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.

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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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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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.

Ohio is America in many respects: a land of race and religion, LeBron James and the Tafts. And it is the epicentre of the new democratic world we are about to enter: the home of J.D. Vance and the Rust Belt rebellion. Ohio is the state that voted for Barack Obama, twice, and then for Donald Trump, twice. It’s a place that was once a swing state and could be again — but isn’t.

To understand America, you must understand Ohio; and so, four years ago, I travelled from the Ohio River in the south to Cincinnati, Columbus and Canton — before finally landing in Youngstown, the old steel town made famous by Bruce Springsteen. “Here in Youngstown; Here in Youngstown; My sweet Jenny I’m sinking down,” he wailed in 1995, foreshadowing the political upheaval to come.

By now, such laments have almost become passé, the story of modern America we all know: the hillbilly elegy that explains Trump. “Youngstown was steel, nothing but steel,” my old colleague George Packer wrote in The Unwinding. “Everyone here owed their life to the molten pour of iron… Without it, there was no life.” And yet, the steel disappeared in 1977 and it wasn’t until 2016 that it voted for Trump.

Before my trip, I’d ploughed through Phillip Meyer’s American Rust, set just across the border from Youngstown in the hills of western Pennsylvania. It’s a book that captures that sense of decline that has wormed its way into the bones of both northern England and the American Midwest. “You wanted to believe in America,” says one of Meyer’s characters, “but anyone could tell you that the Germans and Japs made the same amount of steel America did these days.” Here was the reflex that lies at the heart of the new post-liberal conservatism: “If you don’t have steel, you don’t have a country,” as President Trump declared in 2018.

This is the message that Vance brings to his ticket — a statement of economic intent. “The effects of globalisation have hollowed out America’s industrial core,” Vance wrote recently in a joint op-ed with Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s former Trade Representative and potential future Treasury Secretary, who also happens to hail from Ohio. “When the manufacturing jobs moved out, a host of social problems moved in: family divorce and breakdown, child abuse and neglect and opioid addiction.” A similar message could have been delivered by any Labour or SNP politician since the Thatcherite industrial collapse of the Eighties. Yet it is now a message more likely to be heard on the Conservative backbenches.

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In his maiden speech last week, Nick Timothy, the new Tory MP and former Downing Street chief of staff under Theresa May, pronounced the death of the old economic consensus. “We don’t make, do or sell enough of what the world needs,” he claimed. “From low pay to regional inequality, poor productivity to funding public services, all the things we worry about are symptoms of this wider problem.” In Timothy’s view, Britain needs a new economic consensus. “We need to challenge Treasury orthodoxy and think beyond the intellectual limits of ideological liberalism,” he said.

Occasionally, you hear an odd centrist chastise this kind of message. Yet, it would be wrong to consider this new strain of conservatism as some kind of ideological aberration for either the Republicans or Conservatives. Both parties, in fact, have their roots in protectionism: the Tories in Disraeli’s support for the Corn Laws and the Republicans in Civil War tariffs. To understand why, come to Ohio.

Canton was once the home of William McKinley, the last Republican president to be assassinated, and a descendent from what the Americans like to call the “Scotch Irish”, much like Vance today. These Protestant Irish settlers are the original “hillbillies” — the “Billy Boys” from Ulster whose hero was and remains King Billy, or William of Orange. There is deep historic irony, then, in Vance’s conversion to Catholicism, which seems to have been largely missed.

McKinley today remains a largely obscure figure, lost in the sunken years between the Civil War and the Great War of 1914-18. Even the memorial to him in Canton has an air of forgotten grandeur to it. Yet, McKinley’s presidential victory in 1896 remains a pivotal moment in American history, ending decades of political deadlock and ushering in a period of Republican domination which only came to an end with Roosevelt’s victory in 1932. At the heart of McKinley’s election victory were the twin issues of protectionism and the dollar — two issues which have once again been thrust under the spotlight.

In 1896, it’s worth recalling that it was the Republican Party that was the party of protectionism and sound money — backed by the white middle-class protestants of the north and African Americans of the south (and beyond). The Democrats, by contrast, were the party of segregation, free-trade and “free silver” — a policy designed to help inflate away the debts of the many small farmers who formed the backbone of the party, along with the new Irish and Italian immigrants in the north (a policy with faint echoes of J.D. Vance’s ideas today). To the Republicans, they were the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion”.

