Wildland by Evan Osnos

Author:Evan Osnos [Osnos, Evan]
Language: eng
Format: epub

THIRTEEN

UNMAKING THE MACHINES

FOR HIS FIRST FORAY into politics, Trump benefited from uncanny timing. The institutions that might have thwarted him at other moments in history—the mainstream press, the church, the Republican National Committee—were beset by declines in trust and resources. By 2016, the Republican leadership had a smaller payroll than the Koch brothers’ private political network. Fortunately for Trump, he had also caught the Democratic Party at a perilous moment. As usual, after eight years in the White House, the party in power was the focus of discontent and malaise; as the campaign progressed, that diminished enthusiasm started shaping who voted for whom, where, and why.

Across the country, the Democratic Party was struggling to generate excitement for political grandees who had presided over politics for a generation. In Illinois, Michael Madigan was the longest-serving leader of any state or federal legislature in U.S. history, having been Speaker of the House for all but two years since 1983. In the city of Chicago, new blood was almost as scarce; for forty-three of the past fifty-five years, the city had been run by one of the Daleys, father or son. When the son retired in 2011, he left a lot of deferred political maintenance: the budget deficit totaled $637 million, low-income neighborhoods were plagued by violence, and relations between Chicago police and the public were unraveling.

One measure of the city’s health was not encouraging: the population of the area was falling. Those who moved away voiced various reasons—taxes, corruption, traffic among them—but researchers paid particular attention to an exodus in the Black community. Since 1980, Chicago had lost at least a quarter of its Black population; between 2000 and 2010, 181,000 Black residents left Chicago. Initially, they headed to the suburbs, but more and more they were going farther—to Indiana, Iowa, the Sun Belt, and the South. Some felt priced out of the city—“strategic gentrification,” as it became known—while others cited violence and the languishing economy on the South and West sides. Whatever form it took, the message was the same: they felt powerless to make the city pay attention.

“We feel like the forgotten people,” Tenesha Barner told me. At her church, a nondenominational parish called New Beginnings on the edge of Parkway Gardens, the pastor had become so desperate that he took a drastic step. The Reverend Corey Brooks marched across the street to a vacant motel that attracted drug-dealing and prostitution. He climbed up to the roof, took a seat, and refused to come down until he had raised enough money to demolish the building. It was the middle of a frigid Chicago winter, but Brooks stayed up there for months, sleeping in a tent with electric heaters on extension cords, while Barner and the rest of the parish watched his sermons on a digital feed across the street. As time wore on, the stunt attracted a parade of bigwigs; the governor of Illinois climbed up to take a look, as did the Reverend Jesse Jackson and the Reverend Al Sharpton.

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