Wildland summary

Prescott Bush –⁠ father of George H. W. and grandfather to George W. –⁠ was the poster child for Greenwich, Connecticut’s political scene. He was the moderator of the town council and spent eleven years as a US senator. 

He was also ludicrously aristocratic – an eight-time club golf champion who required his sons to wear jackets and ties at dinner each night. Despite that, however, Prescott was politically moderate. He had more progressive opinions on civil rights, birth control, and welfare than many of his Republican compatriots. And he lambasted fellow Republican Joseph McCarthy for sowing political divisions within the country. 

The “Athens of Allegheny” –⁠ now known as Clarksburg, West Virginia –⁠ is a city with a population some 16,000 strong, nestled in the green highland between mountain and river. 

In years long gone, Clarksburg was a thriving hub of activity. Straddling the line between North and South, the city’s famed residents included both Union and Confederate Civil War generals. Later, in the twentieth century, Clarksburg prospered and grew thanks to its riches in coal, natural gas, and sand. In 1960, politicians – including Lyndon Johnson and three Kennedys – paid it a visit.

In the early twentieth century, Black Americans began leaving the former Confederate states in search of greater freedom and opportunity. Throughout this period, known as the Great Migration, the Illinois city of Chicago became the “Promised Land.” Chicago’s population was just 2 percent Black before the Great Migration; after, it was 33 percent. 

However, Black migrants weren’t exactly welcomed with open arms by the city’s white residents. 

The years immediately following September 11, 2001 defined a new era in American culture. A central metaphor for the time was twilight warfare, which describes a conflict with no clearly defined geography, winner, or loser. 

For most Americans, the wars in the Middle East were abstractions, far removed from their daily lives. Three years into the Iraq War, for instance, less than a quarter of Americans with some college education could point out Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and Iran on a map. 

Over the years, depictions of the working class have shifted dramatically. Back in the 1930s, working-class men were seen striking heroic poses on posters and murals. That depiction devolved; in the 1970s, the poster version was Archie Bunker – a fictional blue-collar worker with a racist bent. By the 1990s, it had transformed into Homer Simpson: an incompetent, donut-eating alcoholic.

While American elites have slowly become aware of systemic discrimination based on race and gender, the category of class is often ignored. Over the past several decades, the working classes have increasingly been degraded and sneered at, all while big money has kept them trapped.

Trump’s victory in the 2016 election was the product of factors that converged around Greenwich, Clarksburg, and Chicago.

In Greenwich, Trump lost the county overall; the final tally was 57 to 39 percent – but that wasn’t the resounding rejection that many were expecting. In West Virginia, Trump won by a whopping 42 points in a state that had once been a Democratic stronghold. And in Chicago, just one precinct went for Trump. But across the country, Black voter turnout was down in a presidential election for the first time in 20 years. 

“This is their new hoax,” Trump said at a rally on February 28, 2020. He was criticizing Democrats for their concern over his response to COVID-19. “So far we have lost nobody to coronavirus,” he added. A month after the speech, over a thousand Americans were dying each day.

Trump had weakened the civil service, and now that weakness was contributing to unnecessary illness and death. America was the world’s richest and most powerful country, yet it couldn’t manage to find masks to protect its citizens or tests to diagnose them. The economy, too, was in freefall – the country was experiencing its lowest levels of employment since 1975.

As the 2020 election approached, gun sales continued to break records. On social media, right-wing militants began issuing calls to arms. And in an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, Trump claimed that “People that you’ve never heard of” were controlling his opponent, Joe Biden, “in the dark shadows.” 

When the election came in November 2020, it wasn’t particularly close. Biden won by more than seven million votes – 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. But immediately, Trump launched a fevered effort to contest the results. He tweeted incessantly about winning by a landslide and advanced wild and fantastical theories about voter fraud.