That year, it was the Democratic candidate for the presidency who was the fiery populist: William Jennings Bryan, a pin-up of the forgotten man raging against East Coast elites, international speculators and the gold standard — the “cross of gold” upon which the American farmer was being crucified, as he put it. Here, then, was the caricature of an American populist: Trump before Trump, though one whose populism was rooted in a furious opposition to protectionism. To defeat him, the Republicans chose McKinley, a unity candidate for change who could appeal beyond the old Republican base.

For Karl Rove, a one-time Republican election guru who has written a history of the 1896 election, McKinley’s victory was pivotal — not only because it won the argument that year, but because it created a new coalition for the Republicans that would keep the party in power for much of the next 36 years.

With Trump and Vance playing the role of insurgent populists today, questioning the core principles of American industrial and monetary policy, the stakes of this election feel eerily similar. Yet, Harris does not appear to be a McKinley figure — and Trump, unlike Bryan, has already shown he can win. The question today, I think, is which party will be able to follow McKinley in reaching out beyond its current electoral base to create a new wider coalition that can break the deadlock in America.

In Rove’s account of the 1896 election, he offers a number of key lessons for the Republican Party’s triumph — many of which are applicable today. First, McKinley did not skirt the big issues but addressed them directly, including the one considered to be his opponent’s core strength: Bryan’s advocacy of Free Silver. Today, it seems that Trump’s core strength is his “America First” economics — his opposition to free trade. The choice for the Democrats today, then, is whether to accept this in an attempt to neutralise it, or to take it on as McKinley did of Bryan in 1896. Do the Americans want to risk a return to inflation?

Second, McKinley also offered himself as “a different type of Republican” who realised he needed to broaden the party’s appeal to a whole series of states once considered safely Democrat. Once again, today’s Democratic Party seems unwilling or unable to adopt this strategy, focused instead on securing just enough electoral college votes to win. Harris does not seem like the kind of candidate capable of winning over crucial swing-states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin or, of course, Ohio. Those I spoke to in Ohio said there was no reason why it could not be a swing state again, rather than a solid Republican bastion. It just required the Democrats to listen and compromise more than they currently seemed willing.

Finally, McKinley defined himself as a unity candidate facing off against an increasingly divisive Bryan campaign that “attacks… anyone who disagreed with him”, as Rove put it. Biden was able to play this role against Trump in 2020. Obama adopted the same message in 2008 and 2012. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, didn’t see the need — and abjectly failed. For both parties, the lesson here isn’t hard to glean.

From Canton I went to Youngstown, where it was hard not to be shocked by the scale of the city’s degradation: the abandoned plots, the ruined roads, the general sense of abandonment. I couldn’t help but think of Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, set in Detroit in the Seventies. “All that was left of the old neighbourhood was empty land,” one of his characters complains as he crashes over a bridge to his death. “It seemed that most of the city was gone.”

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Yet this was only one part of the city. The story less often told about Youngstown is that of the suburbs and surrounding towns, which are far from abandoned and dying but very much still alive. Here I found a region filled with small factories and office blocks, neither poverty-stricken nor a land of plenty. Here the golf clubs were filled with old auto workers and union men who were once Democrat but no more, living in neat bungalows with nice cars on the drive, with their children nearby, no longer working the furnace but as teachers or office workers. According to my guide Tom Maraffa, a retired professor at Youngstown State University, this was where Trump had flipped things.

A little further out, one town sticks in the memory, a place so American it could be nowhere else. Not London or Oxford, but Colombiana. If the modest suburbs were the places Trump had flipped, Colombiana was always his — not filled with angry MAGA supporters, either, but driving ranges and country clubs, small businesses and nice cafes. The Republicans here might have preferred a candidate a little less brash, but considered the Democratic Party so wildly out of touch they would never consider switching sides.

Earlier this week, when I spoke with Tom again, he lamented the state of American politics and its coverage in the US media. I was intrigued how things had changed since my last visit. The state, he felt, remained in an odd holding pattern. The old union men now voting for Trump were still not entirely sold on the Republican Party, but the Democrats were not offering them much either. “Fundamentally, Trump speaks to people who are tied to their places and want them restored,” Tom told me. In contrast, he felt, “the Democratic Party has become the party of the educated ‘placeless’”.

It’s a mood that was captured by Springsteen in Youngstown. “From the Monongahela valley to the Mesabi iron range; To the coal mines of Appalachia, the story’s always the same,” he sang. Almost 30 years later, both parties face the same challenge: are they bold enough to rewrite Springsteen’s “story”? If so, Ohio is the place to start.

