’t changing anyone’s mind acting like that.” Yet out of caution, she’s advised her 74-year-old mother against putting out a political sign herself. 

At work, meanwhile, Carlucci keeps her politics quiet. The same cannot be said of others. Professors regularly waltz into her office to cuss and gripe about the former president. Wholly unaware that others may see the world differently, they force her, and a furtive set of MAGA fellow travellers, onto a secret Microsoft Teams chat. At church, my 81-year-old mom has the opposite experience. A Mississippi native and life-long Republican, she nonetheless dismisses Trump as “gross”. Yet she dares not share her true views and upset the congregation.  

Not everyone in Erie is quite so diffident. Consider Doug King. A Shakespeare scholar and English professor at Gannon University, a youthful conversion to Catholicism prodded him toward an inchoate conservatism, dovetailed by profound pro-life principles. 

These days, King dismisses most Republicans as “idiots.” But he rejects the Democrats too, disgusted by their support for abortion and foreign adventures like the Iraq War. “When we poke our nose into others’ affairs,” he says, “you need a clear mission of when you get in or get out.” 

A funky-dressing sometime actor and musician, who works in liberal academia, King freely agrees that he doesn’t fit the MAGA stereotypes. When his fellow professors discover he supports Trump “their jaws drop”.

Like Carlucci, meanwhile, King is far from insensible to Trump’s flaws. “He is not pro-life,” he concedes, but he will “do less harm”. As someone who has always run against the grain — before entering academia, he spent his 20s following the Maharishi Yogi — King is another Erieite drawn to Trump’s counter-cultural status. “I tend,” he says, “to root for the underdog.”  

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Here, the professor shares much with Tecumseh Brown-Eagle. An Erie native and Trump enthusiast, the 67-year-old accountant was born to a black family but changed his name to reflect his Native American ancestry. “It is definitely the underdog thing,” stresses Brown-Eagle, a former Democrat, of the real estate baron. “He is an underdog for a stupid reason: he is successful.” 

Like King, Brown-Eagle is a searcher. A Muslim convert who studied Judaism, he travelled the world as a member of the US karate team. Seeing a kindred spirit in Trump, he calls him a “black sheep” who has the courage to say what everyone else is thinking. “They are on his ass so hard,” he says. “He can’t be a fake dude. We feel that he is being bullied.”

King makes a similar point. “He’s this bull in the China shop. It’s not that Fox News loves him, or Republicans love him. It is that the establishment hates him.” 

That seems to be enough for this trio of Erie voters. But politics also has its limits. Whatever the signs she sticks in her front yard, Carlucci equally notes that she and her “very Democratic” mother have decided not to have political discussions at home. “It is stupid,” she laughs, “to not talk to one another over two people we have never met.” It seems Joy Division’s mantra does have limits after all.

But Ty Pinkins, a slim and energetic African-American lawyer, decided to challenge the GOP incumbent for a US Senate seat anyway. As the 50-year-old told me of his decision to take on Roger Wicker, “Don’t be afraid to walk in the tall grass. That’s how I started.”

Born to an unwed 15-year-old mother, Pinkins chopped cotton as a boy to help feed his family, a fate David Rushing, chair of the Sunflower County Democratic Party, says is typical of poor boys from the Mississippi Delta. “We don’t have many gutters in Mississippi,” explains Rushing, “but we have a lot of ditches.” For Pinkins, then, the tall grass was the only route out of that Delta ditch.

The first in his family to graduate high school, he struggled to pay for college. So, Pinkins left Mississippi for the tall grass of the US Army.

A 21-year military career gave him a passport full of stamps, three combat tours, a Bronze Star, and a job in the White House. After retirement, Pinkins earned not one but two law degrees from Georgetown University. He turned down the big money of a Washington law firm for the Delta. 

Back in his hometown, Rolling Fork, Mississippi, Pinkins published a memoir, 23 Miles and Running, and litigated hundreds of civil cases for the underprivileged. In 2021, he made national news by filing a federal lawsuit on behalf of fired black farm labourers, who had been replaced by white South Africans. Filing suit and testifying before Congress on the issue, he forced a settlement. 

Taking note was Mississippi’s lone Democratic Congressman, Bennie Thompson. The chair of the January 6 Select Committee tapped Pinkins to run for the local school board. By the time Pinkins learned of Thompson’s desire, he had already publicly declared his candidacy for the senate seat. “The biggest problems are federal issues,” he tells me. “That’s what I’m interested in. Our state is last in everything that is good and first in everything that is bad.”

In theory, Thompson and state Democratic chair Cheikh Taylor promised Pinkins, the only Democrat to announce for the race, their party’s full support. But though he knew the contest would be an uphill struggle, Pinkins never expected a major hurdle would be Bennie Thompson — his own Congressman and the very politician to first have noticed his talents.

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At first, his phone calls asking for endorsements went unanswered. Then, when his phone did ring, respondents attacked, apparently upset that Pinkins’ hadn’t followed Thompson’s advice and run for his local school board. As Will Colom, a prominent black Mississippi attorney and party donor allegedly told him: “You will lose. You are a loser. And you will always be a loser.” A young Mississippi state representative also phoned. “Who the hell do you think you are, getting your name on the ballot?” they yelled. “You need to go through us gatekeepers.”

Gatekeeper. The term shocked Pinkins. Party insiders refused to support him simply because, as he tells me, “I didn’t ask anyone, ‘can I please run?’” The candidate’s astonishment went beyond personal ambition. With its pungent whiff of machine politics, what Pinkins calls Mississippi’s “Gatekeeper Syndrome” is the very problem “preventing our democracy at the state level from blossoming.”  

Not that everyone is surprised. When I asked Ralph Eubanks about gatekeeping he laughed. As the academic and writer puts it: “Welcome to poor ole beat down Mississippi.” To Eubanks, Gatekeeper Syndrome reflects the “way the Democrats think about their own state. It is learned helplessness. There are so many things that are broken that can’t be fixed that many just give up.” 

