Plain English with Derek Thompson - This Small Pennsylvania Town Explains the 2024 Election

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

Today, a close look at the history of a Pennsylvania town and how that history contains within it the story of the 2024 election. In September, Donald Trump claimed that the city of Charleroi, Pennsylvania, was being overrun by immigrants who brought violence, gangs, and economic destruction. Last month, The Atlantic's George Packer went to Charleroi to report on what's actually going on there, and how the issues most important to Charleroi—nativism, immigration, change, working-class decline, and corporate greed—are also the deciding issues of the 2024 election. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: George Packer Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did you know that scientific studies have found most people lie once every 10 minutes? In my new podcast, Truthless, I'm talking to people about the lies, they tell, from faking illnesses in high-pressure moments to making up stories on national TV. From Spotify and the Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Phillips. Listen to Truthless on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Today, a close look at the history of one Pennsylvania town and how its story contains within it the story of the 2024 election. During the presidential debate several months ago, Donald Trump famously suggested that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs and otherwise terrorizing the people of Springfield, Ohio. In September, at a campaign event in Pennsylvania, Trump continued to claim that Haitian immigrants,

were destroying the country. This time, he turned his attention to a town called Charleroi. Charleroi has experienced a 2,000% increase in the population of Haitian migrants under Kamala Harris. The schools are scrambling to hire translators for the influx of students, and the town is virtually bankrupt. In other comments, Trump continued to call out Charleroy as a place overrun with gang-fueled violence. Last month, the Atlantic's George Packer went to Charleroi to figure out what was actually happening there and whether Trump's comments had any semblance to reality. The immigrant influx in this part of the country is undeniable.

Thousands of Haitians have moved to the area, and they have transformed the city's racial composition and its economic trajectory. There is an unfortunate tendency in the news media to represent immigration as something simple, a simple benefit, or a simple destructive force. My personal view, which I've never tried to hide on this show, even as I've brought in some guests who disagree, is that immigration is a profound economic blessing, and arguably the secret ingredient of America's economic and cultural dominance.

But immigration policy and immigration itself is complicated, because immigration is change, and change is complicated. Population growth increases GDP, but it can also strain resources. Cultural change can enliven and enrich areas of stagnation, but it can also brush up against what I think are deep-seated preferences for familiarity or tradition. What George Packer took away from his trip to Charleroy was the impression that what he saw up close and writ small were the issues that are defining the 2024 election. And by extension, the politics that we'll have after this election is over, because at least theoretically, this election will at some point be over.

Today's guest is George Packer. We talk about Charleroy, the Pennsylvania town that explains the election, and the issues that will decide it. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. George Packer, welcome back to the show. Nice to be with you, Derek. So America is this big, diverse, chaotic, unwieldy place. There's no one city that contains the full mosaic of the country, but a city like Charleroy, Pennsylvania, a small town facing economic and population decline with a surge of immigrants, which had been singled out by Donald Trump and pulled into the center of the political conversation, is such a fascinating flashpoint for the issues that this election will turn on.

Before we get to what those issues are specifically, tell me a little bit about this town, Charleroy, Pennsylvania. What is this place? Well, the town goes back to the late 19th century. It is named after a town in Belgium where there has been industry, maybe even glassmaking, like Charleroy, Pennsylvania. Belgian immigrants came to Western Pennsylvania. the town began to make iREX, which was, I think, uniquely made in Charleroi and is sort of the

pride of the town because it's such a durable product. But like that whole area, like the entire Rust Belt, factories and population began to decline really in the 60s and it sped up in the 70s and by the 80s, the decline. the decline seemed like it was almost irreversible, but it never stops. That's the thing about declining. It's not as though you reach a point and, okay, we've stopped declining. That can happen with a lot of effort and luck, but more often it just, the population keeps dwindling. And by 2020, the population of Charlevoire was about 4,200. Most of the stores on the two main streets, it's a very small town. It's like a dozen blocks long along the Norfolk Southern Railway and the Monongahela River.

