The autopsy determined that he had been stabbed several times, then covered in gasoline and burnt alive. Holmes was 18. The day before, in a message posted on Snapchat, he had warned his friends and family that his life was in danger.

“Alkhion Dunkins, Yzire Jenkins-Row and Zahmire Welcome,” he wrote. “If something happens to me, know those three.”

***

Half a century earlier, the writer Joan Didion had travelled to San Francisco to report on the “social haemorrhaging” of Sixties America. She wanted to bear witness to a nation’s decay and reveal its impact on a disoriented youth. These children, she wrote, “drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins”; these children “were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together”.

On San Francisco’s streets she found a generation numbed by narcotics and ideological incoherence: a youth no longer in revolt — but in stupor. “It was not a country in open revolution,” she wrote in her essay, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. “It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America.”

That was 1967. But what of today? If San Francisco once embodied a country collapsing under the weight of its contradictions, where is our Bethlehem?

As the curtain falls on an election campaign defined by its own ideological incoherence, there is no longer one single locus for the nation’s disaffected. For at least a decade, there have been many Bethlehems here: Philadelphia, Oakland, Seattle, San Francisco. And more recently, this “haemorrhaging” has spread to unexpected corners of the country.

Today, one place more than any other embodies this anomie. A rust-belt city that serves as a mirror to the nation. A city in America’s most important battleground state; in a county that has predicted the winner of every US election since 1912 bar three. A city that happens to be called Bethlehem.

***

Here, on the surface at least, the centre appears to be holding. Bethlehem is safely ensconced in Pennsylvania’s portion of the Greater Appalachian Valley, and bisected by the gentle Lehigh River. It oozes college-cute charm. Tim Walz held a rally at one of the city’s high schools back in September and was mocked for admitting “we can’t afford four more years of this”. But in Bethlehem, the gaffe went mostly unnoticed.

Earlier this year, it was awarded Unesco World Heritage Status, and it feels like the city is still celebrating. On Bethlehem’s Main Street, crimson leaves fall to the pavement, where they turn to gold. There is a choir of beautiful churches, an ice cream parlour, two taprooms — one selling beer; the other organic olive oil — and a shop selling Palestinian flags.

At one end, almost out of sight, Donald Trump’s campaign team have set up an office. “The building is owned by a Democrat,” the flag-seller tells me, before shrugging. “I guess money talks.” On the city’s fringes, Trump and Harris yard signs face off against each other, while Democrat billboards flank its entry roads.

True to its name, Bethlehem has always been drawn to the Holy Land. Since 1741, when devout Moravian travellers founded the settlement on 24 December, Christmas has been central to the city’s identity. Within six years, it boasted America’s first decorated Christmas tree. These days, it’s known as the “Christmas City” and, from November onwards, tourists come to worship in the city’s festive gift shops. The most devout get married in the opulent Hotel Bethlehem, where December weddings start at $18,000. “It was perfect,” purrs one Bethlehem bride.

But across the river, the rusted hulk of the city’s former steelworks speaks to a different chapter in the city’s history. If Bethlehem gave America its Christmas spirit, it also built its backbone. The Chrysler Building, Alcatraz Island, the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge — all were forged with steel produced in its 16-story blast furnaces. By 1940, roughly 40% of New York City’s skyline was constructed with materials from Bethlehem Steel. Three years later, during the Second World War, its workers constructed the equivalent of one battleship per day. As Walz said during his visit, it was Bethlehem Steel that “freed the world from Nazi oppression”.

Then came the post-war reconstruction, when Japan and Germany rebuilt their own plants, and more efficient steelworks were devised in America. When the global recession hit in the Eighties, Bethlehem Steel’s fate was sealed. It clung on until 1995, when the city’s steelmaking tradition died in one final nostalgic cascade of fire and ore. A worker whistled “Amazing Grace” over a speaker system on the furnace floor, and the steelworks fell silent.

Today, the land is owned by that other great American business: a casino company. Many of the old factory buildings remain empty and fenced off; a handful are occupied by start-ups and event companies. Tucked away at one end is the casino, whose shopping centre, spa and dizzying array of 4,000 betting terminals attract gambler-tourists ferried in and out on coaches from New York’s Chinatown. Britney Spears held a show there in 2018; next month, Engelbert Humperdinck is flying in.

Under the shadow of the five remaining defunct furnaces, I find Tom Sedor, a third-generation steelworker. His family history charts the industry’s decline. Sedor’s grandfather was a blacklisted union man during the First World War. His father was also a union man, until he was killed when a furnace blew up in 1948. Sedor himself worked on the plant’s electrics, right up until Bethlehem Steel closed.

