Main Street Contemplates: The Perfect Storm

A Note to the Reader

Those of you who regularly read Main Street know that I write about the places, people, history, architecture and preservation stories that help us understand our community. From time to time, however, something beyond those usual subjects seems important enough to ask for a little space here. This is one of those times.

It’s about what is on my mind and perhaps yours too. As the mid-term elections approach, I find myself less preoccupied with the individual candidates than with a larger and, to me, more troubling question: Who is prepared to vote for candidates openly embracing democratic socialism, and why?

Candidates like Melat Kiros of Colorado, Chris Rabb of Pennsylvania, and Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier of New York. Their success in Democratic primaries tells us that these ideas are no longer confined to some distant edge of American political life.

I am struck by how dramatically the political vocabulary of this country has changed. I realize this did not happen overnight, but since Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, was elected mayor of New York City, it feels as though that jack has jumped out of the box. Something that had been building beneath the surface suddenly became impossible to ignore.

His election did not create this political shift. It exposed how far it had already advanced, and how willing a significant number of American voters have become to consider political ideas that, not very long ago, would have stood well outside the mainstream.

And that leaves me asking:

What happened?

Perhaps what we are witnessing is a political and social perfect storm. The expression describes a situation in which several separate forces come together at the same time, each strengthening the others, until together they produce something far more powerful than any one of them could have produced alone.

What are those forces in America today?

Millions of Americans have come to believe that our system itself is broken. Whether that belief always reflects present conditions is another question. What matters politically is that the belief exists, because once people lose faith in the system, they become far more willing to consider replacing it with something fundamentally different.

There is a generational change at work as well. For those of us living in the Cold War era, words such as socialism and communism came burdened with history. We knew the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall, Eastern Europe, the nuclear threat, and the long struggle between two very different ideas about government and individual freedom.

Younger generations did not experience that history firsthand. The words do not necessarily arrive carrying the same warnings.

And then there is social media, perhaps the great accelerant of our time. Complicated questions are reduced to slogans. History loses its context. Anger moves faster than explanation, and promises that once would have required pages of argument can now be packaged into a few sentences and repeated thousands of times before anyone stops to ask where the ideas have been tried before, or what followed.

This is where the image of the perfect storm begins to make sense to me.

A loss of confidence in the system. A generation increasingly separated from the historical experiences that once gave certain political words their meaning. A communications culture built for speed, emotion and repetition. And candidates willing to step into that moment with the promise that something fundamentally different will solve what people believe has failed them.

None of these forces alone explains what we are seeing. Together, however, they may have created the vacuum.

And into that vacuum, the jack has jumped out of the box.

That is what interests and concerns me far more than any individual candidate.

Candidates come and go. Political personalities rise and disappear. The electorate is the lasting story.

I am troubled that Americans would seriously consider changing fundamental ideas about the country that generations before us believed worth defending. But perhaps the more unsettling realization is that no political movement advances by itself. It advances because people vote for it.

We are not merely watching these changes happen.

We are allowing them to happen through the choices we make at the ballot box.

That is why I keep coming back to the voter.

When ideas once considered far outside the American mainstream become attractive to a significant number of Americans, I want to understand not only who is running, but what happened to us that made the message persuasive.

The mid-term elections will tell us considerably more about America than simply who will control Congress.