Ohio is the battleground for America’s future The nation needs a new economic consensus

By now, such laments have almost become passé, the story of modern America we all know: the hillbilly elegy that explains Trump. “Youngstown was steel, nothing but steel,” my old colleague George Packer wrote in The Unwinding. “Everyone here owed their life to the molten pour of iron… Without it, there was no life.” And yet, the steel disappeared in 1977 and it wasn’t until 2016 that it voted for Trump.

Before my trip, I’d ploughed through Phillip Meyer’s American Rust, set just across the border from Youngstown in the hills of western Pennsylvania. It’s a book that captures that sense of decline that has wormed its way into the bones of both northern England and the American Midwest. “You wanted to believe in America,” says one of Meyer’s characters, “but anyone could tell you that the Germans and Japs made the same amount of steel America did these days.” Here was the reflex that lies at the heart of the new post-liberal conservatism: “If you don’t have steel, you don’t have a country,” as President Trump declared in 2018.

This is the message that Vance brings to his ticket — a statement of economic intent. “The effects of globalisation have hollowed out America’s industrial core,” Vance wrote recently in a joint op-ed with Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s former Trade Representative and potential future Treasury Secretary, who also happens to hail from Ohio. “When the manufacturing jobs moved out, a host of social problems moved in: family divorce and breakdown, child abuse and neglect and opioid addiction.” A similar message could have been delivered by any Labour or SNP politician since the Thatcherite industrial collapse of the Eighties. Yet it is now a message more likely to be heard on the Conservative backbenches.

In his maiden speech last week, Nick Timothy, the new Tory MP and former Downing Street chief of staff under Theresa May, pronounced the death of the old economic consensus. “We don’t make, do or sell enough of what the world needs,” he claimed. “From low pay to regional inequality, poor productivity to funding public services, all the things we worry about are symptoms of this wider problem.” In Timothy’s view, Britain needs a new economic consensus. “We need to challenge Treasury orthodoxy and think beyond the intellectual limits of ideological liberalism,” he said.

Occasionally, you hear an odd centrist chastise this kind of message. Yet, it would be wrong to consider this new strain of conservatism as some kind of ideological aberration for either the Republicans or Conservatives. Both parties, in fact, have their roots in protectionism: the Tories in Disraeli’s support for the Corn Laws and the Republicans in Civil War tariffs. To understand why, come to Ohio.

Canton was once the home of William McKinley, the last Republican president to be assassinated, and a descendent from what the Americans like to call the “Scotch Irish”, much like Vance today. These Protestant Irish settlers are the original “hillbillies” — the “Billy Boys” from Ulster whose hero was and remains King Billy, or William of Orange. There is deep historic irony, then, in Vance’s conversion to Catholicism, which seems to have been largely missed.

McKinley today remains a largely obscure figure, lost in the sunken years between the Civil War and the Great War of 1914-18. Even the memorial to him in Canton has an air of forgotten grandeur to it. Yet, McKinley’s presidential victory in 1896 remains a pivotal moment in American history, ending decades of political deadlock and ushering in a period of Republican domination which only came to an end with Roosevelt’s victory in 1932. At the heart of McKinley’s election victory were the twin issues of protectionism and the dollar — two issues which have once again been thrust under the spotlight.

In 1896, it’s worth recalling that it was the Republican Party that was the party of protectionism and sound money — backed by the white middle-class protestants of the north and African Americans of the south (and beyond). The Democrats, by contrast, were the party of segregation, free-trade and “free silver” — a policy designed to help inflate away the debts of the many small farmers who formed the backbone of the party, along with the new Irish and Italian immigrants in the north (a policy with faint echoes of J.D. Vance’s ideas today). To the Republicans, they were the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion”.

That year, it was the Democratic candidate for the presidency who was the fiery populist: William Jennings Bryan, a pin-up of the forgotten man raging against East Coast elites, international speculators and the gold standard — the “cross of gold” upon which the American farmer was being crucified, as he put it. Here, then, was the caricature of an American populist: Trump before Trump, though one whose populism was rooted in a furious opposition to protectionism. To defeat him, the Republicans chose McKinley, a unity candidate for change who could appeal beyond the old Republican base.