“The hardest part was the Rule of 85,” he explains, where a worker could only retire with a full pension if their age and period of service added up to 85 or more. “Many men had to go to other plants, mostly in Baltimore, and that led to a lot of divorces.”

Sedor, 83, will be voting Democrat, but only because, as a lifelong union man, he could never vote for Trump. “At least Harris has visited Pennsylvania, unlike Hillary Clinton,” he says. But will life get better? “I don’t think so. Take the casino. Yes, it brings jobs, but they’re not well-paid.” He points out that the minimum wage in Pennsylvania is the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour; more than half of the rate in neighbouring New Jersey.

“How is anyone supposed to pay their rent with that?”

***

At the time of his death in April 2018, Tyrell Holmes rented a flat with two of his killers, Alkhion Dunkins and Yzire Jenkins-Row. “Back then, the landlord didn’t care how you made your money,” says one former resident.

On the night of the murder, just after midnight, neighbours heard a fight break out in their third-floor apartment. There was a shriek followed by a crash — and then silence. Holmes had been strangled unconscious. He was then dragged down the stairwell and thrown into an idling car. It quietly drove off.

Today, the block of flats on East Raspberry Street, a short walk from Bethlehem’s centre, is owned by a different letting company, but a handful of its residents remain the same. Elle, 31, has lived in the flat next to Holmes for six years. “I used to let them into the building when they forgot their keys,” she tells me. They played loud music, she says, but “didn’t cause any problems”. On the night itself, Elle and her husband came home just before 3.00am, after closing up a nearby bar. “They were next door, quickly packing up their shit — and then they just left.”

The next day, a forensic team arrived. She never saw the young men again.

“The building is still a piece of shit,” Elle adds. “They don’t fix anything.” But at least the rent is relatively cheap: it costs $1,100 a month for a two-bedroom flat, half the price of the going rate. “I’ve been lucky they haven’t raised it,” the tattoo artist admits.

Just around the corner, a new block of flats is being built, where a new studio costs around $2,000. “At least five of these developments have gone up in recent years,” Elle says, “and nobody local can afford them.”

But these flats aren’t built for those born in Bethlehem. Since the pandemic, wealthier residents of New York and Philadelphia have been moving in, just a 90-minute commute. Coupled with Bethlehem’s growing student population — it boasts two private universities — and rental and house prices rose by 40% between 2019 and 2023.

Priced out of their homes by the newcomers, 111 former residents now live on the streets, many of whom are fed by New Bethany, a food bank not far from the steelworks. “This is the worst we’ve ever seen it,” says its director Marc Rittle. He estimates there’s been a 91% increase in homelessness since the pandemic, when the government increased food stamps and cash assistance to those on lower incomes. But when the pandemic was officially declared over in May last year, that support was withdrawn.

The fall-out was unforgiving. Walk east along the south bank of the Lehigh River, past the “No Trespassing” sign and over the rusted railroad track. There, under a motorway bridge, lurks evidence of the city’s homelessness crisis: a camp that, in the dusk sunlight, might have been built by Huck Finn. The despair is ordered. Thick duvets lie across a corrugated metal platform; knee-high piles of books slouch against the back wall; at the far end a dozen DVDs are waiting to be watched on a television that doesn’t exist.

Carlos, 57, has been here a year, after the company that employed him as a forklift driver shut down. “The weekends are particularly hard,” he explains, as the nearby food bank is closed. Despite coming to America from Puerto Rico almost 40 years ago — a third of Bethlehem is Hispanic — he has no identity papers, which means he can’t apply for housing or financial support.

“I’ve just got to be hopeful,” he says calmly, when I ask about the election. “That’s all I got.” And he shrugs.

Across the river, some 50 other people have set up a larger encampment, but Carlos prefers the quiet. Sometimes he goes over to fish with them. There are 30-odd tents. Most of their occupants are waiting for manual work to come around, but few are as hopeful as Carlos. Some have lived there for more than five years, and plan to stay for another five. “This is our home now,” says one. Further up the river, another says he’s too busy to talk; he returns to his plank of wood and starts to aimlessly drill holes.

George, by contrast, doesn’t need a tent. Instead, despite working at New Bethany and claiming social security, he spends each night sleeping in his car. Last year, his rent increased from $875 to $1,000 — and he couldn’t afford the difference. “I park down by the hospital,” the former construction worker, 69, explains. “It’s one of the safest places you can stay because of the security guard.” To avoid suspicion before nightfall, he moves from carpark to carpark, along with a small cortège of other car-sleepers.

Unprompted, George describes how, after his daughter died in June, he started drinking to forget the pain and the elements. “But I drank so much I got hospitalised and have been sober since,” he adds. And now he feels the cold.