“Giving up” would oblige Democratic elites to abandon their prerogatives in favour of building a competitive party. So to safeguard their position, Bennie Thompson and his colleagues have adapted the strategy of that classic wheeler-dealer: Richard Daley. Just like Chicago, Eubanks tells me, Mississippi is a place where you “have to work your way up through the system or you are jumping the line.” He adds: “It’s not healthy at all because it stops someone who has talent and drive with an inspiring backstory. You’d think ‘let’s get behind the brother and help him out’ but that’s not happening.”  

From the outside, Mississippi is ruby red. Outsiders assume that Democrats like Pinkins have zero chance. But with an African-American population of 40%, it’s the blackest state in the union. A reliable Democratic bloc, the African-American vote means Democrats can win with high black turnout and a quarter of white ballots. In 2023, Brandon Presley used that formula to come within 26,619 votes of the governor’s mansion.  

White and black Mississippi Democrats can, and have, run competitive statewide races. But the problem isn’t at the top of the ballot. The issue, as Pinkins and others point out, are those gatekeepers, those machine politicians who think Mississippi’s Democratic Party belongs to them and them alone. No less important, gatekeeping means the bottom of the ballot stays empty. 

In the same cycle as Presley’s 2023 near-miss, there were contests for all 122 of Mississippi’s statehouse seats. Yet in nearly half of contests, Democrats failed to field a candidate, a phenomenon that affects up-ticket races too. As Michele Hornish, the executive director of the Every State Blue campaign group explains, simply fielding a state representative candidate gives the top of the ticket a 1.5% vote boost. Running candidates across the ballot is also a barometer of a party’s grassroots health. As Scott Kleeb, a lead organiser with Rural Americans for Harris-Walz, admits: “For the last several decades Democrats have not been building at the local, county, and state level,” especially in rural states like Mississippi. Of the nation’s 3,143 counties, Kleeb says that Democrats have a chair in just 300. 

To be fair, an increasing number of Democrats are prodding the system to change.

One example is Rickey Cole, a two-time Mississippi Democratic state chair and Pinkins’ campaign manager. Cole always intended to run a senate race while also re-building the state party’s grassroots. 

Cole’s strategy was to organise Mississippi’s 82 counties and appoint a campaign leader in all 1,762 precincts. From there, Cole says, it’s “just math.” In 2020, after all, some 400,000 registered Mississippi Democrats failed to vote. This year, Cole needs to mobilise around 178,000. Once the party got organised, the path to higher Democratic turnout was easy. “In rural Mississippi,” Cole explains, “if you provide the matriarch of the family a list of folks who are sporadic voters, they can get to them.” 

As Kleeb warns, moreover, this comprehensive approach is the only viable path to a Democratic revival in conservative redoubts like Mississippi. “Institutions matter,” he says. “We can’t go from candidate to candidate. Every campaign can’t build an airplane from scratch every four years.” 

But instead of endorsements and campaign cash, all Pinkins got was a cold shoulder. Mississippi’s African-American leaders — notably Mike Espy — refused even to meet, much less endorse. Appeals to the Congressional Black Caucus, Black Economic Alliance, BlackPAC, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and Dirt Road Democrats all went unanswered too. 

Behind it all was Pinkins’ former admirer: Bennie Thompson. 

Mississippi’s lone Democratic Congressman is the political kingpin of the Delta, and the state’s black political establishment. Thompson earned national attention as chair of the January 6 Select Committee, but at home he squelches democracy as Mississippi’s lead gatekeeper. Pinkins tells me that “fear of Bennie Thompson” has resulted in only three of Mississippi’s African-American state senators and representatives endorsing him. Others supposedly tell him: “I can’t host a fundraiser for you because of Bennie Thompson.” 

All the same, Pinkins persevered, and nearly two years on from his initial snub finally bagged a meeting with Thompson in May 2024. Much like their earlier interaction, Thompson was kind, heaping praise on Pinkins and promising his full support. “I commit to you,” he apparently said. “I will make a sizeable contribution to your campaign.” 

Yet once again, Pinkins would soon find this apparent warmth vanish, like dew in the Delta sun.  

Just days after their apparent reconciliation, the duo attended the Democratic State Convention. In an auditorium full of the state’s leading liberals, Pinkins awaited his promised endorsement. Instead, Thompson praised the white Brandon Presley as his “brother” and then promptly sat down. Audience members turned to Pinkins in astonishment. In July this year, at another Democratic gala, Thompson pulled the same stunt. Pinkins understood “that my own Congressman was clearly refusing to publicly support my candidacy.” 

And in late August, at the Democratic National Convention, Bennie Thompson took his gatekeeping public. At a Mississippi state delegation breakfast, Thompson supposedly told 100-or-so party leaders that “we need to support our candidates but some of them need to earn it. He needs to work for the support. He doesn’t get to walk up to the head of the table and think he’s going to get our support.” The Congressman never mentioned Pinkins by name — but then again he didn’t need to.

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Pinkins, for his part, has endured Thompson’s slights with grace, describing them as “the Congressman’s prerogative.”  Not that he’s sat on his hands either, instead throwing himself into grassroots campaigning. Gradually, perhaps, Mississippians have understood he’s a different sort of candidate from the gatekeeper stereotype, not least in terms of race. 

In the Deep South, most African-Americans run in majority-minority districts, developing little experience wooing white voters. Pinkins, by contrast, had spent two decades in the military, meeting civilians and leading soldiers from every walk of life. And like Georgia or North Carolina, Mississippi’s demography is changing. Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s scandal-plagued GOP nominee for governor, won his race for lieutenant governor on the backs of white votes. He may bring pizza to a porn shop, but he also reveals that white voters in 2024 are not what they were in 1965. He also shows that Southern whites are more open to voting for black candidates. For their part, Cole and Pinkins have eyed white Yankee transplants to Mississippi’s Memphis suburbs, as well as snowbirds, soldiers, and shipbuilders in towns like Pascagoula. In soliciting white votes, alongside the African-American base, Pinkins says he’s learnt that most voters crave the same thing. “They want someone they can trust,” he says. “They are so tired of politicians doing the same old things. We end that by meeting voters face-to-face.” Pinkins adds that Mississippians of all races are interested in a Delta boy like him “doing something unorthodox.”

