
Hardly anybody talks about the mainstream political narratives. Mention of the Trump-Russia collusion story tends to elicit a dismissive smile — but about everyone agrees that this is a most unusual political moment and a litmus test for American democracy.
Yes, some people — from bigots in the Rust Belt regions to the ones who are misguided — are simply racist. But in a society and economy spearheaded by a sense of worker insecurity, the arrival of large numbers of people prepared to do jobs with increasingly awful terms was always going to trigger a blowback. For many places, the pace of change fueled by the modern economy and the pressures on public services have proved to be too much to cope with.
According to the Census Bureau, 19.1 million Americans chose not to vote in the last presidential election. The bureau estimates that 16 percent of the eligible voters refused to vote because they were “not interested,” and another 13 percent felt that they lacked political agency and “did not like the candidates or campaign issues.”