Once upon a time, people whose politics we now think of as liberal dominated the land between the coasts.
They were economic populists, who made common cause with urban liberals to demand respect for miners, farmers, and factory workers. People like Fred Harris (right), Frank Church, George McGovern, and Birch Bayh won re-election because they delivered for people who needed help and represented a majority in their states.
You can say that social issues destroyed this coalition. But it’s more about economics and demographics. The constituency died out. As Jason Isbell sang in Last of My Kind, “the family farm’s a parking lot for Walton’s five-and-dime.”
Industrial automation turned farms into factories, farmers into factory workers, and the owners are now conglomerates thousands of miles away. The people running our speed trap towns are no longer bankers and lawyers. They’re managerial minions and grifter-preachers in sheet metal churches. The minions control the medical clinics, and the grifters run the schools. They’re gatekeepers to failure.
The working class is now the Gigging Class. Millions of people aged 20 to 60 live desperate lives pretending they’re entrepreneurs. Trump is letting them know the game was rigged from the start. It wasn’t hard work and luck that propelled the billionaire class. It was old school ties and inherited wealth.
But discontent is what political movements are made of. Trouble is, no one in today’s political establishment is positioned to take advantage of it.
The Waiting Game
The attention of media elites instead is focused on blue state populists like Zohran Mamdani, people who already have constituencies. Win or lose, Zohran’s not the future because New York is wealthy, and its middle class is organized. Win or lose, New York will be fine.
The future lies in Trumpistan. It lies in the suburbs of Boise, it lies outside Des Moines, it lies in Lubbock, and in a host of small towns you have never heard of. The leaders are starting to go to city council and school board meetings. The troops are inside your local Walmart and at the back of a grifter’s congregation right now.
The future lies in people who have learned hard lessons, who have become hardened by those lessons, who are mad as hell, who aren’t going to take it anymore, but who remain young enough to have a voice.
Both major parties today are divorced from these people. The Republicans are too rich, and the Democrats too educated, to even have a clue. Besides, both are too damn old.
City and school board elections, the kind we’re holding this year, are the places to find these people. These are the incubators of democracy.
Don’t talk. Listen. People will emerge, and while you won’t like all of them, they’ll be worth following. That is how democracy works.