In a period of intense creativity, Springsteen wrote hundreds of songs for a much-anticipated follow-up. Intending to teach them to his band, he recorded them on a simple four-track tape machine in his New Jersey bedroom. Subsequent sessions in the studio could not replicate the intensity of these demos. They were too personal, immediate: the words often mumbled so softly they were barely discernible; the rhythm of the guitar-playing often broken. But rather than re-record these tapes himself, Springsteen released them, as Nebraska.

Everything about the album went against the spirit of the times. Ronald Reagan was two years into his first term after the Republicans swept the working-class heartlands of America in a landslide victory. The president believed storybook myths about his country: that its fortunes had been made by pioneering men and women on the western frontier, free from the restraining hand of the federal government. Reagan’s America was like the cowboy B-movies in which he had once starred: a land of heroes, opportunity, and sunny Hollywood optimism.

Nebraska was not optimistic. Its cover sleeve depicts a bleak sky, above a road to nowhere, ice on the windshield and, beneath it, the title in red, like a warning sign. It sold poorly and due to its troubling themes, Springsteen did not take it on tour. Nebraska was left to speak for itself. Today, exactly 40 years after its release, that voice is no less disquieting. Its characters are mostly out-of-work men, driven to the edge of madness, and sometimes beyond it, by poverty and despair. They commit petty acts of crime to make ends meet, or sometimes shocking acts of depravity.

The album’s opener, for instance, tells a fictionalised account of the crimes of Charles Starkweather, a 19-year-old carpenter’s son who took his 14-year-old girlfriend on a killing spree around rural Nebraska in 1959. “I can’t say I’m sorry for the things we done,” reflects Springsteen’s Starkweather character, “at least for a while, sir, me and her we had us some fun.”

On Nebraska, Springsteen’s characters all speak in this idiomatic, first-person style, punctuated with “sirs” and “misters”. They speak in parables, of gleaming mansions on hills, of lost sons returning to fathers, of family loyalty chosen over duty. The economy of language owes much to the influence of Flannery O’Connor, the writer of Southern Gothic fiction, in whose profoundly Catholic vision grace is often found in moments of shocking violence. “She got to the heart of some meanness that she never spelled out,” Springsteen has said, inspired to create characters of his own. Her work, he later reflected, reminded him of the “unknowability of God”.

Matters of the soul were on Springsteen’s mind. He was 33 and mired in depression. It was an affliction that ran deep among the Springsteens, working-class Italian-Irish Catholics from Freehold, New Jersey. Bruce’s father was a brooding, sometimes violent alcoholic, who traded various blue-collar jobs. Nebraska is Springsteen’s most personal album, written for the kitchen in which his father drank; for the “flat, dead voice” that drifted through his town on sleepless nights; for his grandparents’ sparse living room, frozen in time, ornamented by a picture of his father’s sister, killed as a child in a bicycle accident.

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Springsteen grew up introspective with few friends or prospects. Music, to which he devoted his life, offered salvation. Greetings from Asbury Park, his first album, is about the hot summer streets and beaches of New Jersey; Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town reflect dreams of escape; while on The River, Springsteen begins to explore working-class lives and problems. It is on Nebraska, however, that these themes reach full maturity. It is the moment he steps into his father’s clothes and channels the working-class consciousness of America.

It was Springsteen’s preternatural artistic gift that his own depression offered a way to explore his country’s, which, by the early Eighties, had grown acute. Between 1945 and 1973, the average American family income almost doubled. In the factories of the Midwest, rising wages meant harmony between unions and management. Blue-collar workers reaped the fruits of their labour. They bought houses, cars, and household goods once considered luxuries reserved for the privileged few.

However, by the mid-Seventies, a combination of sluggish economic growth and high inflation brought this period of relative prosperity to an end. The Reagan government prescribed a shock therapy of tax cuts and deregulation. Unemployment reached 10.8%, a postwar record. High interest rates led to home repossessions. The factories of the Midwest began to rust. The result was the hollowing out of small towns, the breakdown of families, and diseases of addiction and despair.

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It is into these broken lives that Nebraska casts us. “Down here it’s just winners and losers and don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line,” says one character, bound for Atlantic City, the promised land. But so often Springsteen’s characters are caught on the wrong side, like the worker who loses his job at an auto-plant and murders a store clerk. “Now I ain’t sayin’ that makes me an innocent man,” he tells the judge. “But it was more ‘n this that put that gun in my hand.”