More than that, meanwhile, Pinkins feels a moral obligation to take on people like Bennie Thompson. “Walking in the tall grass,” he says, “is doing what the average Mississippian can’t afford to do,People want politicians to have moral courage. They wonder: ‘Do you have the courage to the hard right or the easy wrong?’” 

By going public about Thompson’s behaviour, Pinkins believes he is doing that hard right. Perhaps. But there’s still a way to go until the gatekeepers are vanquished. As Pinkins explains, one issue are those black Mississippian Democrats still unwilling to cause civil rights legend John Lewis called “good trouble”.

“There are a select few black men who, because of Gatekeeper Syndrome, are stopping progress in Mississippi at the federal and state level,” he says, after a heavy sigh. “Their reluctance to go against Bennie Thompson is holding back black Mississippians. We have a lot of officeholders who prioritise their personal power over the people’s interest.

At this point, Pinkins stops and exhales, before starting again. “We need to have the conversation. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” 

All the while, Cole and Pinkins believe their efforts will boost Democratic changes in a 2026 senate race against a weak GOP incumbent. They’re also looking ahead to Brandon Presley’s widely anticipated 2027 race for governor. But those efforts will be undone if Mississippi’s gatekeepers shoo talented candidates like Ty Pinkins from the ballot.

As for the former cotton chopper, David Rushing is clear. “He has my unequivocal support. He’s the real deal. He is not blowing smoke. I just admire him. He’s a bright star, and the future of the party if he doesn’t get frustrated by all this mess.”

But the tall grass is where Pinkins feels most comfortable. Like his own life, he sees it as the only way for Mississippi to move forward.

Urban senses that Pennsylvania, the nation’s key tipping point state, is slipping away. He fumed to me: “Trump had the big positions, the vibes, and the themes. But with Harris there are no themes except: we are not Trump and abortion.”

Flipping the script, it is Harris who now leads Trump in Pennsylvania and a series of key battleground states. But some knew this before they saw the polls. Sam Talarico, chairman of the Erie County Democratic Party has the pulse of the swing county of the nation’s swingiest state. With Biden as the nominee, Talarico witnessed a trickle of volunteers. Once Harris topped the ticket, a flood commenced. Talarico told me: “People are calling and asking, ‘what can I do?’ Canvassing and phone banking are way up. And interest is way up. There was a lot of energy that was just released once the change [Biden to Harris] was made. It is exponentially different.” And as Erie goes, so goes Pennsylvania — and with it the White House.

With money and energy, Talarico now has eight full-time staffers and dozens of volunteers. And Erie is merely a microcosm of the fundamental vibe shift in American politics. I spoke with Joe Morris, an Erie-based political science professor, who sees in the polling what Talarico senses on the ground. He told me: “Harris has completely changed the dynamics of the race. At this time, the Trump campaign is at a loss for how to manage this.” Even more ominous for the Republican is Morris’s interpretation of the political mood: “To beat a movement, you need a movement. Harris is on the threshold of being a leader of a movement, like Obama in 2008 and Trump in 2016.”

Urban’s political Spidey senses are tingling. A Harris movement, like Obama in 2008, would mean her candidacy has come to represent “change” to voters in what is most certainly a “change” election. Harris would then float above the political flotsam. This would spell political doom for Trump whose only chance at victory is an ugly slugfest in the mire. The race is still winnable for Trump. But the Harris vibe, immense crowds, record fundraising, and grassroots energy, has distracted the boss. And a distracted, sullen Trump is his own worst enemy. Urban griped: “Trump is one of the most gifted politicians, but he is also one of the most flawed. He is incredible at connecting with crowds, but he is also incredibly ill-disciplined.”

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The revolt of the Rust Belt

By Jeff Bloodworth

In the weeks since Biden left the race, Trump’s utter lack of self-restraint has been on full display. His rants about the Vice President’s racial identity and vulgar social media posts have merely fuelled the Harris momentum — and vibe shift. For Urban, Trump’s self-immolation is especially galling. He knows that Harris’s liberal record makes her politically vulnerable with Erie County and Western Pennsylvania’s normie voters. He advised, “All the Trump campaign has to do is focus on the issue. If we make this about the issues, Republicans win.”

Urban is surely onto something. In Harris’s truncated 2020 presidential campaign, she delighted the progressive fringe with gun buy-backs, fracking bans, and the Green New Deal. These positions, to Urban, loom as Harris’s political Kryptonite in Western Pennsylvania. A smart pol, the Vice President has pivoted to the centre. Urban said of this: “Those are some mental gymnastics that Olga Korbut would be proud of.” But he knows that Harris’s liberal centrism is good politics. That’s why he growled: “If we listen to her [now], she sounds like a fuckin’ Republican.”

And that’s important — because while policy obviously matters, “vibes” reign supreme. Years ago, Peter Hart, the veritable Yoda of Democratic pollsters, explained why George W. Bush defeated Democrats whom voters deemed more intelligent and knowledgeable: “voters value ‘I Like’ over IQ”. If vibes didn’t precede ideology, Hillary Clinton would be finishing her second term.

It is losing campaigns and candidates who cry “stick to the issues”. Winning presidential campaigns capture the vibe by the political alchemy of personality, first, and policy, later. Like a first date, a voter must get “the feels” before they entertain the wonk of inflation reduction or stories about your awkward brother.

Urban’s “stick to the issues” steals a page from a long cast of liberal losers. In the Fifties, liberals noodled over the riddle of sustaining party loyalty in an era where old fidelities had faded. Southerners were no longer automatically voting Democrat. Northern white ethnics increasingly ignored political bosses. The liberal egghead answer was “programmatic liberalism”. In this equation, voters would decipher the meaning of issues to their own lives and vote accordingly. For the Democrats, voters were like Star Trek’s Spock or AI.