When I ask how his daughter died, he replies as if I should already know the answer: “Fentanyl.”

***

Over the past five years, there have been more than 600 opioid overdoses in Bethlehem. As one resident, whose flat overlooks the dumpster where Tyrell Holmes was burnt alive, told me: “There are drug deals here every night.”

Five days before Holmes’s death, five members of Bethlehem’s “Money Rules Everything” (MRE) gang robbed a drug dealer. Such “drug rips” — where dealers or suppliers are targeted — had become increasingly common in Bethlehem.

The robbery didn’t go to plan. As the young men escaped with a bag of marijuana, one dropped his phone. When the dealer turned it on, there were two faces on its background: Alkhion Dunkins and the phone’s owner, Tyrell Holmes.

The police are still piecing together what happened in the short period between that night and Holmes’s murder. Witnesses have been reluctant to provide testimony or evidence; in 2021; one of the killers, Jenkins-Rowe, was accused of witness intimidation from his prison cell. (In Pennsylvania, first-degree murder still carries the death sentence.)

But some facts are known. After the robbery, Alkhion Dunkins — Holmes’s flatmate and fellow MRE member — started to receive threats from the dealer the gang had targeted. Holmes, meanwhile, had become the subject of an internal investigation. He stood accused of stealing from MRE and associating with members of a rival gang.

“Tyrell lived two lives,” a friend tells me. “But he didn’t deserve to die like that.” She tries to explain why many of their male friends were drawn into crime: “They feel like drug dealing is the only way they can live. There isn’t much out there for them, and they’re trying to control the chaos.” When I ask if she thinks the election will alter anything, she responds: “Nothing is going to change. If anything, everything is going to get worse. It always does.”

Elle, Holmes’s next-door neighbour, agrees. “What pisses me off is that both parties only care about minute things when there’s so much other shit going on.” I ask what she means. “Abortion and stuff is obviously important. But what about the economy? What about the drugs?”

Fentanyl has continued to flow through Bethlehem’s backstreets since the last election. “When I was 16, three of my best friends got addicted to heroin,” Elle says. “But now heroin doesn’t even exist. It’s just fentanyl. It’s everywhere.”

This year alone, there have already been 52 opioid overdoses in Bethlehem, down on last year but still significantly higher than the national average. Indeed, in the state as a whole, one Pennsylvanian dies of an overdose every two hours. Dotted around Bethlehem are purple boxes containing Naxolene, which is used to reverse opioid overdoses. There is one in the visitor centre at the steelworks, next to a vending machine selling snacks.

Those who overdose in Bethlehem skew young. They are mostly the children of the steelworker generation, and sometimes the grandchildren. In San Francisco, Didion met a five-year-old girl whose mother feeds her acid. In Bethlehem, the situation is as desperate. Earlier this year, a mother pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter after her two-year-old son died of a fentanyl overdose in her home. She had fallen asleep with the child’s father, who awoke to find their son unresponsive, his lips turned blue.

When I visit her house, nobody answers the door. Further up the street, her family’s business is still in operation. It claims to be Bethlehem’s “most trusted” seller of windows.

***

Before Holmes was murdered, there were at least four gangs operating in and around Bethlehem. Most had alliances with other street organisations — the Latin Kings in Chicago, for instance, or the African-American Bloods in Los Angeles and their rivals the Crips.

But Money Rules Everything was different: it was a strictly “neighbourhood gang” — it was born in Bethlehem.

When it was founded in 2013, MRE’s eight or so members took over the city’s Pembroke housing development. Less than a 10-minute drive from Bethlehem’s World Heritage sites, Pembroke is home to 196 low-income housing units that the council now wants to demolish. Squatting on the city’s borderlands, the estate is flanked by a petrol station and a dusty park overlooked by a sweet factory.

Maggie is sitting in the project’s playpark. She lived on the estate with her boyfriend Lewis until two years ago, when their house was destroyed in a fire. Maggie, 33, now stays with a friend nearby; Lewis, 50, surfs Pembroke’s sofas — or, when there isn’t one free, sleeps in a tent in a nearby wood. “There’s no real financial support,” he tells me. “Everyone here is in some sort of trouble,” Maggie adds.

Neither Lewis nor Maggie are registered to vote. “What’s the point?” Lewis asks. Maggie claims a man came by a few weeks ago asking if she wanted to put her name down. “Afterwards, he offered to sell me weed,” she adds.

When he was growing up, Tyrell used to spend a lot of time in Pembroke, and I ask if they remember him. “We all remember that kid’s death,” she says. “The one who was burnt.” And his killers? Didn’t they grow up around here too?

