As promised, my big feature went live tonight on the Washington Monthly website. As a special bonus, there’s also an interview I conducted with Virginia gubernatorial candidate Tom Perriello. They should be read in tandem.
Here’s my favorite part of the Perriello interview:
WM: You’ve been campaigning on this anti-monopoly theme all over the state, from the D.C. suburbs of northern Virginia to small Appalachian towns in southwestern Virginia. Are these really issues that voters are already thinking about and asking questions about?
TP: I actually think in many ways the challenge is people inside the Beltway having too low of an opinion about the sophistication and knowledge of people outside the Beltway. What will often happen to me on a given day is that I will start the day out in a red county, where people are talking to me about consolidation and automation, and then end the day inside the Beltway talking to people who say, “Tom, you sound like a think tank, that kind of thing will never go down with those people out there.” So I think that if we could actually get folks to sit down together, those inside the Beltway could really understand again, this is something voters across the Commonwealth are talking about because they are living the experience.
And I get the exact same response from liberal blog-readers every single time I write about these issues. Every single time.
These articles are my big effort to break through the cognitive dissonance and the resentment and the disappointment and the despair and the cynicism and the apathy and, ultimately, the nihilism that is gripping the left in the aftermath of its most bitter election season in modern history. I know it’s just a start, but I hope it’s a good start.