Since the Sixties, a bevy of well-intentioned liberals placed policy at the forefront of their campaigns. Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes, and Trump were the result. Liberals lose because they underestimate humanity’s frailties and foibles. Conservatives win because they don’t.

The latest political science affirms this reality. Voter behaviour is dictated by emotions just as much as rational choice. Even those of us with fancy degrees are influenced by “vibe” and “tribe” more than we admit. Obama’s healthcare-for-all and Iraq War posture mattered. But he, more than Sarah Palin or Chris Dodd, dressed, talked, and lived like your coolest professor from graduate school. Plus, Obama signalled a definitive vibe turn from the Clinton-Bush era. For upwardly mobile professionals, voting Obama was tribe and vibe first, policy came second.

That’s why David Urban is partly right but mostly wrong. Kamala Harris’s 2019 policy positions should cause West Pennsylvania normies to wince. This is why Urban is begging Trump to frame the race as a choice between policy visions. But he admitted to me: “[Trump] is terrible at talking about his policy accomplishments. When he is off-prompter he is much more fired-up about the hand-to-hand political combat.”

Trump wants the political combat because he knows, more than anyone, that vibes are key. In 2016, he tapped into the nation’s sour mood and launched a movement. He, like Professor Morris, sees a nascent counter movement on the Left. Trump understands what Urban knows is true but hopes is not. The vibe, like the Dude in The Big Lebowski, always “abides”.

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Trump's fight for Pennsylvania

By James Billot

But to boost the political feels you need campaign nuts and bolts. In 2016, the Clinton campaign ignored Erie County and Western Pennsylvania, while, in 2020, Covid prevented much face-to-face canvassing. So, for 2024, Talarico is touting a “coordinated campaign” that combines his staff with a recently opened Harris office, one of 14 across Pennsylvania. Terron Sims, who helps lead the Democratic National Committee’s vote mobilisation efforts, boasted to me: “When it comes to grassroots get-out-the-vote campaigns, no one beats the Democrats. We have professionals and super volunteers who have been doing this for decades.”

And the issue for Trump is, while he understands the value of vibes, he doesn’t see that they mean less without political organisation. A local Democratic strategist admitted that the GOP’s local dysfunction fuelled Biden’s 2020 win in Erie County. Four years later, the Erie County Republicans might have new leadership, but sources report “major beef” between Trump forces and area Republicans. Local Republicans pay rent to the Trump campaign for a bit of space at the local headquarters, an arrangement that a Democratic official described as “odd”. The Harris campaign, who have the opposite agreement with local Democrats, seem to have it the right way round.

Conflict is to Trump what the sun is to organic life. But as in 2020, dysfunction could prove decisive in a close race. Urban pointed to Trump’s disregard for mail-in early voting as greatly hurting the Republicans. In the 2022 US Senate race between Mehmet Oz and John Fetterman, Pennsylvania Democrats banked 1.5 million early votes. The Democrats had won before election day. Urban, obviously frustrated with how “Trump derides early voting”, advised that “Republicans need to play by the rules in the commonwealth. We need to ensure that the voters of colour who are for us are registered.”

By mid-October, millions of Pennsylvanians will have cast their ballots. Trump has weeks to stunt the Harris vibe. In Erie and Pennsylvania, it is vibe and organisation, not the issues, that will decide this race. For now, both decisively point to Harris.

The Rust Belt is my backyard, too. And in Erie, Pennsylvania, where I live, Vance’s schtick plays well. Folks here feel left behind — because they are. In their despair, they want a scapegoat.

In 1950, the Rust Belt was home to 43% of all American jobs. In Vance’s lifetime, industrial jobs have plummeted by 35%; in his early adulthood alone, 5 million factory jobs vanished. Deaths of despair filled the vacuum. Suicide in slow motion, the Rust Belt’s white working class leads the nation in early deaths caused by alcoholism, addiction and risky life choices. Before the term was even coined, Vance wrote in his 2016 Hillbilly Elegy memoir: “The statistics tell you that kids like me face a grim future — that if they’re lucky, they’ll manage to avoid welfare; and if they’re unlucky, they’ll die of a heroin overdose.”

Vance and I share more than a backyard. His biography is mine. I’ve lost my best friend, dad, aunt, uncle, and two first cousins to deaths of despair. My sister will probably be next. Broken homes, poverty, and addiction are, like Vance’s, my family’s narrative themes. I flunked high school. But like Vance, I had a grandparent who helped me survive the post-industrial apocalypse. Somehow, I bumbled into college. Eventually, I earned a PhD.

Today, as a professor, I study American liberalism. And here in the academy, white working-class despair is seen as something best ignored. This comes with a political cost, but don’t take my word for it. As Lisa Pruitt, a professor of law who studies the rural working-class, told me: “Race, ethnicity, and sexuality: It is a competition. Everyone gets a gold medal unless you are white. We need to acknowledge white pain and white vulnerability, or you can’t build a broad coalition.”

But what if Pruitt’s warning is already outdated? Today, the Democrats’ “working-class” problem has metastasised beyond whites. In 2020, Joe Biden won the Hispanic, 55-41, and black, 92-8, working-class by wide margins. Yet Republicans have made real inroads with these voters. The Democrat’s lead with the non-white working class has collapsed to nine points. Two-thirds of all voters are working-class. The math is clear. If the polls of the non-white working class hold, Trump wins in a landslide.

The Democrats’ working-class problem goes beyond math — it cuts to the core of the party’s identity. Gregg Cantrell, a professor at Texas Christian University, has literally written a book on liberalism’s working-class roots. “Farmers and labourers were among the first Americans to realise that the new large-scale corporate capitalist economy needed a counterbalance to protect the little guy from being crushed,” he told me. The idea that the government can protect the small against the big guy is the foundation of modern liberalism.”

But now the “little guy”, of all races, is shifting to Trump. The Republicans are poised to become a multi-racial working-class party. Democrats, meanwhile, are, in the words of Vance, a coalition of “well-to-do white Americans and minorities from across the political spectrum”.

