Within the People’s Reach

I’ve been interviewing people across the US – visiting Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Tennessee, Wisconsin and Mississippi – as the November election nears. My itinerary is loosely based on the route taken by Alexis de Tocqueville nearly two hundred years ago when with his friend Gustave de Beaumont he sailed from Le Havre, reaching Newport, Rhode Island in May 1831. I’m retracing parts of their journey and expanding it to other states they didn’t visit, such as Florida, which wasn’t yet in the union in the 1830s.

‘A great democratic revolution is taking place in our midst,’ Tocqueville proclaims at the start of Democracy in America. Today many Americans fear a different type of revolution is underway – an autocratic reversal of their democratic experiment.

‘I think he’s authoritarian,’ Mary, 79, said to me of Donald Trump. We were sitting next to each other at a fellowship meal following a Sunday service at a Lutheran church in Grantsburg, Wisconsin. I had introduced myself earlier to a church greeter, offering my card, disclosing my job as a sociologist who lives in the UK.

‘We have some visitors,’ the pastor announced as the service started. ‘Linsey? Can you say hello? What brings you to Grantsburg?’

The service continued this way, far more interactive than the services I attended as a child in a larger, more austere church in Toronto. There was clapping and praising; one man was in tears when he was invited to the pulpit to share news of a three-day religious revival taking place soon in a town further south.

‘That was lively,’ I said to the woman next to me in line while we queued after the service for the fellowship meal, prepared by church volunteers.

‘Goodness, no,’ she whispered. ‘It was much more active at the Baptist church we used to attend in our old town – but I love this pastor.’

Tocqueville worried that despotism in America might come not from violent revolution but from complacency, as people retreated from the political sphere into the sanctuary of their homes, voluntary organisations and businesses. But the Americans I’ve met are hardly the retiring sort; they’re garrulous and amazingly open with strangers, whether we’re driving on a rural sideroad snaking from Ohio to West Virginia or sitting on bar stools. They’re also scared and numbed by their worries of national decline. Even most of the Trump voters I’ve met so far don’t love him.

A term that’s come up a lot in these interviews is the word ‘grace’. Where has the grace gone? people ask. They feel out of grace – I can see that – but who they blame isn’t clear. Sometimes it’s other people: right-wingers blame immigrants and professors like me. Left-wingers blame the right-wingers for blaming immigrants and professors.

But much of the blame seems directed inwards, especially when I speak with people who are parents or grandparents. The harder they work, the further certainty and comfort seem to slip away. Even the richest don’t have what they really want, which is assurance about the future. They want evidence that things won’t keep going downhill, a child’s sled pulled closer to the cliff edge.

‘What makes you hopeful for the future?’ I asked two women in their seventies sitting on a porch in Canfield, Ohio, a suburb of Youngstown, a former steel town that’s lost over half its population since the 1950s. ‘That we’ll be dead.’

On one of the islands in south-west Florida, in the early afternoon, I met three men sitting at a bar. They were businessmen from Wisconsin and Ohio, down south on a couples’ trip with their wives, having pints while the women shopped in town. They let me sit for an hour and record our conversation. They are conservatives. They’ll vote for Trump, but they don’t like him. He’s an ‘egotistical maniac’; ‘he just can’t keep his goddamn mouth shut.’

‘Do you ever feel like you work with people like that?’ I asked, joking.

‘No. I terminate them.’

His friend added: ‘As much as Trump goes out there and runs his mouth and you wish he would just be quiet, we’ve currently got a president who can’t go out there and speak his mind. You don’t know what’s coming out of it.’

We were speaking in February: Biden’s frailty was already a major concern. Trump’s age too. The calibre of the candidates bewildered people. This is it?

A few months later, in April, I was in Garrettsville, Ohio, in a bar playing old rock and selling good beer at cheap prices. The regulars had a sliver of the wealth of the Wisconsin men in Florida. ‘I don’t want to offend where you’re from,’ Carla said to me gently – graciously – after I’d spent half an hour chatting with her and her husband, Danny. ‘But I think this is the best country in the world. And I just can’t believe these two men are our best.’

Since Biden withdrew I’ve witnessed an electrifying uptick in energy from both camps. ‘She’s not going to get in!’ Peter, 78, declared, wearing a red ‘Trump 2024’ hat and banging on his farmhouse kitchen table on the outskirts of Grantsburg. He wasn’t one of the listless Republicans: he adores Trump as much as he dislikes Kamala Harris. He used deeply racist words about her.

But I’ve also noticed, across right and left, enormous excitement about Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz. A lot of people seem to want change, at all political levels. Carla and Danny live in Windham, where Lawrence ‘Mac’ Cunningham was recently elected mayor, the first Black mayor in this rural region. ‘He’s a friend of ours,’ said Danny, who works as a street sweeper. ‘He’s doing good things.’

Behind their heads, a sticker on the wall in the bar said: ‘black rifles matter’. I don’t know if Danny or Carla, who are white, supported the Black Lives Matter protests. But I know they support Mac Cunningham. People like being neighbours with their representatives. ‘Local assemblies of citizens constitute the strength of free nations,’ Tocqueville wrote. ‘Town-meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people’s reach.’

The names of all interviewees have been changed for privacy.