For Karl Rove, a one-time Republican election guru who has written a history of the 1896 election, McKinley’s victory was pivotal — not only because it won the argument that year, but because it created a new coalition for the Republicans that would keep the party in power for much of the next 36 years.

With Trump and Vance playing the role of insurgent populists today, questioning the core principles of American industrial and monetary policy, the stakes of this election feel eerily similar. Yet, Harris does not appear to be a McKinley figure — and Trump, unlike Bryan, has already shown he can win. The question today, I think, is which party will be able to follow McKinley in reaching out beyond its current electoral base to create a new wider coalition that can break the deadlock in America.

In Rove’s account of the 1896 election, he offers a number of key lessons for the Republican Party’s triumph — many of which are applicable today. First, McKinley did not skirt the big issues but addressed them directly, including the one considered to be his opponent’s core strength: Bryan’s advocacy of Free Silver. Today, it seems that Trump’s core strength is his “America First” economics — his opposition to free trade. The choice for the Democrats today, then, is whether to accept this in an attempt to neutralise it, or to take it on as McKinley did of Bryan in 1896. Do the Americans want to risk a return to inflation?

Second, McKinley also offered himself as “a different type of Republican” who realised he needed to broaden the party’s appeal to a whole series of states once considered safely Democrat. Once again, today’s Democratic Party seems unwilling or unable to adopt this strategy, focused instead on securing just enough electoral college votes to win. Harris does not seem like the kind of candidate capable of winning over crucial swing-states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin or, of course, Ohio. Those I spoke to in Ohio said there was no reason why it could not be a swing state again, rather than a solid Republican bastion. It just required the Democrats to listen and compromise more than they currently seemed willing.

Finally, McKinley defined himself as a unity candidate facing off against an increasingly divisive Bryan campaign that “attacks… anyone who disagreed with him”, as Rove put it. Biden was able to play this role against Trump in 2020. Obama adopted the same message in 2008 and 2012. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, didn’t see the need — and abjectly failed. For both parties, the lesson here isn’t hard to glean.

From Canton I went to Youngstown, where it was hard not to be shocked by the scale of the city’s degradation: the abandoned plots, the ruined roads, the general sense of abandonment. I couldn’t help but think of Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, set in Detroit in the Seventies. “All that was left of the old neighbourhood was empty land,” one of his characters complains as he crashes over a bridge to his death. “It seemed that most of the city was gone.”

Yet this was only one part of the city. The story less often told about Youngstown is that of the suburbs and surrounding towns, which are far from abandoned and dying but very much still alive. Here I found a region filled with small factories and office blocks, neither poverty-stricken nor a land of plenty. Here the golf clubs were filled with old auto workers and union men who were once Democrat but no more, living in neat bungalows with nice cars on the drive, with their children nearby, no longer working the furnace but as teachers or office workers. According to my guide Tom Maraffa, a retired professor at Youngstown State University, this was where Trump had flipped things.

A little further out, one town sticks in the memory, a place so American it could be nowhere else. Not London or Oxford, but Colombiana. If the modest suburbs were the places Trump had flipped, Colombiana was always his — not filled with angry MAGA supporters, either, but driving ranges and country clubs, small businesses and nice cafes. The Republicans here might have preferred a candidate a little less brash, but considered the Democratic Party so wildly out of touch they would never consider switching sides.

Earlier this week, when I spoke with Tom again, he lamented the state of American politics and its coverage in the US media. I was intrigued how things had changed since my last visit. The state, he felt, remained in an odd holding pattern. The old union men now voting for Trump were still not entirely sold on the Republican Party, but the Democrats were not offering them much either. “Fundamentally, Trump speaks to people who are tied to their places and want them restored,” Tom told me. In contrast, he felt, “the Democratic Party has become the party of the educated ‘placeless’”.

It’s a mood that was captured by Springsteen in Youngstown. “From the Monongahela valley to the Mesabi iron range; To the coal mines of Appalachia, the story’s always the same,” he sang. Almost 30 years later, both parties face the same challenge: are they bold enough to rewrite Springsteen’s “story”? If so, Ohio is the place to start.

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Tom McTague is UnHerd’s Political Editor. He is the author of Betting The House: The Inside Story of the 2017 Election.

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