“Oh yeah,” Maggie adds. “One of their moms still lives here.” She points. “That house there. The one with the light on.”

When Tyrell Holmes named his would-be killers, he didn’t know one of his oldest friends would be among them. He had grown up with Miles Harper; their families had even attended the same church when they were children. But for Harper, fraternising with a rival gang was worse than sin.

To date, Harper is the only killer to have pleaded guilty to Holmes’s death; when he was sentenced in 2019, he was already in prison for shooting two men outside a shopping mall. Holmes’s other three killers are due in court next spring; nobody in Bethlehem doubts their guilt. Even the judge admitted he’d never presided over such a pitiless crime.

“I’m Miles’s mother,” says the woman at the door when I explain why I’m standing on her porch. Tonie Harper is reluctant to talk about her son, saying only that little has changed on the Pembroke estate since he was arrested. Only slightly more forthcoming is Miles’s older brother, Xavier, a puckish figure in his late twenties.

“I was just praying when you arrived,” he explains. “It’s clearly a sign.” When I ask if he agrees with his mother that life hasn’t improved over the past six years, he says that it’s what God would’ve wanted. When I ask about his brother and Holmes, he repeats himself. Every question is met with the same response: an appeal to God. The conversation briefly turns to politics. He won’t be voting in the election.

A friend of Holmes later puts me in touch with his older brother. Now 27, he lives in Florida, where he works in construction after serving a four-year term in the army.

“Tyrell was a good kid,” he says. It’s Bethlehem that’s bad. “It’s like a horror movie — it’s like a dark hole there.” He’s not keeping up with the police investigation. He has no explanation for the bleak impulses behind Holmes’s murder. Nobody does.

No one knows how an 18-year-old was led into the dark hole which led to him being strangled, stabbed and then burnt alive. Few seem to care. In 1967, Didion concluded that, “once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomisation could be reversed”. Half a century later, the pretence endures. Despite Bethlehem being a “political battleground”, the city’s hopeless fringes are still ignored: regardless of who wins, things will continue to fall apart.

“There’s nothing special about Bethlehem,” Holmes’s brother adds. “It’s the same as everywhere else.”

I ask him about the election, and Bethlehem’s outsized role in picking its winner.

“I don’t care,” he says. “You might as well flip a coin.”

***

This article was first published on 4 November, 2024.

The autopsy determined that he had been stabbed several times, then covered in gasoline and burnt alive. Holmes was 18. The day before, in a message posted on Snapchat, he had warned his friends and family that his life was in danger.

“Alkhion Dunkins, Yzire Jenkins-Row and Zahmire Welcome,” he wrote. “If something happens to me, know those three.”

***

Half a century earlier, the writer Joan Didion had travelled to San Francisco to report on the “social haemorrhaging” of Sixties America. She wanted to bear witness to a nation’s decay and reveal its impact on a disoriented youth. These children, she wrote, “drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins”; these children “were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together”.

On San Francisco’s streets she found a generation numbed by narcotics and ideological incoherence: a youth no longer in revolt — but in stupor. “It was not a country in open revolution,” she wrote in her essay, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. “It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America.”

That was 1967. But what of today? If San Francisco once embodied a country collapsing under the weight of its contradictions, where is our Bethlehem?

As the curtain falls on an election campaign defined by its own ideological incoherence, there is no longer one single locus for the nation’s disaffected. For at least a decade, there have been many Bethlehems here: Philadelphia, Oakland, Seattle, San Francisco. And more recently, this “haemorrhaging” has spread to unexpected corners of the country.

Today, one place more than any other embodies this anomie. A rust-belt city that serves as a mirror to the nation. A city in America’s most important battleground state; in a county that has predicted the winner of every US election since 1912 bar three. A city that happens to be called Bethlehem.

***

Here, on the surface at least, the centre appears to be holding. Bethlehem is safely ensconced in Pennsylvania’s portion of the Greater Appalachian Valley, and bisected by the gentle Lehigh River. It oozes college-cute charm. Tim Walz held a rally at one of the city’s high schools back in September and was mocked for admitting “we can’t afford four more years of this”. But in Bethlehem, the gaffe went mostly unnoticed.

Earlier this year, it was awarded Unesco World Heritage Status, and it feels like the city is still celebrating. On Bethlehem’s Main Street, crimson leaves fall to the pavement, where they turn to gold. There is a choir of beautiful churches, an ice cream parlour, two taprooms — one selling beer; the other organic olive oil — and a shop selling Palestinian flags.

At one end, almost out of sight, Donald Trump’s campaign team have set up an office. “The building is owned by a Democrat,” the flag-seller tells me, before shrugging. “I guess money talks.” On the city’s fringes, Trump and Harris yard signs face off against each other, while Democrat billboards flank its entry roads.