Nebraska is a place where fates are decided, where confessions are made, where redemption is sought. A driver begs a late-night radio DJ to hear his prayers, a highway patrolman drives down to the crossroads, an out-of-work man agrees to do an unspeakable favour. These men are haunted by the past. Ghostly voices rise from moonlit fields. Radios are jammed up with “lost souls callin’ long distance salvation”. A bar band sings “The Night of the Johnstown Flood” — not a song, but a tragedy, which claimed the lives of 2,000 Americans in the late 19th century.

And Nebraska becomes not a state, but a state of being: a purgatory of perpetual darkness where its characters are condemned to the horror of eternal recurrence. Whether there is any escape from the bardo is not clear. A character dreams of his “father’s house”, which stands “hard and bright” across a dark highway, visible, but out of reach. The album ends with the optimistic line: “every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe”. But the song is about lives of quiet desperation and pain.

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In the early Nineties, doctors discovered millions of Americans were suffering from a mysterious pain. The pain was especially acute in the Nebraska of Springsteen’s imagination: the desolate farms and villages, the hollowed-out factory towns. Doctors did not know its source, but there were many causes. Since the Seventies, the wages of white working-class men not only flattened, but declined. As factories shuttered, trade union membership collapsed. Marriage and fertility rates fell much faster than the rest of America. Church attendance fell too. And while the American crime rate has decreased since the Nineties, in the Rust Belt it remained persistently high. Bereft of hope, men and women in these godforsaken places fell victim to diseases of despair: drug addiction, alcohol abuse, suicide.

Then, in the mid-Nineties, a solution for the pain was found: painkillers. Because the pain could not be treated at source, it was numbed. Opioids were prescribed to millions of Americans. Big Pharma companies grew rich, while patients were immiserated. Because patients developed a tolerance to the drugs, they turned to alternatives bought on the street, some 100 times stronger than morphine. Between 1999 and 2017, the death rate in overdoses from opioids increased fivefold. But the pain remains. And the economic conditions — high inflation, high interest rates, low growth — that were among its causes, have returned. The American heartlands of 2022 are no less a likeness of Springsteen’s Nebraska than they were in 1982.

It is these abandoned heartlands Nebraska still speaks for. It speaks for their dead, too, many of whom, awaiting final judgement, are trapped there, between this world and the next.

Contrary to expert opinion, America has been adding hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs in the past two years. Last year, the nation’s manufacturers added 284,000 jobs – the most in any year since 1995. That comes on top of the 207,000 additional jobs in 2017, itself a reverse of patterns in the final two years of the Obama Administration.

Trump might not deserve the credit for this, but the timing of the gains strongly suggests he does. Federal government data shows that manufacturing jobs started to increase in December 2016. The gains continued throughout 2017, and accelerated in late 2017 after it became clear that the President’s large corporate tax cuts were likely to pass Congress. Correlation does not prove causation, but it’s hard to imagine what other circumstances were more important to manufacturing’s health than Trump’s election and his agenda.

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The problem for Trump, however, is that the Rust Belt is not getting the bulk of those new jobs. Data shows that less than 89,000 of the 503,000 manufacturing jobs gained since November 2016 were in the five Rust belt states whose switch from Obama to Trump decided the election.[1. (Wisconsin;  Pennsylvania;  Ohio; Michigan;  Iowa.] Moreover, the number of jobs varied significantly among these states. The smallest of the five states, Iowa and Wisconsin, obtained nearly half of the new jobs. The largest, Pennsylvania, gained just 7,700 new manufacturing jobs, barely a ripple in the state’s large economy.

The uneven distribution of jobs can also be seen within the Rust Belt states themselves. Ohio, for example, has gained over 21,000 manufacturing jobs since Trump’s victory. Yet the hard-hit Youngstown area, site of many closed steel mills and a region with some of the largest swings towards Trump in 2016, has actually lost 2,100 manufacturing jobs in the past two years.

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Michigan, which Trump won by only 11,000 votes, has received nearly 16,000 new manufacturing jobs since he won. But 7,000 of them are in the Grand Rapids and nearby Muskegon regions. Long troubled areas like Flint, meanwhile, are experiencing a continued loss of coveted manufacturing work.

The states really benefiting from the manufacturing upsurge, perhaps not surprisingly, are mainly the same ones which were growing quickly before Trump.[2. See data.] Texas, America’s second largest state, has added over 56,000 manufacturing jobs during the Trump era. The fast-growing Southeast has added another 62,000; while Arizona and Nevada – which have grown rapidly over the past two-plus decades – added more than 30,000. Even tiny Idaho, which is about one ninth the size of Pennsylvania, has added 6,000 manufacturing jobs under Trump – nearly as many as the once-great Keystone State itself.