Most of the stores were empty. A lot of houses were empty. And there were still a few factors going. And then two things happened. First, beginning in about 2020, Haitian immigrants began arriving. And not because the government sent them there, but because employers sent them there, job sent them there. jobs sent them there and they worked in jobs that Americans just weren't taking like very low-wage jobs in cold and refrigerated foods preparation plants. And that has continued until now there's 2,000 new, relatively new immigrants from Haiti, mostly in West Africa, which is a 50% increase in the size of Charlotte. That's a dramatic change. last month in at least in september um the owners of pirex which is like a multi-layered ownership of a private equity firm in new york which has a big investment stake in a glassmaking company called

anchor hawking which had bought the pyrex plant in charleroy in a disputed bankruptcy sale that may have violated antitrust law, that company announced that it was closing the factory in Charleroi, which was just symbolically huge because this had been the pride of the town and was moving the operations about three hours west to Lancaster, Ohio, and moving maybe half the jobs in case people were willing to uproot themselves from Charleroi. But basically it would stop making hyricks in Charleroy. And a week later, Donald Trump probably tipped off by a local Republican, added Charleroy to his hit list of towns in America that had been overrun, quote unquote, with immigrants, an invasion of them, and destroyed by them, crime, gangs, bankruptcy. And suddenly,

for a very short time, Charleroy followed Springfield, Ohio, as one of Trump's favorite targets. He then got bored with Charleroy and moved on, but it was enough to have a profound effect on the town. Let's go back to the Haitian immigrants. How is their arrival changed the city? We're talking, as you said, about a town, a small town, with 2,000 maybe even more Haitian immigrants coming in, taking these jobs, often low-paying jobs that maybe Native-born Americans weren't taking themselves. How would you say their presence has changed the city economically, culturally, socially? So it depends on who you ask. The two city leaders, I asked, were the borough manager, Joe Manning, and the city, the borough council president, Kristen Hopkins, Kalsek. And they, they,

both said it had been a good thing for Charleroy to have this influx of new life because Charleroy was dying. It was emptying out. People were leaving. Buildings were vacant. And suddenly you have a bakery opening on McCain Avenue. You have a food market opening on Fallowfield Avenue. Those are the two main streets. You have children going to schools that were getting to the point where they might have to be closed down for lack of enrollment. You had new taxpayers, new renters, and new energy. They had festivals in the streets. They had, you know, joined the Fourth of July parade. I talked to a Haitian immigrant named Jethro Bernabe, who's the community liaison for the borough of Charleroi. And he said when he arrived

in 2020, it was a beautiful place, but like a ghost town. And after a few years, he described how it was sort of coming back to life, like almost like a reanimated body. And how hardworking the Haitians were, which is also something I heard from others, including blue-collar workers, and how happy they were to be there. And he said, I've always loved the phrase e pluribus unum on the American coin, because to me it means people from different backgrounds coming together in a unified country, unified, not fragmented. So from that point of view, it was a good thing. I think there were people in Charleroi. I talked to a few who felt some grievances about the immigrants, that they drove the wrong way on one-way streets, that they had overcrowded the schools,

and the teachers no longer had enough time for the kids of the Native-born Americans, because they had to deal with two different language groups. School buses were crowded. And I even heard a very strange story that the immigrant food market, had had a sign up that said no whites allowed. Now, this boggled my mind. It sounded really implausible, but an immigrant in a new town that's dominated by a white population

would say no whites allowed. The picture they showed me, and these were some workers at the Pyrex factory, was of a sign that said something like Asian, African, Caribbean, and Latin American food. and that was enough to get complaints coming to the attention of Jetero Bernoube, the community liaison, who was hearing that it didn't say American food and that that made people feel they weren't welcome at the store. That's how fragile Charleroy is. That's how thin the line of grievance is.

And that's how fragile, I think, sometimes change can be, right? Even as you were extolling some of the benefits of the Haitian in migration and talking about how there were parades held down the mainstream or held down these avenues of Haitians, I thought on the one hand, there might be people that look at these parades and say, these are the folks that have brought life to our economy and our community. I'm happy they have a day to celebrate their culture. And other people who think, this is my home. and I'm watching the streets be filled with people celebrating a culture that's utterly alien to me and my memories of childhood. I think that the difficult thing about change and decline to sort of connect this back to a previous thing you said is that stasis is a myth. Stasis is impossible. Perfect stasis does not exist economically in the world of economics or the world of physics. What exists is change,

growth or decline. And while decline is painful in some ways, population growth that leans on immigrant in migration can also be difficult. You're right. And just to finish the story, Bernerbe went to the market owner and said, you've got to change your sign. People are complaining. And she said, oh, my God, I didn't think of that. Now, the streets are rather empty, Derek. It's not a happening place.