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Why rural America doesn't trust Joe Biden

By Jeff Bloodworth

Can Harris woo the non-white working class back to the Democrats? That’s the meta-question of the entire election. And simply replacing the top of the ticket is a cosmetic fix to a systemic problem.

To understand why, start at the top. A majority of House Democrats graduated from a top-100 college. Just one measly Democratic member of Congress has cited ever working a blue-collar or service job. Since 2004, a quarter of all Democratic presidential campaign staffers attended the same 15 elite universities. What this means is that Democrats, the self-styled “Party of the People”, don’t have folks with working-class backgrounds on their staff, in their offices, and now on their voter rolls. But the problem runs deeper than the class disparity of political elites.

Dr Cory Haala, a specialist in the political history of the Rust Belt Midwest, thinks the Democrats’ working-class woes stem from the party’s “singular focus on winning the presidency”. With the White House always in mind, he explained, the Democrats aimed policy at upscale suburban voters in key swing states. As a result, what started with Rust Belt working-class whites morphed into a problem with the non-white working-class.

And this political romantic comedy now has a twist, with Republicans wooing the very Rust Belt and non-white working-class base whom the Democrats had so long taken for granted. Eva Posner, a Democratic campaign manager, thinks her party’s working-class problems start with pocketbook concerns. “We are in desperate times. Housing costs have been going up consistently. There is not a city in America where you can afford an apartment on a minimum wage job.”

Posner agrees with Haala on the damage wrought by White House-centric politics. An obsession with the White House means Democrats ignore political offices that address basic problems. As she told me: “We don’t prioritise city councils or mayor races that have the jurisdiction. We prioritise the goddamn DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee]. Congress is doing shit. Why are we pouring millions of dollars into races that don’t do governance? The things that solve people’s problems are at the local level.”

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An elegy for the American Dream

By J.D. Vance

For Posner, politics is not advanced calculus: “This isn’t goddamn hard. Voters see that we are quick to help corporations but not regular people. They think, ‘you aren’t doing anything for me.’ Well, no shit. Fund local campaigns, talk to human beings, find the problems and solve them. It is basic.”

Because Democrats no longer offer tangible solutions to working-class voters, they left the door open to symbolic appeals. From Kid Rock to Hulk Hogan, Trump and Vance offer a down-scale gloss on a plutocratic agenda. But Trump, at least, offers the gloss. And in choosing Vance, he nominated a person with working-class roots to the Vice-Presidency.

The decision may be hollow and, as recent weeks have indicated, not without blunder. Vance’s recent “cat lady” rhetoric, for instance, is as stupid as it is sexist. But the Democrats are wholly oblivious to our struggles. And in times of oblivion, scapegoats and ruses often have the final say.

America’s presidential cycles, dubbed “The Circus” by a Showtime docuseries, have only recently become punishingly absurd ultra-marathons — the 2024 presidential election cycle officially began with the first Republican debate — 444 days before election day. Parties used to choose nominees at quadrennial summer conventions at which delegates from each state would gather to nominate a presidential ticket. Then over several hot summer days, candidates debated while insiders took stock of their political chops and electability. These conventions were essentially primaries writ small and in-brief. Delegates voted. Nominees were chosen. And the consequent presidential campaigns were measured in days (approximately100) — not years.

But choosing presidents via these closed sessions of party insiders understandably had its detractors. And in the early 20th century, good government progressives felt the need to challenge the monopoly power of party bosses. And so, the goo-goos, as the press labelled them, established presidential primaries. Reformers believed primaries would curb the power of party bosses, ease corruption, and make democracy more responsive to popular sentiments. By 1916, 20 scattered states hosted presidential primaries. But dubbed “beauty contests” by journalists, the primaries held no actual power. A candidate could prove their electability by winning one, but that state’s convention delegates were not required to support them. Voters turned out sporadically. Most candidates ignored them.

In postwar America, however, that calculus changed. In 1930, fewer than one-in-five Americans held high school diplomas; a paltry 3.9% graduated from college. By the Seventies, those numbers had tripled. Meanwhile, per capita GDP had nearly quintupled. In this milieu, a new mass demographic was born, the educated middle class. A mix of economics and vocation, the educated middle class are lawyers, engineers, teachers, doctors, and journalists. Not quite rich but comfortably affluent, they were blessed with leisure time. And this class no longer treated politics as spectator sport — they wanted to participate. Participatory democracy, to them, ensured greater accountability.

In 1952 their presidential candidate, Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver, challenged Harry Truman in the New Hampshire Democratic primary. Folksy, cerebral, and media savvy, the Tennessean clubbed the sitting president, 54-46%. The drubbing forced Truman into retirement; Kefauver went on to win 12 of 15 primary contests. But Kefauver never stood a chance of being nominated. Party bosses knew a secret the larger public did not — the Tennessean’s alcoholism. Kefauver’s boozing was prodigious even in an era in which crapulence was the norm. The party bosses won out. But Kefauver made the primaries, and the educated middle class, matter.

Instead of Kefauver, Democrats, at the 1952 open convention, nominated Illinois Governor, Adlai Stevenson. Generations before Barack Obama, the Illinoisan tickled the educated middle class to their cockles with stirring rhetoric. Forgetting Kefauver, they dubbed themselves Stevensonians, and flocked into the Democratic Party. In so doing, the educated middle class gained power in the Democratic Party far beyond their numbers.

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By Lionel Shriver

While primary contests did matter, convention delegates still possessed the ultimate power to choose a nominee. In 1960, erstwhile Stevensonians boosted John Kennedy to primary wins. This, along with Kennedy’s charisma, pushed party bosses to relent. But eight years later, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who never even entered a primary contest, took the nomination over Senator Eugene McCarthy, who had split primary wins with the assassinated Robert Kennedy. Outraged at the disregard of primary voter sentiment, young protesters in league with old Stevensonians tore Chicago asunder. Afterwards, activists championed the 1970 “McGovern reforms”. This fundamentally changed the nominating process. Starting in 1972, the reforms made primaries and caucuses binding. If a candidate won a state contest, delegates were compelled to support them at the convention. “The Circus” was born.