This gap highlights one of America’s most pressing political challenges: how to ensure that growth is widespread. As in many Western countries, America’s economic growth for the past decade has primarily occurred in large metropolitan areas, and has mainly benefitted people with more advanced education.

Increases in manufacturing jobs are intended to help ‘spread the wealth around’, as they are more often filled by people without college or post-graduate degrees. But if the jobs these people can fill are not going to the places they live, then that’s a problem.

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People could, of course, move to fill these jobs, but the evidence suggests that this is not happening quickly enough. Fast-growing Texas, for example, gained a net 467,000 Americans in 2017. Only 35,000 of these, or about 5%, came from the five economically hard-hit Rust Belt states mentioned above. That is far below the 13.3% of the population that the five states comprise.[3. See Table 1]

This strongly suggests that rather than move in search of economic opportunity, many Rust Belt residents are staying put, adding to the political tensions caused by living in towns and areas that are no longer vibrant.

Of course, two years is a very short time in which to change the economic trajectory of a large country. It may be that the significant uptick in manufacturing job growth seen in 2018 will accelerate in the coming years and be more evenly spread throughout the country. That could start to turn around depressed Rust Belt cities, and in the process help Trump’s re-election chances by demonstrating that he could keep promises that national elites thought foolish from the start.

If that does not happen, however, Trump’s re-election chances will likely suffer even if aggregate national growth figures look healthy. The people who put their faith in him may have signed on to a campaign that intended to “Make America Great Again”, but what they really wanted was to make their lives great again. If Trump fails to do that, big job gains in other parts of the country won’t matter to the folk whose dashed dreams are symbolised by the shuttered factory around the corner.

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Levittown, a medium-sized suburban community north of Philadelphia, was created by developer William Levitt, starting in 1951, as one of America’s earliest affordable suburban communities. Over sixty years after its first house was sold, it remains a White, working-class town, but unlike better-known Trump-friendly, White blue-collar places like Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna County or Ohio’s Mahoning County it is still economically well-off. Yet despite this relative affluence, it behaved just like these other places, moving dramatically away from a traditional Democratic voting history to make Trump the most successful Republican nominee in these areas in the last thirty years.[2. Trump received 45.6 percent of the vote in Levittown the highest share received by a Republican nominee since at least 1988. Mitt Romney, the 2012 nominee, received less than 38% of the vote and lost by over 24% to President Obama. Trump, however, lost by less than 6%, an improvement of over 18% on the margin. Trump’s improvement over Romney on the margin was roughly 24% in Lackawanna County and about 25% in Mahoning County. See https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/]

My visit unearthed just how complicated and varied Trump’s appeal to these voters is. Some people mentioned economic concerns as an explanation for Levittown’s shift, while others mentioned immigration and the cultural and economic issues it raises. But more than anything people mentioned a deep psychological resonance that made Levittowners feel Trump understood and cared about people like them. They may not like Trump’s tweets, but his brash manner and his open embrace of the value of work was for them a breath of fresh air in an otherwise long-stale political climate.

Understanding populism

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By Henry Olsen

Although the town is doing well – the median household income is over $72,000 a year above the US median – economics still resonates because of Levittown’s past. Many of its original residents worked for one of five large manufacturers, the largest of which was United States Steel. As elsewhere in the Rust Belt, the factories gradually closed down or dramatically reduced in size. Jane,[3. All names of interviewees are pseudonyms, allowing their ability to speak openly about their community] a sixty-year Levittown resident, told me that the U.S. Steel plant went from a high of nearly 10,000 employees in the 1980s to a current total of about 150. While Levittowners eventually adapted and found new jobs, they paid less and had less generous benefits than the old jobs that had gone. “Bringing manufacturing back was a big thing for Levittowners,” says Jane. It’s a now familiar refrain: “US Steel workers used to make $25 an hour [close to $50 an hour in 2018 money] and get up to 13 weeks of vacation each year. The jobs they have now don’t pay anything near that well.”

For Bill, a retired carpenter, Trump’s economic message was personal. Telling me about how his union couldn’t get work when competing against contractors employing foreign labourers, who may be in the US illegally, it was not hard to see why Trump’s message resonated so deeply. “If Trump had been President,” he says, wistfully, “I probably wouldn’t have had to retire.” Some people even think Trump will get them their old jobs back, says Jane, not just bring back manufacturing more generally.