But the people I saw on the streets were mostly young Haitians, families, single men, and not that many white people, their population is aging. They may not be coming downtown very much. So it was like a very quick transformation of the way the town looked. And yeah, that's going to make people feel as if, as a couple of people said to me, as if we don't matter anymore. And so they begin to see certain privileges being given to. the newcomers that they don't feel they have. Now, those may not exist. One of them was they get to use

their international driver's license for a year, whereas I have to pay for a test and a license to get an American driver's license. So they have this little advantage for a year. They get to use their international license. Again, it seems very small. It's not a lot of money, but it aggravates that feeling you described. If someone's cutting in front of me in line, someone's changing my town without my being consulted, and even if in material terms, it really is to the benefit of Charleroi,

it may seem like a change for the worst to people who've lived there a long time. It's interesting that you mention the archetype of cutting in line because the UCLA sociologist Arlie Russell Hawkschild wrote this wonderful book, Strangers in Her Own Land in 2016, that for many people, including me, was a kind of Rosetta Stone

for understanding the mindset of Trump voters. And the deep story, as she called it, that she told about Trump voters, is that they felt like there was a line in American history, a line of patient people, native-born Americans, waiting to walk to the top of a hill

and that field represented the American dream. And they felt like people were cutting in line. Immigants were cutting in line. Women were cutting in line. line, you know, maybe even, you know, gay or trans, lesbian people were in their own way cutting in line and making it harder for the Native-born Americans with conservative traditional values to say what they felt. And I do think that there is something so intuitively powerful about the image of being cut in line. It hits viscerally. If you're waiting in line

for something as stupid as a latte at Starbucks, and someone comes in. And someone comes in, and just cuts the line. Like a quiet code has been broken. Absolutely. It makes you upset the inside. It's just the essence of unfairness for that to happen. And think about it this way, to extend Hoax Child's metaphor,

what if the line is going up a hill that's eroding so that every time they take a step up, they seem to go back down two steps. Then you're really going to resent it when you feel someone is in line ahead of you, which explains, something that a lot of people have had trouble grasping, which is why it is not Trump has never been a candidate for white people. He in 2016 was mostly a candidate for white people who felt

that they were losing ground. He was not the candidate of white professionals and he's less that now than ever because if you don't feel the ground is eroding under your feet, you're not going to resent everyone coming in with an international driver's license and opening up a shop with live crabs. It's simply not going to bother you in the same way. Let's move on to Trump's comments. On September 12th at a rally in Arizona, Trump, who had previously made comments about immigrants in Rust Belt cities in Ohio, brought Charleroi into the mix, and he made a few claims that were specific enough to be subject to fact-checking. He said the city experienced a 2,000 percent increase in the population of Haitian migrants,

to Kamala Harris. He said it is a flood of illegal aliens. He said it's bringing massive crime to town and every place near it due to the lawless gangs. We have an audio quoting everything that Trump said in our open. But let's just talk about three falsifiable claims here. Number one, 2,000 percent increase in immigrants. Number two, their illegal status. And number three, the fact that these Haitian migrants in Charleroi are contributing to a massive crime wave on account of their gang activity. Based on your reporting, which of these statements is true? None of them. The first is simply a mathematical, nonsensical statement. He's taking 2,000 people and turning them into 2,000 percent. Now, let's say it went from pretty close to 0 to 2000.

Well, that's not an increase of 2,000 percent either. It's a large increase, but it's not 2,000 percent. The town itself grew by more or less 50 percent with the arrival over a period of – and by the way, this actually began under Trump. He doesn't want you to know that. But immigrants from West Africa kind of preceding the Haitians began to arrive during Trump's term. So it's something that's been going on for maybe six or eight years. And it's increased the size of the town by 50%, which I don't know if that matters to Trump or not. Crime and gangs, not that I saw, not that I heard.

