Some days, I wonder how I ended up in this fun-house mirror of a timeline. I came to understand about midway through the 2016 general-election campaign that almost everything I knew about American politics was wrong. When the results from 2024 began to roll in, I decided that whatever I still thought I knew about American politics was also wrong.
Which prompted me to recall one of the worst mistakes I ever made in this plague-ridden craft of mine. It was 1980, and I was covering the presidential campaign between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter for The Boston Phoenix. (While I am not at the moment dead, Reagan, Carter, and the Phoenix all are.) As part of our coverage of the homestretch, the newspaper rented me a car and sent me on the road to take the temperature of what was still charmingly called the New Deal coalition. I was to drive to various stops throughout the newly deindustrialized Midwest and see how the children of the people who’d benefited from the New Deal itself were doing.
My first stop was in Youngstown, and the first—and last—answer was “not well at all.” I stopped by a steelworkers union hall to talk to the president of a local and to some of the members. On the way, I passed closed steel mills, vast and faceless and empty beyond empty. Bits of rusted metal flaked off the plant buildings and drifted on the breeze like dirty snow in October.
The crowd in the union hall was sparse and grim. The first thing I noticed was that every bit of furniture was marked with numbers written in chalk. I asked the local president whether they were moving.
That Saturday, they were going to have a giant garage sale, and those numbers were the prices on the various items. They were selling off the union hall piecemeal. This should have told me something.
In fact, it did, but I forgot about it. The situation didn’t get better on the rest of the trip. I drove from Youngstown to Toledo, up to Flint, and finally to Grand Rapids, where I saw President Carter visit a local library.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