True to its name, Bethlehem has always been drawn to the Holy Land. Since 1741, when devout Moravian travellers founded the settlement on 24 December, Christmas has been central to the city’s identity. Within six years, it boasted America’s first decorated Christmas tree. These days, it’s known as the “Christmas City” and, from November onwards, tourists come to worship in the city’s festive gift shops. The most devout get married in the opulent Hotel Bethlehem, where December weddings start at $18,000. “It was perfect,” purrs one Bethlehem bride.

But across the river, the rusted hulk of the city’s former steelworks speaks to a different chapter in the city’s history. If Bethlehem gave America its Christmas spirit, it also built its backbone. The Chrysler Building, Alcatraz Island, the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge — all were forged with steel produced in its 16-story blast furnaces. By 1940, roughly 40% of New York City’s skyline was constructed with materials from Bethlehem Steel. Three years later, during the Second World War, its workers constructed the equivalent of one battleship per day. As Walz said during his visit, it was Bethlehem Steel that “freed the world from Nazi oppression”.

Then came the post-war reconstruction, when Japan and Germany rebuilt their own plants, and more efficient steelworks were devised in America. When the global recession hit in the Eighties, Bethlehem Steel’s fate was sealed. It clung on until 1995, when the city’s steelmaking tradition died in one final nostalgic cascade of fire and ore. A worker whistled “Amazing Grace” over a speaker system on the furnace floor, and the steelworks fell silent.

Today, the land is owned by that other great American business: a casino company. Many of the old factory buildings remain empty and fenced off; a handful are occupied by start-ups and event companies. Tucked away at one end is the casino, whose shopping centre, spa and dizzying array of 4,000 betting terminals attract gambler-tourists ferried in and out on coaches from New York’s Chinatown. Britney Spears held a show there in 2018; next month, Engelbert Humperdinck is flying in.

Under the shadow of the five remaining defunct furnaces, I find Tom Sedor, a third-generation steelworker. His family history charts the industry’s decline. Sedor’s grandfather was a blacklisted union man during the First World War. His father was also a union man, until he was killed when a furnace blew up in 1948. Sedor himself worked on the plant’s electrics, right up until Bethlehem Steel closed.

“The hardest part was the Rule of 85,” he explains, where a worker could only retire with a full pension if their age and period of service added up to 85 or more. “Many men had to go to other plants, mostly in Baltimore, and that led to a lot of divorces.”

Sedor, 83, will be voting Democrat, but only because, as a lifelong union man, he could never vote for Trump. “At least Harris has visited Pennsylvania, unlike Hillary Clinton,” he says. But will life get better? “I don’t think so. Take the casino. Yes, it brings jobs, but they’re not well-paid.” He points out that the minimum wage in Pennsylvania is the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour; more than half of the rate in neighbouring New Jersey.

“How is anyone supposed to pay their rent with that?”

***

At the time of his death in April 2018, Tyrell Holmes rented a flat with two of his killers, Alkhion Dunkins and Yzire Jenkins-Row. “Back then, the landlord didn’t care how you made your money,” says one former resident.

On the night of the murder, just after midnight, neighbours heard a fight break out in their third-floor apartment. There was a shriek followed by a crash — and then silence. Holmes had been strangled unconscious. He was then dragged down the stairwell and thrown into an idling car. It quietly drove off.

Today, the block of flats on East Raspberry Street, a short walk from Bethlehem’s centre, is owned by a different letting company, but a handful of its residents remain the same. Elle, 31, has lived in the flat next to Holmes for six years. “I used to let them into the building when they forgot their keys,” she tells me. They played loud music, she says, but “didn’t cause any problems”. On the night itself, Elle and her husband came home just before 3.00am, after closing up a nearby bar. “They were next door, quickly packing up their shit — and then they just left.”

The next day, a forensic team arrived. She never saw the young men again.

“The building is still a piece of shit,” Elle adds. “They don’t fix anything.” But at least the rent is relatively cheap: it costs $1,100 a month for a two-bedroom flat, half the price of the going rate. “I’ve been lucky they haven’t raised it,” the tattoo artist admits.

Just around the corner, a new block of flats is being built, where a new studio costs around $2,000. “At least five of these developments have gone up in recent years,” Elle says, “and nobody local can afford them.”

But these flats aren’t built for those born in Bethlehem. Since the pandemic, wealthier residents of New York and Philadelphia have been moving in, just a 90-minute commute. Coupled with Bethlehem’s growing student population — it boasts two private universities — and rental and house prices rose by 40% between 2019 and 2023.