I talked to a member of the borough council who is on the regional police board, and she said there has been no spike in crime since the Haitians began living here. And certainly no evidence of gangs. and I didn't see any. So it may be that Trump is taking a little bit of truth from Aurora, Colorado, and poking it into the tender wound of Charleroi, Pennsylvania, and saying, ah, the gangs are everywhere. But these are falsifiable and quite reckless lies, yeah. And just to be clear, on their legal status, what do you know about the legal status? They are not illegal immigrants. They are working in the United States under what's called temporary protective status, which is a category that kind of applies to particular populations that are in emergency situations. Cubans some years ago, Afghans after the fall of Kabul in 2021, and Haitians because of the overwhelming violence that has taken over Haiti in the last few years from gangs.

So they're not on a track to citizenship, but they are not illegal either. One of the more interesting things about your story is that this isn't a case of, as it so often happens, Trump says something and it's exciting or outrageous, and then it just melts into the general flow of reality, like a snowflake on a white rock. In this case, that's not what happened. what Trump said about Charleroi changed the experience of people living in Charleroi, both white and Haitian. Can you tell me what effect Trump's comments had? Well, I think the immediate effect was to scare the hell out of the Haitians and to drive them basically back into their homes. I was told that the streets, which were not particularly lively when I was there, had been much livelier until Trump's remarks.

Jethro Bernabe, the community liaison, told me that he was getting phone calls from immigrants saying, should I let my kids go to school today? Or I'm thinking of leaving Charleroi, I'm afraid. It had a decisive effect on immigrants. What effect did it have on white people? Well, those who saw the immigrants as on the whole a good thing were devastated. Kristen Hopkins-Colsec, the borough council president, cried when she told me that she'd been living there her whole life.

Her son had fallen prey to drugs. Fentanyl's a big problem there. Crime has been a big problem there. When there were no Haitians, but there was crime. And suddenly the town began to come back. and stores began to open again. And then the streets emptied and it became a ghost town after Trump spoke. And she was crying when she said it felt like we were going backward to where we were just when we had begun to pick ourselves up, kicked when we were down. And that really struck me. And I think there were people in Charlotte, although I can't say I actually heard this directly, who probably felt emboldened to be more open about disliking the Haitians in their midst and yelling things at them. I heard from Bernoubaid that people were hearing, you know,

Trump is coming. There were a lot of Trump flags and yard signs overwhelmingly, a few Harris, but mostly Trump. So I think it probably stirred some people up. On top of the effect that you just discussed, there was also a, flyer posted to Facebook, published or theoretically published by the so-called white citizens of Charleroy, which seemed to attack or threaten Haitian people living in Charleroy by saying, among other things, quote, arm yourselves, white America, protect your families, white people are the only victims to immigrant brutality, end quote. And this digital flyer was circulating around Charleroy in the aftermath of Trump's comments.

What was this flyer and what was its effect in the community? I think it was just some random white racist in Kentucky, which is where it was printed, who posted it online, and therefore did not need to drive to Charleroi with 4,000 printed copies and leave them on people's front porches, as he would have in the 60s. But instead could just hit publish on Facebook and it's now in the world. And it began to circulate in Charleroy. People heard about it.

Haitians saw it. But I don't know that that was the overwhelmingly, you know, most important thing that happened after Trump spoke about Charleroy. But it certainly was a result of Trump speaking. And it added to the tension and the fear on the part of, of immigrants that they were going to be targeted in Charleroi. So the conversation up to now has mostly focused on the story of Charleroi, the town. And I want to turn our attention to what you learned from this Pennsylvania town that you think explains the larger trends that are at work in this election.

You write that when we look closely at Charleroy, we can see three factors that will decide the election. One, nativist anger, two, working class decline. and three corporate greed. And I want to hit those issues, one, two, three so that we can sort of scope out and think about the implications of your reporting in Charleroi.