The sense that these jobs were unfairly lost also helps explain this Trump-friendly narrative. Jane emphasises that US Steel’s foreign competition was subsidised by foreign governments. “We sent our jobs overseas and then we sent money [via foreign aid] to countries that turned around to stab us in the back,” she said. Bill went further: “immigration is a big thing because it is a big handout. We can’t get big handouts like they can.” It was a odd comment, US laws do not offer legal immigrants anything different from what it offers citizens and immigrants not here legally are often not allowed to receive many government benefits, but whether Bill and Jane are correct is beside the point – what matters from a political standpoint is that voters like those in Levittown feel like their government has abandoned them.

This sense of abandonment – of being “left behind” – came up time and again in my discussions with local people. “They want officials to pay attention to them,” Anthony, a young 30-year old anti-Trump Republican, told me. “They aren’t seeing any direct benefit from any of the policies” politicians talk about. In fact, the disaffection goes deeper. Levittowners, one astute local politico named Greg told me, tend to believe that “if I work hard and play by the rules it will work out.” But, as Greg said as we drove round the old steelworks, “there’s a sense that not everyone is playing by the same rules. Many of these folk think ‘I’m working my ass off, and this just isn’t working for me’.” That’s a common view among the White blue-collar workers who turned to Trump.

Disaffection with the status quo – the ‘establishment’ – drove voters to Trump the outsider: “The institutions that used to help you are now working against you, many people think. The game is rigged and it’s time to change it.” Interestingly, as both Bill and Greg told me, that outsider could just as well have been socialist populist Bernie Sanders. I was told about exchanges on primary day where Democratic voters told their GOP counterparts that they were voting for Hillary Clinton’s challenger, Sanders, but they were voting for Trump in November if Clinton won.

These pro-Trump feelings rarely extended to specifics. Time and again I would ask people what exactly voters thought they would get from Trump, and time and again I found only a general sense that things would get better for people like them.

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But perhaps they were already getting the specific thing they craved more than anything else: the feeling that someone in power cared. Bill surprised me by repeatedly saying that “Trump is a very compassionate person.” He mentioned a story he had heard from Trump’s personal airplane pilot about how Trump once sent his jet to pick up a young person who couldn’t get to a hospital for medical treatment he needed, but it was clear that this idea of caring extended well beyond that one specific example. “Supporting Trump was the second-best decision I ever made”, he said – quite a statement from a self-described “life-long Democrat” who voted for Obama in 2008.

To really understand this devotion-inspiring appeal, however, you have to look beyond the economic. For many blue-collar Whites, Trump’s pull was personal.  Greg put it this way: “Trump is telling them ‘it’s OK to be you’. The rest of culture is telling them ‘it’s not OK to be you’.”

As Greg told me, whether the message is economic – “you have to go to college to succeed” – or cultural – “I like to listen to AC/DC; what’s wrong with that?” – Levittowners and people like them have felt the brunt of elite disdain. In voting for Trump, these blue-collar workers were rebelling against the idea that America is no longer for people like them.

“Levittowners just want a good Christmas for their kids and go to the Jersey Shore for a couple of weeks. They want some acknowledgement that is OK,” Anthony said. Trump gives them that, and they are willing to overlook nearly everything else in exchange.

It is against this backdrop that another aspect of Trump’s appeal starts to make sense. Anthony told me that one reason his neighbours liked Trump was that he “says what everyone thinks”. And that even extends to some of his cruder comments. “If I was down at the bar, that’s exactly what people would say,” the young Republican says of Trump’s “shithole countries” remark. For these Americans, Trump’s blunt, crude talk is just another way of showing he understands and values their way of life.

I left Levittown with more questions than answers. How would Levittowners feel if the US economy wasn’t roaring? Would they still overlook Trump’s shortcomings if he suffers a serious foreign policy reverse that threatens America, such as in the dispute with North Korea? Most importantly, I wondered how deep this psychic longing for recognition was.

Like almost everyone I know, I am a college graduate with a good job who enjoys all the benefits the wide global economy brings. My life experiences are largely those that are treated with respect by media and academic elites, and the unsubtle message Levittowners, and blue-collar workers like them across the country, get is that their children should be more like me than like themselves. Returning to Washington from Levittown I couldn’t help but reflect on what it felt like to be, if not on the bottom, then on the downslide. Rather than viewing global blue-collar discontent through an economic lens, we ought to be looking at populist-backing voters more as people like us, holding similarly cherished identities and hopes. And maybe if we did that, we might all be a little bit better off.

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