Burn Down the Think Tanks

I spent the past several weeks travelling, and during those travels I had conversations, a continuation of what I've been doing for the past dozen years. These conversations were not interviews, just chats over coffees and beers in two states. Nobody expected to be quoted or identified. So I'll just report the gist.

The disconnect between people out there in towns and cities and what passes for Democratic political leadership is profound. I mean, it is universal. The obviousness of this became evident while I was on the road and candidates preferred by New York mayor Zohran Mamdani won New York primary elections by defeating candidates preferred by Washington D.C.-based professional Democrats (my preferred term for the melange of pundits, think tankers, consultants, and elected office holders). "But that's just New York!" the professional Democrats said. Then a Democratic Socialist won a primary in Colorado.

Political reporters began talking about internecine war among Democrats. "Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank, said the outcomes in New York were 'dangerous' for Democrats nationally," reported The New York Times.

Never mind, for a moment, that if Bennett is afraid Republicans will say nasty things about Democratic candidates in, say, Ohio, or Pennsylvania, or Arizona, by handcuffing a Tucson congressional candidate to Mamdani, that ship sailed long ago. To me the bigger issue is that the pros just – still! – don't get it.

I tried to explain to Third Way almost a decade ago when I was asked to come to Washington to speak to them after the publication of my book, Glass House. I have written about the experience of that meeting in my new book, The Mayor: One Poor City's Fight to Bring Back Government and Save the Nation's Soul, out December 1.

Here's an edited excerpt:

After Trump won in 2016, I was asked to come to Washington, DC, to talk to a think tank called Third Way because I’d written a book about my hometown and so I was supposed to have insight. Hillary Clinton campaign people were there looking shell-shocked, still, along with people from other Democrat-leaning tanks. I told them about Lancaster, Ohio, on the edge of Appalachia, and the people there, and some of the problems they faced, and how they’d gotten rooked in the late twentieth century and were still getting rooked, only worse, in the early twenty-first. They’d been sold out by modern capitalism and its political enablers.

It seemed to me that most of the people in that Third Way conference room had been polished to brilliance by the great American meritocratic system. They had an air about them like they’d been told they were smart all their lives, like they’d made every right move, checked every box. (I hadn’t done anything right.) They appeared to have never spent a hot night laying on the hood of a beater ’74 Chevy Nova drinking Little Kings Cream Ale and staring at the stars as “Foreplay” from that goddamn Boston tape played for the two hundredth time. I got the feeling none of them had lain there wondering how they could get out of the town that they hated and loved in equal measure. None of them seemed to have worked as janitors, or in an all-night gas station, or as a lifeguard at a cheap apartment complex swimming pool where they watched a sad overweight woman in a too-small bikini dance-teeter to “Moody Blue” and “Viva Las Vegas” after drinking cans of Miller all day, a Marlboro clinging to her lower lip as she wept over the news that Elvis had died.

A man named Jim Kessler, a Harvard grad and a founder of Third Way, argued with me. That couldn’t be right, he said of my conclusions about the people I knew back in Ohio, perhaps forgetting that I’d not only written a book about the place but grown up there. Then he talked about data, and the data said there were a lot of small business start-ups in counties like Fairfield, where Lancaster sat, and that didn’t jibe with economic insecurity and voting for Trump.

Kessler had worked for a United States senator and spent most of his adult life in Washington. I wasn’t used to contradicting such people, so, though I was tempted, I did not point out that he, and the others in the room, had just lost a presidential election to a lying sociopathic criminal, so what the hell did they know? I didn’t ask how many of those small businesses were gas station pizza joints, or “antique” shops selling cast-off junk that somebody opened because they’d lost a job and selling off other people’s garage sale stuff was about all you could do. The rent on a storefront was cheap because the shoe store and the jewelry store had gone out of business a generation ago, so why not open an antique shop? I didn’t ask how long any of these new small businesses managed to stay open, or whether any of the new proprietors had health insurance. Nor did I remind them that not everything was about money. The smart people were focused on money and business because this was the America where money and business, ROI, and profit had become the measure of all things. Their own careers depended upon the profit system and rich people giving them money. They didn’t talk at all about community, meaning, faith, honor.

I wanted to describe for them the way Chris, a forty-year glass worker and union leader, walked with ceremony into the little bedroom off his little living room. I was visiting Chris to present him with a copy of the book I had written in which he appeared. My eyes followed Chris into that room. There, on the walls, he’d built shelves, and on the shelves rested an example of every piece of ware he’d ever made in the glass factory, enshrined like a high school kid’s sports trophies. He reached up to one shelf and pulled down a milk glass coffee cup of the sort that was once common in diners across the country. It had green striping near the rim. “Here,” he said, “I want you to have this.” He handed it to me as if he were handing me a Fabergé egg. Chris didn’t work for money. Of course, he needed to be paid, and he fought for money in his role as a union leader. But his forty years were not only about money. He was a glassman with a glassman’s pride in supplying a necessary product to millions of people. That, and his family, were what cloaked his life with meaning. It was a good and honorable life.

When a private equity firm that featured in my book about Lancaster threatened to sue me if I didn’t stop the publication, they defended themselves as the good guys. They tried to prove their righteousness by saying that they’d donated to Hillary Clinton. The people I met in that room in Washington were part of a system in which such an empty argument mattered.

Chris didn’t care which politician the private equity guys supported with cash, he cared that they had bankrupted his company. The think-tankers, on the other hand, had helped create that system. That system was the ladder they climbed into DC offices, the pages of smarty-pants publications, the panel TV shows. They became important and respected by virtue of those rules and the system the rules created, and so they were attached to them. They didn’t seem to realize that they, and the system, were already being swept away. A revolution had arrived. Nobody knew what the country would look like when it was over, but the people in Washington didn’t seem to understand there was a revolution at all. They seemed to want to restore the system as it existed before Trump, not understanding that Trump was the apotheosis of that system.

Political parties are dead. Many people just don't believe in them anymore. The GOP is a family-run mafia outfit and the professional Democrats are clueless. James Carville has been irrelevant for 30 years, but he's still out there passing out advice as if the '90s never ended. Politics for the people I've spent years talking to aren't about party, but about individual candidates. People did not vote for Mamdani or his preferred slate because they want to be socialists, necessarily, they voted for them because they thought Mamdani was an authentic believer in something.

One smart volunteer for a candidate told me about how conservative the professional campaign staffers around the candidate were. This person meant conservative in the sense of cautious. They were afraid. A college professor told me that the leadership of the Democratic party just did not get how angry people are. Others told me they'd vote for Democrats, but not because they had any faith in the party. They'd vote for Democrats because they hated Trump.

People are not going back to the 90s, or the early 2000s. They see Trump and the thieving oligarchy around Trump, including the tech barons, the finance industry cats, the morally bankrupt CEOs, and they're craving somebody stand up and talk about ethics, values, and justice. They want meaning. They want America to stand for something besides profit.

The people I talked to are craving a reinvention of America that fulfills our founding principles. They don't want tweaky reform from technocratic consultants, they want a wholesale down-to-the-studs renovation. Those who don't understand that, or oppose it, had better get out of the way.