First, let's talk about immigration. And I want to pick up on a thread that you were starting to unspool just a few minutes ago, which is that when it comes to immigration, I think two things can be true. Number one, that immigration policy under Joe Biden created a set of both,

television and real world disasters. The asylum policy under Biden was a mess, but also many of the claims being made about the downsides of his asylum policy. There are no semblance to reality, right? Just because Joe Biden's asylum policy was bad doesn't mean that Trump isn't going to say a bunch of things that are just false about immigration.

And on the issue of immigration and the so-called material world, this is something that I'm still trying to reconcile for myself. It seems to me that with Charleroy, you have this funny example where the influx of Haitian migrants has been economically and socially beneficial to the city, but there's a fear from folks outside the city that immigration is destroying Charleroi. And it speaks to like this disconnect that you sometimes see in the electorate.

Maybe it's especially profound with immigration, where there's like, like a material reality, people's community, what's happening on the ground, and there's sometimes digital or TV-influenced surreality about what immigration means to communities outside of our own. Can you talk a little bit about how you saw this disconnect between how immigration is talked about at a national level and what it actually looks like when you're a working-class town in economic decline, and you get an influx of immigrants? Well, I think it cuts at least two ways, and we've talked about both. It can be, and I think in Charleroy has been an economic boon.

It can also be, and has been in Charleroi, a cultural shock that leaves people feeling as if they don't recognize their hometown anymore. and that makes it easy to pin the blame on the immigrants and to be swayed by like a single experience or even an invented experience, an imaginary experience, into thinking that they're just a maligned force, that they're destroying the town. I think it's pretty hard for people who live in Charleroi to say they are destroying the town. but it's not that hard for people in Charleroy to say they are taking our town away from us and here's one thing that happened that proves it. So it's like the tender is dry for a match to be thrown by a Donald Trump and then things happen. But the two town officials I spoke to said to me, we just need time for the Haitians to become part of the community.

It's already happening. They want to be part of this community. They're doing everything you would do to show you want to be. They're supporting themselves. They're paying their rent, et cetera. So we just have to be left alone and it's going to work out. But of course, politicians aren't going to leave them alone. And that's where the power.

power of people's imaginations, rhetoric, propaganda, and mediated experience. It doesn't come from running into someone at a bakery, but comes from reading about someone online, even if that someone is two blocks away from you. It's just much easier to hate that person or to imagine that person is destroying your community, than it is when you're simply passing them on the street. And if we live more and more apart from each other in real life and immersed in our different tribal echo chambers online, you can imagine what the experience, say, of the Italians in the north end of Boston in 1900 or the Jews on the Lower East side of New York would have been if there was no direct connection of, say, their economic productivity to the native population,

but only flyers, books, and newspaper articles saying they're destroying the city. and that's kind of closer to the way we live now than it was 120 years ago. I am obsessed with this issue, which is to say obsessed with this disconnect between the cliche that all politics is local and what seems to me to be the reality that in a world where people are spending more and more time alone, looking at screens, whether they're televisions or smartphones, and less time being with other people and being in their community and being outside of their house. I mean, all these things are statistically true. We've never spent so much time in our homes, in our phones, not spending time with other people. That's a world in which all

politics is local is dramatically threatened by the fact that people are spending a lot of their time getting their messages from national political narratives that succeed or fail based not on whether or not they are true in the physical corporeal world, but whether or not they're exciting and therefore likely to be shared. And I want to bracket this conversation, before I throw up back to you, I want to bracket this conversation by saying, I don't want to pretend that immigration is easy. There's really no period in American history where we can say, oh, wow, we assimilated thousands or hundreds of thousands of these people with a very different culture. And there were no problems whatsoever. You look around the world, find me a country with a large amount of immigrants that's having

no political issue, assimilating them, or dealing with some kind of backlash. I'm a pro-immigate person, generally speaking, but politically, you cannot live in reality and say this is an easy issue. It's not, it's a complex issue. Nonetheless, it is so interesting to me that this is a world where rural Kentucky residents are agitated about the degree to which immigrants are destroying Charleroy, while Charleroy residents are telling you, they're not actually destroying our town. These people are voting on a myth of our city, not the reality of our city. That's just a fascinating media artifact. All right, back to you, sorry. I agree completely about the difficulty of assimilating immigrants. I think the one thing this country still does better than any country on earth is that. We,

