What Lies Beneath the Noise

Bill Clark/Getty Images (WAHAB) / Emily Elconin/Getty Images (El-Sayed)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. Every chair. Every desk. Every file cabinet. I asked the local president whether they were moving. He said no. 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. He sat in a chair that was much too small for him. And I stood in a narrow aisle taking notes and feeling as if I had walked into one of those miniatures that Toni Collette makes in Hereditary before she loses her head. Everything around me looked small, including the president of the United States. This should have told me something. In fact, it tried, but I was deaf to the obvious.This article appeared in the October/November 2026 issue of EsquireSubscribeWhen I finally got to Milwaukee, I settled into an empty classroom at my old journalism school to write my magnum opus. I thought about the people selling off the union hall in Youngstown and about the weird dollhouse town meeting in Grand Rapids, and I pounded out the following passage on a borrowed gray Royal upright:“The New Deal is as dead as the steel industry. Jimmy Carter is going to lose, and he is going to lose in a landslide. It is entirely possible that he will fail to receive 100 electoral votes.”Pretty good, if I do say so myself. But Phoenix subscribers never read a word of it.At the time, all the elite opinion agreed that the electorate was “undecided.” The overwhelming consensus was that the American voter was a muddled, disillusioned mess, liable to jump in any direction, including over a cliff. And I walked right into a rookie mistake. I removed my “landslide” theme and went with the “muddled America” theme. On election night, I gathered with my fellow alternative journos at a friend’s house. It was the angriest collection of sullen souses you’ve never seen. The results rolled in, and it plainly was a late-arriving catastrophe for the Democratic party. Carter lost state after state. He even lost Massachusetts. Giants of the Senate—Frank Church, George McGovern, Gaylord Nelson—all sank out of sight. And all night long, that lost paragraph rang like a gong in my memory.I’d seen it. It was right there in front of my eyes. It was there in the chalked-up office furniture and in the shrunken presence of the incumbent president, who I’d once written would not get 100 electoral votes and ended up with 49. Not that my readers knew any of this, because I had lost faith in my own observations and my own instincts. I learned a valuable lesson that night: Trust what you know and what you see, because sometimes huge changes are under way, beneath all the vain noises that signify nothing at all.Our revels now are ended. These our actors,As I foretold you, were all spirits andAre melted into air, into thin air. —Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act IV, Scene IThe 2026 midterm campaigns, which may indeed be the country’s last exits from an onrushing nightmare, have entered the realm of the spirits. Phantom issues abound. White House aides in the trunks of cars. With which podcaster have you appeared, and why haven’t you denounced them yet? Dead campaigns haunt the living ones. These are things that will lose all substance in our politics sometime on November 4.Over the past few months, the Democratic party, the wind at its back to begin with, has demonstrated a remarkably energetic intellectual and ideological diversity. New candidates with a startling variety of appeals to a startling variety of constituencies have popped up everywhere from Alaska to Florida. Money is flowing to all of them for different reasons. Ordinarily, this would be a cause for institutional joy, if not perilous giddiness.Trust what you know and what you see, because sometimes huge changes are under way, beneath all the vain noises that signify nothing at all.However, in the realm of the spirits, nothing is as it seems. This diversity of appeals to diverse constituencies scares the daylights out of some Democrats. It’s expressed as a party wrestling with internal contradictions and with a collision of generations. But I would argue that it really represents the last, fading tremors of the fear that entered the Democratic party when it awoke the morning after that dark day in 1980 and realized that its New Deal coalition had collapsed under its feet without anyone noticing.Out of this came the ceaseless pursuit of white working-class men who were as gone forever from the party as their factory jobs were from places like Youngstown. The Republicans offered these folks someone to blame, which is precisely the crack cocaine they were seeking. Unfortunately, these also were the most reliable voters the Democrats had. The involuntary flinching reflex among the national Democrats proved very hard to unlearn. The available evidence so far this year is that the long process may have finally come to completion.The Democrats come into November with a variety pack of very good candidates. In Massachusetts, Senator Edward Markey has fended off another challenge. Markey entered Congress in 1976, which was 13 years before James Talarico, the senatorial candidate in Texas, was born. Sherrod Brown in Ohio is trying to return to the Senate, while Abdul El-Sayed up in Michigan is trying for the Senate for the first time.And then, all the way out in the 14th Congressional District of California, a woman named Aisha Wahab has replaced the disgraced Eric Swalwell in the House of Representatives. She is a Muslim. She was born to Afghan refugees. And now she is the first Afghan American elected to Congress.Wahab has joined a whole clutch of congresscritters who served in Afghanistan. With any luck at all, they will all talk to each other and learn something that will help this country make better choices in that part of the world. The power of change, beneath all the vain noises.