Party bosses no longer ruled; But the educated middle class did.

On average, 27% of registered voters turn out for primaries. And these voters are overwhelmingly from the educated middle class. In any election, the college degreed are 50% more likely to vote than a high school graduate. But this is even truer for primaries. The standard primary goer is twice as likely to have studied beyond a bachelor’s degree as the average voter. So the McGovern reforms, far from a democratic revelation, have given the educated middle class an outsized voice in American politics. More partisan and ideological than the normie voter, they donate, volunteer, and vote for candidates who reside on the ideological edge of their party.

Well-intentioned, the McGovern reforms gave birth to our hyper-partisan presidential politics, the toxins of which now flow downstream to contaminate even local races.

Yes, the Democrat’s normie-in-chief, Joe Biden, won the 2020 nomination. Covid and the spectre of Trump prematurely curtailed the primary season. With every other major contender, except Pete Buttigieg, vying for the Brahmin Left’s vote, Biden had the normie lane to himself.

But there is nothing sacrosanct about the present system. In clinching the GOP and Democratic nominations, Trump and Biden won approximately 10% of all voters in the 2024 primaries and caucuses. This is scarcely “Vox Populi, Vox Dei”.

But an open convention would be a television show without a script. Delegates, on live national television, debate and mull the strengths and weaknesses of the major candidates. Every state delegation votes. Those votes would be weighted to each state’s overall population. It is the candidate’s job to woo the delegation. The first candidate to win a majority of delegates votes, 1,990, votes nabs the nomination.

Presided over by the educated middle classes, primaries offer only the illusion of direct democracy and legitimacy. Whereas a motley collection of 4,672 convention delegates, mostly officeholders and activists, is an imperfect, yet reasonably fair reflection of the Democratic ranks. Women, minorities, union members, and local party officials comprise the delegate ranks. The nominee, by necessity, will be someone with appeal to the party’s diverse ranks. The novelty of an open convention will bring other-worldly ratings. The eventual nominee will be awash in campaign funds.

But the political geography is clear. To win, a Democrat must sweep Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. A ticket combining the popular Democratic governors of two of those three states, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer and Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, possesses an enormous homefield advantage. An open convention will allow Democrats in the coming weeks to vet candidates and weigh all possibilities. In the coming weeks, delegates will watch televised debates. They can even attend a live campaign event and sense the crowd’s electricity. They have plenty of time to assess the cut of a candidate’s jib and how that jib is received by their Democratic friends, family, and party ranks.

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What America can learn from 1924

By Michael Cuenco

Ninety-two years ago, in 1932, Democrats met in Chicago, to nominate a president. The global economy was in freefall. Fascists were on the march. After several rounds of convention ballots, Southern, Northern, conservative and progressive Democrats coalesced around FDR. In an era before the Internet, jet airplanes, television, or Zoom, Roosevelt ran a successful 100-day national campaign, from a wheelchair.

Next month, Democrats, like 1932, convene in Chicago. The stakes are jarringly similar.

An open convention is Trumpism’s Kryptonite. Trump feeds on political cynicism. The fission generated by actual democratic competition is a living, tangible negation of Trump’s nihilism.

An open convention offers the best and final chance to nominate a president who, like the Biden of old, understands normie lives and speaks fluent Middle American. That, and only that, can beat Donald Trump.

Forsaken by the Democrats, rural America has offered its soul to the MAGA movement. Donald Trump took 65% of the rural vote in 2020, up from 62% in 2016. The 2020 figure was even higher among rural whites at 71%. The resulting polarisation between blue cities and red countryside is a “byproduct of the Democrats”, says Matt Barron, who specialises in rural Democratic races as the principal at MLB Research Associates. “They don’t even try to compete in rural America.”

While only one in five people lives in rural or small-town America, the Republican Party has a monopoly over 24 states with large rural populations. The Constitution’s rural tilt means that the Republican Party can claim two senators for every state — however small or rural. As a result, the Senate is trapped in a stalemate with an almost equal number of Republicans and Democrats. Meanwhile, at the state level, rural voters give Republicans nearly double the number of state legislative chambers as Democrats. This, in turn, gives the Republicans more influence in the House of Representatives, which is also stuck in a deadlock.

But the Democrats haven’t always been rural pariahs. In the post-war era, the party regularly earned half of the rural congressional vote. In the Nineties, Bill Clinton won the heart of rural America, and in 2008, Barack Obama received 43% of the rural vote due to the strength of his grassroots organising. Yet Obama took his victory for granted. His operatives came to believe that the Democratic majority was destiny: there was no need to organise, canvass or traipse round knocking on doors.

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“The Obama people showed-up [in 2008] and then they left — there was no follow-up,” Chloe Maxim, a former state representative in rural Maine, told me. “Voters felt abandoned.” The percentage of rural voters identifying as Democrat fell from 45% in 2008 to 38% in 2016. During the Obama presidency, Democrats lost 13 seats in the Senate and 69 in the House, as well as 11 governorships, 913 state legislative seats and 30 state legislative chambers. Rural voters were punishing Democrats for their betrayal.

After such humiliation, can Joe Biden win back rural America? It would certainly transform his electoral prospects: even a 5% bump with rural voters would be a “game changer”, according to Adam Kirsch, a Midwest-based Democratic political consultant. For one thing, control of Congress would no longer shift every two years, allowing a Biden White House to make headway with its political agenda.

The trouble is that rural voters are difficult to reach. In the Nineties, liberals all but ceded talk radio to the conservatives, an act of foolishness given the platform is crucial to connecting with a car-loving population. Soon after, the internet transformed the economics of newspapers: nearly 3,000 American newspapers have folded since 2005. Rural newspapers were hit especially hard. Today, more than half of all American counties have very limited, if any, access to local news. On top of this, nearly a quarter of rural Americans lack broadband internet. How can they keep up with Washington politics while living in a media vacuum?