Americanized people relentlessly. And the Haitian children who are going to the schools of Charleroy will be American very soon because we have this accessible, open, famously coarse and vulgar culture that seems able to be translated into every language and to absorb every language into it. And I think that is maybe the last really great thing we have going for us. and we have shown it over and over again. But I agree with you and I agree with David Leonard in his book, which I read, but whose ours is the shining future, I believe. Ours was the shining future that the mass immigration since the immigration law of 1965

was not something Americans approved or saw coming, and it has hurt working class. Americans, both economically and in their social status in a way that it has not hurt those of us who live in the information economy and spend our lives on screens. But back to your nationalization of media, this came to me as an epiphany in 2008. I was reporting on the Obama-McCain race in southeastern Ohio, which is not too far away from Charleroy. And I was in a town. I was in a called Gloucester, a dying coal town. And I was talking to a group of voters and trying to find out what really matters to you here in Gloucester. What are the issues? What are the realities? They had no interest in talking about it. There were no issues as far as they were concerned.

It had always been the same, you know, coal was dying, the town was dying. What they wanted to talk about was the way the Republican Convention had just been covered on cable news. And they talked like cable news anchors. They talked about the Republicans convention bounce or post-convention bounce. They used the phrasing that you get on cable. And it struck me for the first time, and it has struck me many times since then, that their own world was less real to them than the world they saw on a cable news studio. And that was before social media, which has accelerated this greatly.

So you're absolutely right. And the effect of that, as one of them said to me, every little crease of this country has been made partisan. That was, he put it as every little crease, and that was a good image

for this little coal town in the hills of Western Appalachia. And what he meant, was you can't escape national politics anywhere. And so we've all become partisans who echo the same line of our national party because that's where we live now. It really depressed the hell out of me because I thought, why am I here in Gloucester, Ohio, if I can't find out what's happening in Gloucester, Ohio. But the people of Gloucester, Ohio were living on cable news. Do you worry that these working-class cities shifting toward the Republican camp are hurting themselves

by cutting themselves off from the very economic pipeline that might be most necessary to the revival, namely population growth, which in a world or country that has below replacement rate fertility levels, requires immigration. Like, is there a way in which the national popularization of anti-immigrant sentiment could wrap around and end up hurting the very places who fall for this story? Who fall for the story and vote for the candidate who's telling the story? Absolutely. It's not going to hurt New York City.

It's not going to hurt Florida. It's not going to hurt California. It's going to hurt Charleroi. It's going to hurt small towns in Ohio because they're the ones. one's losing population. They're the ones whose economies have been in a downward spiral for decades. And when you travel in one, as soon as you leave a major metropolitan area in this country, and this is maybe the biggest, one of the biggest tragedies that I feel as a reporter, as soon as I drive out of a major metropolitan area, I begin to see in most parts of the country,

real poverty of the kind that we used to think only existed in the major metropolitan areas. And depression, economic depression and psychological depression and a sense of hopelessness. Charleroi, I'm certain, although I wasn't there in 2020, from what I've heard, that was Charleroy in 2020. It's still Charleroy today to some extent, but it's coming out of it. and the difference between a place that is trapped in that downward spiral of a small town, industrial town, a rural town, and a place that is beginning to show life is immigration. That's what makes the difference. It doesn't happen without new people, and the only new people are people coming from abroad

because the Americans are leaving. So it is perverse, it is self-destructive, it is understandable, and I don't hold them all guilty of arch-racism. I think the combination of economic decline and dramatic cultural change is the formula for Trump. That's the formula he exploits. That's what got him elected in 2016. it'll be a bit different if he wins this time because he's actually begun to change the demographics of the two parties. But that's still sort of the sweet spot for him,

and that's why he keeps hitting these lies about the Springfield Ohio's and the Charleroi, Pennsylvania. I want to move on to the other two trends that you think explain this election, working class decline and then corporate greed. On working class decline, I actually want to come at this question

from a very specific angle. When we say working class decline, I think sometimes a concept that is concealed by that phrase is that it describes a decline of industries that were once and sometimes still are predominantly male, manufacturing, construction. And we had Richard Reeves on this show recently talking about men in the 2024 election. And he made a comment toward the end that I haven't been able to get out of my head. He said, if you look at the policies the Biden administration passed, expanding infrastructure, increasing demand for electricians in the clean energy sector, protecting union rights. The jobs helped by those policies are overwhelmingly male.