Priced out of their homes by the newcomers, 111 former residents now live on the streets, many of whom are fed by New Bethany, a food bank not far from the steelworks. “This is the worst we’ve ever seen it,” says its director Marc Rittle. He estimates there’s been a 91% increase in homelessness since the pandemic, when the government increased food stamps and cash assistance to those on lower incomes. But when the pandemic was officially declared over in May last year, that support was withdrawn.

The fall-out was unforgiving. Walk east along the south bank of the Lehigh River, past the “No Trespassing” sign and over the rusted railroad track. There, under a motorway bridge, lurks evidence of the city’s homelessness crisis: a camp that, in the dusk sunlight, might have been built by Huck Finn. The despair is ordered. Thick duvets lie across a corrugated metal platform; knee-high piles of books slouch against the back wall; at the far end a dozen DVDs are waiting to be watched on a television that doesn’t exist.

Carlos, 57, has been here a year, after the company that employed him as a forklift driver shut down. “The weekends are particularly hard,” he explains, as the nearby food bank is closed. Despite coming to America from Puerto Rico almost 40 years ago — a third of Bethlehem is Hispanic — he has no identity papers, which means he can’t apply for housing or financial support.

“I’ve just got to be hopeful,” he says calmly, when I ask about the election. “That’s all I got.” And he shrugs.

Across the river, some 50 other people have set up a larger encampment, but Carlos prefers the quiet. Sometimes he goes over to fish with them. There are 30-odd tents. Most of their occupants are waiting for manual work to come around, but few are as hopeful as Carlos. Some have lived there for more than five years, and plan to stay for another five. “This is our home now,” says one. Further up the river, another says he’s too busy to talk; he returns to his plank of wood and starts to aimlessly drill holes.

George, by contrast, doesn’t need a tent. Instead, despite working at New Bethany and claiming social security, he spends each night sleeping in his car. Last year, his rent increased from $875 to $1,000 — and he couldn’t afford the difference. “I park down by the hospital,” the former construction worker, 69, explains. “It’s one of the safest places you can stay because of the security guard.” To avoid suspicion before nightfall, he moves from carpark to carpark, along with a small cortège of other car-sleepers.

Unprompted, George describes how, after his daughter died in June, he started drinking to forget the pain and the elements. “But I drank so much I got hospitalised and have been sober since,” he adds. And now he feels the cold.

When I ask how his daughter died, he replies as if I should already know the answer: “Fentanyl.”

***

Over the past five years, there have been more than 600 opioid overdoses in Bethlehem. As one resident, whose flat overlooks the dumpster where Tyrell Holmes was burnt alive, told me: “There are drug deals here every night.”

Five days before Holmes’s death, five members of Bethlehem’s “Money Rules Everything” (MRE) gang robbed a drug dealer. Such “drug rips” — where dealers or suppliers are targeted — had become increasingly common in Bethlehem.

The robbery didn’t go to plan. As the young men escaped with a bag of marijuana, one dropped his phone. When the dealer turned it on, there were two faces on its background: Alkhion Dunkins and the phone’s owner, Tyrell Holmes.

The police are still piecing together what happened in the short period between that night and Holmes’s murder. Witnesses have been reluctant to provide testimony or evidence; in 2021; one of the killers, Jenkins-Rowe, was accused of witness intimidation from his prison cell. (In Pennsylvania, first-degree murder still carries the death sentence.)

But some facts are known. After the robbery, Alkhion Dunkins — Holmes’s flatmate and fellow MRE member — started to receive threats from the dealer the gang had targeted. Holmes, meanwhile, had become the subject of an internal investigation. He stood accused of stealing from MRE and associating with members of a rival gang.

“Tyrell lived two lives,” a friend tells me. “But he didn’t deserve to die like that.” She tries to explain why many of their male friends were drawn into crime: “They feel like drug dealing is the only way they can live. There isn’t much out there for them, and they’re trying to control the chaos.” When I ask if she thinks the election will alter anything, she responds: “Nothing is going to change. If anything, everything is going to get worse. It always does.”

Elle, Holmes’s next-door neighbour, agrees. “What pisses me off is that both parties only care about minute things when there’s so much other shit going on.” I ask what she means. “Abortion and stuff is obviously important. But what about the economy? What about the drugs?”

Fentanyl has continued to flow through Bethlehem’s backstreets since the last election. “When I was 16, three of my best friends got addicted to heroin,” Elle says. “But now heroin doesn’t even exist. It’s just fentanyl. It’s everywhere.”

