Pennsylvania politics and culture [Trump in 2016, Biden in 2020]

James Carville once remarked that “Between Paoli and Penn Hills, Pennsylvania is Alabama.” I grew up in Alabama part, Johnstown to be specific. I say a bit about that in my current piece for 3 Quarks Daily, Some vignettes in the wake of a historic election [16 tons, where are we now?]. Ed Simon says a few words in praise of Pennsylvania in The Keystone State is Ringing, Belt Magaine, Nov. 12, 2020.

Publications like the New York Times have spent the past four years trafficking in the most jaundiced of stereotypes, pretending its readers need to care about the opinions of voters who disguise their bigotry as economic insecurity. That was always a bogus narrative anyhow—the working class didn’t elect Trump, the white upper middle class (and white voters generally) did. And it was a coalition of Black and brown voters in Philadelphia, Allegheny, Erie, Northampton, and Lehigh counties who helped evict him. But this year, Biden also outperformed Hilary Clinton in every single county of the state, so the silent Democratic voter in Elk and Fayette and Washington and Westmoreland and Luzerne counties also had a hand in the process—truly a multiracial and multiethnic coalition of the working class, the marginalized and disenfranchised, young people, and, I suspect, the just-plain-fed-up.

In 2016 I knew, to my increasing alarm, that Pennsylvania would go for Trump, and this year I knew that it would break with him. Call it something wooey or mystical, but I know my state. I’m flummoxed by media surprise regarding those results (in either direction), but I think they speak to the fact that America has never really grappled with this odd stepchild, Pennsylvania—a place of contradiction that I can’t always apologize for, but which has always harbored a radical and beautiful counternarrative underneath.

This is the Pennsylvania that I see right now: the Pennsylvania of Benjamin Lay, the eighteenth-century Quaker who declared that “All Slave-keepers that keep the Innocent in Bondage [are] Apostates”; of his contemporary, the apocalyptic preacher Herman Husband, who imagined a communist utopia spreading forth through the Alleghenies; of the secret society of nineteenth-century Irish miners known as the Molly Maguires, who, with anarchic precision, fought for workers’ rights in Carbon and Lackawanna Counties; of the father of Black nationalism, Martin Delany, who agitated for abolition from his medical practice in Pittsburgh’s Hill District and commanded a battalion against the Confederate traitors in the Civil War; of the muckracking progressive journalist Ida Tarbell, whose reporting led to the downfall of Standard Oil’s monopoly; and of Thaddeus Stevens, who thundered on the floor of Congress, “I will be satisfied if my epitaph shall be written thus: ‘Here lies one who never rose to any eminence, who only courted the low ambition to have it said that he striven to ameliorate the condition of the poor, the lowly, the downtrodden of every race and language and color.’”