From a materialist standpoint, from a pure economic standpoint, this has been a very pro-man economic agenda. I mean, if you go online and you look at what percent of construction jobs, what percent of electrician jobs, what percent of private sector union jobs are male? Or microchip factory jobs, yeah. microchip factory construction jobs. These jobs are 85, 90% male. But as you and I both know, as everyone listening knows, from a cultural standpoint, I don't think I'm editorializing much here

when I say that Democrats aren't very good at talking to men or don't seem to be very good at talking to men in a way that men want to be talked to overall. And almost everybody expects the male vote, especially the young male vote, to continue to drift toward the Republican Party. How do you straighten that rope? How do you make sense of this?

the fact that there's been a male shift toward the Republican Party that co-insides with an economic agenda that I think can be objectively described as quite pro-male, if not historically, pro-male given the scale of the investments in manufacturing and clean energy. I guess the short answer is people don't live historically. they live by this month's grocery bill. And in the two places I've done most of my reporting in the last year, which is Western Pennsylvania and Phoenix, Arizona, where I spent many, many months for a cover story for the Atlantic, people are vaguely aware of the chips bill. They're vaguely aware of the Infrastructure Act. They're vaguely aware of the climate bill. They don't have anything to say about Joe Biden's views of unions. What they're most aware of is how hard it is to buy a house, what the price of groceries is, what the price of gas is. And those things have all worked against Biden and Harris. So in one way, you can say it's rational. They're not looking at secular trends in industrial policy. They're looking at their own budget.

on the other hand, there's obviously a cultural resistance now to the Democratic Party on the part of mostly young men. And it may be that even if they were a member of a union that directly benefited from a Biden policy and that saw their wage going up, while prices remained flat, they still wouldn't vote Democratic. And that's for all the cultural and social reasons that make men feel as if they been displaced, that women are somehow cutting in front of them in line to use Hoax Child's metaphor, and that they're being demonized as men, that there's no place for them, that maleness is somehow no longer good, providing for your family, being the head of the household, and enjoying a football game and a beer, that these are things that

they have to kind of be slightly ashamed of. those are not good trends for the Democratic Party and maybe not necessary ones. I don't know. I mean, can we imagine a world in which women rightly were gaining more and more power and doing better and better in school and in jobs? And yet men did not feel as if they were toxic. Yeah, that's beyond my scope, but I would like to think that's possible. I just don't think Democrats really have, they don't know how to speak to those people who used to be the backbone of their party.

That's a long-term realignment that is partly the realignment of the two parties between college educated and non-college educated, but it's also gender. And those two have now converged so that women with a college degree are overwhelmingly going to vote Democratic. men without a college degree are overwhelmingly going to vote Republican. And maybe partly because the jobs that those women are getting out of college are jobs that seem more like women's jobs or jobs that women historically have had. And the jobs that are declining, like the Pyrex Factory and Charleroy, are more and more jobs that men have had and that don't require a college degree. So those trends seem to be the decline of industry, the decline of the working class, and the maleness of the Republican Party are perhaps interrelated.

To connect back to something we were talking about earlier, you made me think that I was having a conversation about this topic a couple of days ago with some people, the gender polarization between the parties. And I do think one factor is media. There are differences between men and women. And one thing that social media is very good at doing is designing newsfeeds, algorithmically, that overfit to the preferences of the people reading them. And so I think that there's a way in which men and women might live in media environments that are more different than ever and more different even than men and women are different. So, for example, my wife and I are, you know, very similar in some ways, as is essential in a marriage, but also very different in many

ways in terms of the cultural interest that we have. And my Twitter feed and her TikTok feed are way more different than we are different, if that makes sense. And I wonder if there's something about the algorithmic structure of our media that is exaggerating the worlds that men and women see, the same way that we understand that the worlds of Democrats and Republicans are, we intuitively understand

those worlds are exaggerated for their pleasure when they look at Twitter or Instagram or whatever other algorithmic media they're looking at. I wonder whether some ingredient here is the fact that men and women are marinating in informational ecosystems that have never been more distinct. I don't know if you want to talk off on that.