This year alone, there have already been 52 opioid overdoses in Bethlehem, down on last year but still significantly higher than the national average. Indeed, in the state as a whole, one Pennsylvanian dies of an overdose every two hours. Dotted around Bethlehem are purple boxes containing Naxolene, which is used to reverse opioid overdoses. There is one in the visitor centre at the steelworks, next to a vending machine selling snacks.

Those who overdose in Bethlehem skew young. They are mostly the children of the steelworker generation, and sometimes the grandchildren. In San Francisco, Didion met a five-year-old girl whose mother feeds her acid. In Bethlehem, the situation is as desperate. Earlier this year, a mother pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter after her two-year-old son died of a fentanyl overdose in her home. She had fallen asleep with the child’s father, who awoke to find their son unresponsive, his lips turned blue.

When I visit her house, nobody answers the door. Further up the street, her family’s business is still in operation. It claims to be Bethlehem’s “most trusted” seller of windows.

***

Before Holmes was murdered, there were at least four gangs operating in and around Bethlehem. Most had alliances with other street organisations — the Latin Kings in Chicago, for instance, or the African-American Bloods in Los Angeles and their rivals the Crips.

But Money Rules Everything was different: it was a strictly “neighbourhood gang” — it was born in Bethlehem.

When it was founded in 2013, MRE’s eight or so members took over the city’s Pembroke housing development. Less than a 10-minute drive from Bethlehem’s World Heritage sites, Pembroke is home to 196 low-income housing units that the council now wants to demolish. Squatting on the city’s borderlands, the estate is flanked by a petrol station and a dusty park overlooked by a sweet factory.

Maggie is sitting in the project’s playpark. She lived on the estate with her boyfriend Lewis until two years ago, when their house was destroyed in a fire. Maggie, 33, now stays with a friend nearby; Lewis, 50, surfs Pembroke’s sofas — or, when there isn’t one free, sleeps in a tent in a nearby wood. “There’s no real financial support,” he tells me. “Everyone here is in some sort of trouble,” Maggie adds.

Neither Lewis nor Maggie are registered to vote. “What’s the point?” Lewis asks. Maggie claims a man came by a few weeks ago asking if she wanted to put her name down. “Afterwards, he offered to sell me weed,” she adds.

When he was growing up, Tyrell used to spend a lot of time in Pembroke, and I ask if they remember him. “We all remember that kid’s death,” she says. “The one who was burnt.” And his killers? Didn’t they grow up around here too?

“Oh yeah,” Maggie adds. “One of their moms still lives here.” She points. “That house there. The one with the light on.”

When Tyrell Holmes named his would-be killers, he didn’t know one of his oldest friends would be among them. He had grown up with Miles Harper; their families had even attended the same church when they were children. But for Harper, fraternising with a rival gang was worse than sin.

To date, Harper is the only killer to have pleaded guilty to Holmes’s death; when he was sentenced in 2019, he was already in prison for shooting two men outside a shopping mall. Holmes’s other three killers are due in court next spring; nobody in Bethlehem doubts their guilt. Even the judge admitted he’d never presided over such a pitiless crime.

“I’m Miles’s mother,” says the woman at the door when I explain why I’m standing on her porch. Tonie Harper is reluctant to talk about her son, saying only that little has changed on the Pembroke estate since he was arrested. Only slightly more forthcoming is Miles’s older brother, Xavier, a puckish figure in his late twenties.

“I was just praying when you arrived,” he explains. “It’s clearly a sign.” When I ask if he agrees with his mother that life hasn’t improved over the past six years, he says that it’s what God would’ve wanted. When I ask about his brother and Holmes, he repeats himself. Every question is met with the same response: an appeal to God. The conversation briefly turns to politics. He won’t be voting in the election.

A friend of Holmes later puts me in touch with his older brother. Now 27, he lives in Florida, where he works in construction after serving a four-year term in the army.

“Tyrell was a good kid,” he says. It’s Bethlehem that’s bad. “It’s like a horror movie — it’s like a dark hole there.” He’s not keeping up with the police investigation. He has no explanation for the bleak impulses behind Holmes’s murder. Nobody does.

No one knows how an 18-year-old was led into the dark hole which led to him being strangled, stabbed and then burnt alive. Few seem to care. In 1967, Didion concluded that, “once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomisation could be reversed”. Half a century later, the pretence endures. Despite Bethlehem being a “political battleground”, the city’s hopeless fringes are still ignored: regardless of who wins, things will continue to fall apart.

“There’s nothing special about Bethlehem,” Holmes’s brother adds. “It’s the same as everywhere else.”

I ask him about the election, and Bethlehem’s outsized role in picking its winner.

“I don’t care,” he says. “You might as well flip a coin.”

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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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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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.