Despite these obstacles, Democrats can move the electoral needle in rural America. They don’t even need to win a majority of the rural vote — just reduce the margin of defeat. Barron points to the 2020 Arizona senate election: in a race in which Democrat Mark Kelly spent nearly $100 million, it was a $20,000 rural radio advertisement that turned the tide. Unlike past Democratic candidates, Kelly took more than 30% of the vote in every rural Arizona county bar one. This turned out to be vital in a race decided by 60,000 votes.

Political consultants, however, seem wary of this strategy: many would rather pad their bank accounts than reach out to rural voters and win elections. I was told by many sources that consultants prefer placing advertisements in urban rather than rural media, as their pay cut will be higher. Ricky Cole, the former two-term state chair of the Mississippi Democratic Party, tells me: “Our politics became nationalised by a cadre of professional operatives. It has become a big industry. It is a money game so that they can pay for their vacation homes. It is a cynical multimillion dollar Ponzi scheme.” Posner agrees: “It is about turf, power, and money. If the Democratic Party gave a shit, it would fund parties and campaigns from the bottom up.”

I keep hearing the same thing: if the Democratic Party could be bothered, it could claw back rural loyalty. Jane Kleeb, the state chair of Nebraska Democrats, tells me that four full-time paid organisers could turn the Cornhusker state competitive, if not purple. But alas, donors finance campaign consultants rather than grassroots organising. And campaign consultants would rather send mailers to dump leaflets on rural areas than pay grassroots activists. This is because, as Posner puts it, “consultants get a cut of the mailer. They don’t consult on actual strategy. They consult and decide based on their economic incentives.”

Their incompetence is leading the party to ruin. Without inspiring candidates or local organisation, the party’s brand in rural America is “non-existent”, according to Kirsch. Rural voters have come to see elections as “us versus them, not Left versus Right”. And the Republicans successfully appeal to the “us” mentality.

With party gentry deaf to the problem, a constellation of local and state Democrats is seeking to rebuild the grassroots Democratic Party. One of these rebels is Sara Taber, who is running to be North Carolina’s Agriculture Commissioner. The crop scientist and ex-farmworker refers to rural North Carolinians as “my people” and admits that in her neck of the woods, “it helps to know your place as a Democrat”.

Another is Ty Pinkins, an African American Democrat who is running against Mississippi’s white Republican incumbent, Senator Roger Wicker. It appears to be an uphill battle — but Cole thinks Pinkins has a real shot if Democrats can get out the vote. He points to 2023, when a Democrat, Brandon Presley, lost to Mississippi’s Republican governor, Tate Reeves, by 20,000 votes. The margin of defeat, he says, was a lacklustre African American turnout.

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Rural America has lost its soul

By Steven Conn

Pinkins seems determined not to repeat history. Slim and youthful looking, the 50-year-old politician is an army vet with a Bronze Star and Georgetown law degree. Since June 2023, he has put 70,000 miles on his Black Chevy Tahoe, canvassing in 67 of the state’s 82 counties. But his goal is not just to win one election; instead, he is building an entire get-out-the-vote infrastructure. He aims to have a campaign honcho in every county and a team leader in all 1,762 state precincts.

Can he succeed? Anthony Flaccavento, a farmer in southwest Virginia who ran for Congress twice as a Democrat and later set up the Rural-Urban Bridge Initiative, tells me that rural people often “believe Democrats just don’t like them”. Here, as in any relationship, trust is what matters most. For instance, during his 2014 Congressional race, Flaccavento was approached by a retired United Mine Worker raging against Obama’s support for gay marriage. Flaccavento had lived in southwest Virginia for years; he knew how to handle his interlocutor. In a span of three minutes, Flaccavento told him that Jesus had instructed humans to love another, and that he personally intended to do just that. The miner shrugged and admitted: “I guess they were just born that way.” He went away satisfied with the answer, not because it was a particularly original one but because Flaccavento had spent years building trust and respect in the local community.

Pinkins, too, understands the importance of trust. He says: “I see it every day. The moment you walk up to [voters], you see the look in their eyes. They are eager to tell you what is important to them.” But trust is a two-way bond. If the Democrats are going to take on MAGA in rural America, they’re going to have to trust small-town voters enough to try their luck.

It looks, sounds, and smells like 1968. And this is no coincidence — many of the protesters see themselves as revivalists, resurrecting the pose and the politics of a more heroic era. But a closer examination of the trajectory of the 1968 generation reveals the Columbia crop to be little more than a patchy historical shadow. Because while the 2024 generation are ultimately the grandchildren of 1968, they are also its epigones, and placing the two political movements side by side is an object lesson in the difference between the authentic and ersatz.

Mark Rudd, who led the 1968 Columbia University protests, was a typical New Leftist. He entered college from the mid-Sixties middle class — apolitical, yet vaguely jaundiced. He longed for an “intellectual avant-garde”. He had tired of watching the Civil Rights Movement unfold from the side-lines. He drifted in such frustrations until discovering Malcolm X who taught him that “the division in the world is between the oppressed—who are mainly people of color—and the oppressors—who are mainly white”. In a phrase, this is how Rudd and the New Leftists could link their domestic situation to Vietnam and American foreign policy.

This was key to turning the Civil Rights movement into a larger New Left. The batons, German shepherds, and firehoses that the racist South used as its weapons had already permanently changed how Rudd, and many in his generation, viewed their country. John Lewis, Diane Nash, and the student wing of the civil rights movement served as their activist model. Their villain was George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor, who was taken to define America at home. Once Vietnam was thrown into the mix, New Leftists could think of their nation as George Wallace home and abroad — racist, fascist, and irredeemably imperialist.

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In defence of our new student radicals

By Terry Eagleton

This 21st-century movement opts for a similar synthesis, tying their Gaza activism to their anti-racist background. Like the original New Left, the culture war over American society in the last decade has led them on a journey from racial optimism to remorseless antagonism. It began with Barack Obama, the Zoomer John Kennedy. Charismatic and cool, Obama symbolised an ascendant “post-racial” America when the nation could still believe in change through traditional political channels. But Trayvon Martin’s 2012 murder, Michael Brown’s 2014 shooting, and the Ferguson Riots began to punch holes in this fantasy before, like the Civil Rights movement in the Sixties, Donald Trump’s election and George Floyd, radicalised a generation.