I'm prepared to blame social media to algorithms for pretty much any political or social ill in this country. So you're talking to a converter box. You and I can get a beer on that, for sure. Let me move on to the last point, because I want to talk to you about this issue of corporate greed. You know, you mentioned that corporate greed seems to be a live issue in Charleroi, a live issue in this election. How does the issue of corporate greed make itself known in Charleroi right now? because a corporation is heedlessly, for whatever reasons of short-term profitability,

closing a factory and a way of life, destroying hundreds of livelihoods, and by way of compensation, offering just a pittance for severance. One of the union members I spoke to there said she'd worked at the Pyrex factory for 35 years, and I said, how much have they offered in severance? And she went through the, you know, how many days you've worked, how many years you've worked, blah, blah, blah, $8,000 for 35 years, which is about two-thirds of her life. So that, it is not hard to get people talking about corporations and billionaires as a malign influence in our economy and as an unfair one.

They're not making excuses. is they're not saying, I want to be Elon Musk. They're saying, fuck Elon Musk. How is that issue of corporate greed cashing out in a political benefit to either Republicans or Democrats? Because the issue here seems very drawn down the middle. There are billionaire celebrities that are obvious and loud Democrats, and there are billionaires, Elon Musk, John Paulson, who are outspoken, loud Republican. So is this an issue that you think is helping to drive?

voters in one way or another, or do you think it's simply maybe a kind of a third dimension to the electorate that's waiting for someone to activate it because Donald Trump and Kamala Harris aren't really activating it in the same way that say a Bernie Sanders might be able to? I think the latter, it's a wash as far as I can tell. There's so much cynicism about politics and politicians in the Rust Belt because of years of disinvestment that neither party can claim to be the voice of the working people. Donald Trump might be able to claim to be the voice of the pissed off white working people. But to be able to say, I care about you and I have spent my career trying to improve your life and I will continue to do that no matter what, no matter who

offers me how much campaign money, there are very few politicians who can legitimately claim that and actually win on it. Sherrod Brown is a rare one. which is why in Red Ohio he is running even or slightly ahead in his Senate re-election campaign. There just aren't many. I spent about half a day with a guy named Chris Deluzio, who is a Democratic first-term congressman in Western Pennsylvania, not Charleroy, but north of Charleroy. And that's his line. We need to show that we're willing to take on the big interests, the monopolies, the billionaires, and to defend the interests of the working class, or else we will never be heard because the siren song of anti-immigration is going to drown us out.

And that's his line. He makes no bones about being ready to regulate them, to tax them, and to take them on. And in a pretty even district, he won by, I think something like, six points in 2022, and he's running for re-election this year. One issue that he's focused on is, you remember Derek, about a year and a half ago, a freight train derailed in eastern Ohio, and there was a toxic chemical spill, a mushroom cloud that kind of drifted across the area, and it drifted across the state line into Pennsylvania and into Christeluzio's district. And he has made rail freight regulation a signature issue. And he has. he kind of said to me, we'll see if an issue like that where I'm taking on the corporations,

and my opponent, who's funded by the Koch brothers and refuses to take this issue on, we'll see if it works to my benefit or not. It's a little bit of an experiment to see how Pennsylvania's 17th district shakes out. And I think you've beautifully summarized a theme of this entire interview, which is that he's testing the hypothesis that some politics might still be local. He's taking an intensely local issue and trying to see if taking the side of the people in that local issue is going to be more popular than accessing these national narratives that tend to thrive on the screens that we see rather than the people that we spend time with. George Packer, thank you very, very much. Thanks, Derek. I enjoyed it. Thank you for listening.

Today's episode was produced by Devin Beraldi. Our schedule for plain English for the next few weeks will be one episode a week. on Fridays. We'll see you next week.