And you must make another decision. Do you drive to the polling station or do you leave it and go straight home? You backed Trump last time, you think he’s a bit barmy – you and your friends call him ‘a jerk’ – but you don’t like the Democratic candidate either. So do you head home or do you take the trouble to vote in a nation where 45% of eligible people don’t bother?

What helps with the decision?

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Impeachment helps. It tells you that the folks in Washington who always think they know best are at it again. They don’t talk much about the economy (which has been booming for you: you’re tired because there’s plenty of work) but they go on and on incessantly about phone calls to Ukraine and how some foreigners don’t like the president. They clutch at pearls because he wants the next G7 conference to be held at his resort: hey, why not? You’d love it to be held at your house if it meant new garden lights on the federal dollar. Give the guy a break, you think.

So you turn off on your way home and take the trouble to park and to queue and to pull the lever for Trump. Without impeachment you would not have bothered. Impeachment reminded you, to steal the old Cold War adage, that Trump is a son of a bitch but he’s your son of a bitch. And he wins re-election because you and thousands like you did what I have just described.

This is the Democratic party nightmare. It is the reason why, until now, moderate Democrats in the House of Representatives have seen impeachment as a pretty clear trap –  a set of hinged steel clamps complete with red flashing lights and a sign saying THIS IS A TRAP –  that they would rather avoid.

But the trap has now ensnared them and in fairness what other course of action could they have taken? It’s almost as if Donald Trump did it deliberately. As if Steve Bannon, the dark artist of his first campaign, were back in the room, wondering how to mess with the heads of the president’s opponents.

That’s not the case of course: Bannon is well off the reservation and Trump lacks the discipline to think this through. But he has tipped the scales now: it looks as if his dealings with Ukraine, and the withholding of Congressional funds he had no business withholding, might amount to something so serious that a failure to take action would look like cowardice and weakness on the part of his enemies.

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Where the Russia collusion case was always opaque and multi-faceted and ultimately too tricky for prime time, the Ukraine shenanigans have the feel of something crunchier. The Democrats, if the facts are revealed to be roughly as reported so far, would have to seize the moment.

With what hope of success? On the face of it: none. The Republicans have a 53-to-47 seat advantage in the Senate. Two thirds of Senators are required to confirm impeachment. Even if one or two (Senator Mitt Romney is an obvious candidate) decided to stick it to the Donald, it would not be enough. Mr Trump will not be removed from office as a result of this action.

Not removed from office, and with his base fired up. Yes: folks, it’s Bill Clinton all over again. Impeached in the House of Representatives, with the case thrown out by the Senate. And in the mid-term elections held during the Clinton circus in 1998: his party gained support. In fact the biggest loser was Newt Gingrich, the Republican Speaker of the House who fought hardest for the president to lose his job. Mr Gingrich, defeated in that aim, lost his.

An impeachment process might also involve collateral damage – by severely harming the chances of Joe Biden getting the Democratic presidential nomination, since part of the case would focus on his son’s work in Ukraine (something Trump wanted to have the new Ukrainian government investigate) and the murkiness of top folks’ kids lobbying around the world. Some Democrats would welcome this of course but it would not necessarily be the conversation the party would want to be having at the start of an election campaign with people tuning in and hoping for, well, something fresh.

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There is another outcome, though, and it’s more subtle than America’s bitter political arguments generally allow. It is possible that the Democrats could use the televised hearings that impeachment will bring about to persuade the nation that this is not a witch-hunt; that their actions are not governed by politics but by a gallant defence of The American Way. They wanted the Trump presidency to be successful, they would have to say. They understand why people voted for him and respect their decisions. But this corruption is not right. This is not American. And in your heart of hearts you people who voted for him last time know what is right. We trust you and we want to talk seriously to you. Impeachment, then, not as attack but as healing device. The denouement would be a loss of office in the time-worn way, at the polls in 2020.

It is quite a tall order isn’t it? It would take a degree of discipline that even the Democrats’ best friends might suggest is beyond the party. And yet it could work. Because, of course, not many people need to be persuaded for the election to be lost to Mr Trump. If that electrician in Pennsylvania, and his friends, decide that they are not being belittled and patronised by the Democrats any more and stay on the road and go home without bothering to vote on that November night next year, the president would lose. That state would revert to the Democratic party, where it has firmly been in recent years, and the narrow path for a Trump victory would become impassable.

An impeachment, well handled, could work for the Democrats. They need a firm message summing up why Trump has overstepped the mark. Congressional representatives who behave with restraint and decorum, even when they lose the impeachment case. Then a personable and convincing presidential candidate with captivating ideas about the future, selected at the end of an uplifting and positive set of primaries.

What could possibly go wrong?