Once at college, the institutional pressures were there to bake these ingredients into a very 1968 mould: the 2024 student protesters sound and act like the New Left because they are trained by an institutionalised New Left at elite universities. This is why the intone the very same language and misapply identical principles. In 1968, Rudd founded his protest upon Columbia’s “racism and support for imperialism”. Now, 56 years later, Jawuanna McAllister a Cornell University student protester defines her philosophy: “we’re antiracist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist… none of us can be free… unless all of us are free”. It’s Freaky Friday — the student protest edition, except this time there is no generation gap on campus.

But though they imbibe and spout the same ideas, the modern protest movement dwells in a completely different context to its grandparent. In the Sixties, elite colleges and universities were institutionally conservative: the University of California even prohibited all political activity on campus. It was that total (and unreasonable) prohibition which prompted the original free-speech movement. At Columbia meanwhile, Mark Rudd sipped sherry with “tame and bloodless” professors in dreary afternoon seminars on Aristotle. At Swarthmore, future Weather Underground leaders Cathy Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin endured curfews, dined on white tablecloths, and organised formal dinners.

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By Lionel Shriver

Today, these very same campuses actively market themselves as Left-wing activist finishing schools. Cornell’s student union features a plaque commemorating armed takeover of the building in 1969. At Atlanta’s Emory University, Arts and Social Justice Fellows help students translate their learning into “creative activism in the name of social justice”. And Columbia, which is euphemistically called “Protest Ivy”, brings activist alumni to campus to woo potential students, while its two-semester core “Contemporary Civilization” is effectively a reading list for the 2024 activists. On the list are as many texts on the Haitian Constitution (three) as there are on the American, while the post-1945 readings are devoted exclusively to anticolonialism, race, sex and gender, and climate change. Unlike the Boomers who lived in a conservative social milieu amid establishment liberal ideas, the Zoomers scarcely encounter any contemporary notion to the Right of the Combahee River Collective or Frantz Fanon.

And this gets at the heart of the crucial difference between 2024 and 1968. Rudd, and his contemporaries, rebelled. Their movement, and its excesses, were born amid social upheaval and intellectual ferment. This certainly resulted in some misjudged actions and overheated rhetoric: when I interviewed Rudd, he freely admitted this. But one can understand, if not always defend, the New Left’s actions because of the scale of the political context. They imagined themselves battling racist oppression at home and imperialism abroad — because they were. In 1963, George Wallace had vowed to preserve segregation forever. Selma’s Bloody Sunday was a current event. Western imperialism was a present-day fact. What LBJ saw as the domino theory in Vietnam was instead a final act in Vietnam’s decades-long quest for independence, which America was denying through its war.

This iteration of the Left, by contrast, takes their canned philosophies from their elders and applies them by rote. And what they lack in originality they compensate with intellectual sloppiness. The Israel-Gaza War is not even America’s conflict. Israel is a sovereign nation governed by a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who freely ignores Joe Biden. Protesters fundamentally misunderstand the very injustices they protest. And, trained by the old-New Left, they see American racism as frozen in 1968 amber, even though the material basis for racial inequality has fundamentally shifted. In 1968, to be black was to be in the American underclass: in 1960, only 10% of African Americans held a middle-class job. But the very victories of Civil Rights have changed that equation.

William Julius Wilson, the preeminent urban sociologist of his era, finds that class has become stickier than race in determining life chances. For the half of all black families that are now middle-class as a result, this is good news. And though they still suffer the worst, working-class African Americans are the victims of the same globalised economy as their white and brown brethren. There has not been a complete revolution: drive along any of America’s 955 Martin Luther King Boulevards and you will see reasons for pessimism. African-American men are still disproportionately victims of police violence. But this no longer a product of racialised legislation, but of the fact that poor Americans, of all races, are the disproportionate victims of a militarised police state.

And in several ways this is worse than 1968. Because this time it is the underclass, the Palestinians, who pay the price for elite hyperbole. Benjamin Netanyahu can more easily ignore shrill exaggerations: the war grinds on; Palestinians suffer. The Zoomer Left hasn’t responded to this reality — it doesn’t even try. Instead, it sets about exemplifying Rob Henderson’s luxury belief motif, where anti-war activism confers social prestige on the educated elite. The cultural geography of the current protests is equally telling in this regard. These protests are stationed at elite campuses, the “Ivy plus” institutions where children of elites predominate. The New Left admittedly started with upper-middle-class kids at elite schools. But hundreds of middle-class state colleges eventually erupted in protest. In 1970, normie Kent State University in Ohio became the symbol of a mass youth rebellion.

Anti-racism at home and Zionism-as-imperialism abroad is a nifty way to redirect focus from this reality. And just as Tom Barson, a veteran of the 1968 Columbia uprising, has written, the roots of the tumult are not so much social anomie as it is “deflection”. Otherwise, the student elites might observe their professional middle class has gobbled up 83% of the America’s wealth since 1989. Or that the income gap between college and non-college was a mere 10% in the Seventies (today it is 70%). They could notice that the just over 500, mostly urban, coastal counties where they reside is home to 70% of all wealth, and that an epidemic of “deaths of despair” tears through the thousands of counties left behind. They might even notice that today it is college that separates the underclass from everyone else — and that it should be the cause of social protest, not its incubator.

The Columbia protesters are too coiled up in political introversion to notice these historical ironies. And that is why they will only end up repeating the greatest Sixties irony of them all. After all the fury of that decade, its greatest political achievement was to pave Richard Nixon’s route to the presidency, shattering the coalition that had carried LBJ to a landslide in 1964. By broadcasting the worst of the modern Left to America and its “silent majority”, these students can do the same, sabotaging the current government and boosting a crook to the White House.