SALENA ZITO: The Restorative Power of the American People.
Turn on social media, cable news, or the national news networks, and you would be inclined to believe that we loathe those who are different than us. You would also be inclined to believe that everyone who lives outside the urban centers is backward, stupid, and racist.
Turn off social media, get off the interstates, and spend time in the overlooked neighborhoods, projects, and small towns. You will find, for the most part, the exact opposite of those sentiments. You will discover that many who live in the cities, no matter what the color of their skin is, want to find a way out, not because they don’t love their cities but because those who govern them have become so drunk with power, they find living there untenable.
They no longer trust them to make the right choices because every choice is based on their own political power.
Many of the people I listened to were eating at a diner, a place that some journalists look down on with disdain. Going to a diner when traveling, especially as a reporter, is essential. Our job as journalists is to go where people frequent, not to go where you wish they frequented. . . .
My best estimation of where Americans are culturally and politically is that we are much closer to an inside/outside moment in our history and not left/right. We have been so disrupted by our mistrust in school boards, political parties, unions, academia, institutions, and entertainment that it has strained our ties to our traditional cultural curators.
Whether it is in small towns such as Jordan, Kansas, or more cosmopolitan towns such as Bozeman, Montana, or Aspen, Colorado, multiple interviews taught me something new this year; the long-standing relationship between people and government is unsteady, even among the relatively well-off families.
Everywhere you look, our disconnect between the outside and our centers of power is both wide and deep — it is clear this will affect the party in power. What is unclear is if the party out of power can pull itself together and govern as the outsiders people are craving.
Yep. To paraphrase a famous man, never underestimate the GOP’s ability to f*ck things up.