Few communities in America prospered as much as Texarkana during President Joe Biden’s four years in the White House, and few communities were more ungrateful than the voters of that region, which is anchored around twin cities spread across the Texas-Arkansas border.
In 2024, in spite of economic growth under a Democratic president at rates unheard-of in decades, residents of Texarkana turned around and cast a higher percentage of their ballots for Trump than ever before.
Texarkana serves as a case study in the uphill struggle of the Democratic Party to win — and win back — working class support.
Thomas Edsall
If any body tells you that the Dems lost in ’24 because of the cost of eggs, show them this article. Politics is 20% policy and 80% culture, and the Dems are losing—have lost?— the culture war.
If Donald Trump and J.D. Vance decided to provide Medicare for all, institute a $50K UBI, and raise the marginal tax rate to 90% on the most wealthy to pay for it, Populist America would buy it. It’s not the policy, but who’s proposing it that matters.
But that won’t happen because Trump is a kleptocrat being accepted for now by the 1% as a useful fool tool to enact its agenda.
The 1% owns the GOP, the Supreme Court, Kristen Sinema Dems, and corporate America. The only counterbalance to that kind of concentrated power lies in people power, and the culture war is the 1%’s primary strategy to prevent the people from organizing against its interests. Trump is a powerful weapon in that ongoing effort.
He’s not the problem, the 1% is. If we had a real Left in this country, and not a phony identitarian one, it would not play the 1%’s game. This phony Left is as much a pawn in this game as the MAGA Right is. It’s exasperating.
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