Reporting in ‘Forgotten America’

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with a class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

This is Radio Atlantic.

I'm Isaac Dover.

Jim Fallows is a staff writer here at The Atlantic, but...

In addition to the articles he writes for us, he has another project that's taken off over the last four years.

He's a pilot, and he and his wife Deborah have been flying around the country from small town to small town to better understand the parts of it we don't see in national political coverage.

I spent a lot of my time traveling the country covering the presidential primary campaign, which means a whole different set of expectations and events.

And today we're going to compare notes.

One of the questions that I really want to get into with him, are things as grim as they seem?

Jim, thanks for being here on Radio Atlantic.

My pleasure, Isaac.

Thanks for having me.

So your time in politics goes back to Jimmy Carter.

You signed on to the campaign when he was in that transition point between nobody's ever heard of this guy and this guy's actually going to be the president.

Yes, this was the spring of 1976.

I was living in Texas.

My wife was in graduate school, University of Texas.

I'd started doing pieces for The Atlantic as a freelancer while working for Texas Monthly.

And out of the blue, I had some friends on the Carter campaign.

They were needing to staff up as it looked like he was getting getting some traction.

So I signed on a little before the convention and was on for the ride.

Aaron Powell,

that moment in American politics is probably the closest analog to what we're going through now.

It's the post-Watergate, post-Nixon resignation time.

It's

Ford trying to say the long national nightmare is over.

And this sense of normalcy that people were looking for, that obviously is what it seems is at least part of what the 2020 campaign is going to be, driven by whether people like the upturn

or like

getting to some other kind of calmer time.

Does it feel that way?

Do you feel like you're reliving

76?

It does, and I hadn't thought of it in just this way until you asked the question, but I think you can make comparisons of three sequential elections, 68, 72, and 76, which are sort of the times

I was in college and then immediately after college through that time.

And there are elements of each one.

In 1968,

that was the American hellscape.

When Martin Luther King was assassinated and Bobby Kennedy was assassinated and Lyndon Johnson was deciding not to run and the Vietnam War was just exploding.

And so

that's one vision of what's happening now.

1972 is when Richard Nixon was coasting to his crushing defeat of George McGovern in a sense of a lot of people were unhappy with the prevailing regime, but they couldn't do anything about it.

And in 1976, as you say, it was after Nixon had resigned, Ford had given him the pardon.

There was the withdrawal, U.S.

withdrawal from Saigon just not that long before the 76 election.

And Jimmy Carter, probably, there's no other time in American history when he could have been elected than that, when somebody who was a one-term governor of Georgia could say,

could address this sense that people wanted to be better than the country had been for the previous decade.

So I think that each slice of that historical pie or cake or whatever has some connection to the moment.

Carter was then

ignored, more than ignored,

snubbed by Democrats for a long time.

This time, covering this election for me, he comes up a lot.

And he comes up a lot in people saying, oh, Jimmy Carter returned to normalcy.

Jimmy Carter came from nowhere.

All these things that people are talking about.

One of the things that Carter himself has said, and he said this to me in an interview that I did with him last year, he said it elsewhere, is that his race was possible because of how comparatively little it took to fund elections then.

And so there's a real difference in that.

But I hear that nonetheless on the trail all the time, that these candidates, many of them except for the most popular in the polls,

are looking to be the Jimmy Carter now.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Yes, and there's a particular ⁇ I guess there is the meta-connection you were mentioning both about the theme of these times and the difference in campaign finance, where Carter, his early campaign, he would famously carry his own suit bag over his shoulder when he was getting on and off a plane and he was driving around in little rented cars or Volkswagens or whatever with his staffers.

So those are contrast to those days.

Carter also, there's a direct comparison.

I believe he was the

first person to show that if you spent a lot of time in Iowa, you could have that be the validating experience.

That's the Iowa caucuses are a thing because of of him.

Yes.

The Iowa caucuses existed before, but he won the Iowa Caucuses, right?

And

then people said, oh, who's this guy who won the Iowa Caucuses?

Turns out it was the president when it was all said and done.

And then that's why I spend so much of my time.

And the idea that it is the, in a way,

it's at least a thought experiment of cutting through the big advertising money because if you go to these million little events in Iowa, the person-to-person chemistry that Jimmy Carter was able to apply, and I guess Obama then, you know, a number of years later.

But yes, Carter did sort of give us the Iowa caucuses for better and worse.

And so Iowa's a lovely place.

I'll be back there in several days.

It's been all of several days since I was there last.

The thing that you have now, fast-forwarding,

devoted your time to is this project of looking at small towns all over the country.

And I want to talk more about how that actually works, but one of the

points of this for you is that we have this national political

news,

I don't really like the word narrative, but this sort of vortex that we're all living in.

And it seems like that's the only thing going on often to people who are in Washington, like I am, when I'm not on the campaign trail, or when you go to a Democratic debate like I have been doing,

that everybody in the world is watching, but really almost no one is watching it.

How connected do you think most Americans are to forget about the campaign, but just the issues that we're talking about here, the issues that are on the front pages of the newspaper or on our homepage at the Atlantic every day?

Aaron Powell,

on the one hand, Americans through the millennia have always paid attention to big presidential races, and we can look back back to a dozen of them in U.S.

history, which were big defining turning points.

And whether it was Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson back in 1964, or the famous one where the Atlantic gave its first endorsement with Abraham Lincoln in 1860, et cetera.

But I think that the process of politics and politicking

is not as interesting to most people most of the time as it is to us in the business of writing about politics.

And I've been thinking in getting ready to come here and talk with you about the way in which working for the same institution, going to the same places with similar interests, you and I are seeing just very different sort of Rashaman versions of things because your job in Iowa is to ask people what they think about Trump and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and down the million item list.

And my job is to not ask them those things, to ask them everything else except that.

And that's been both parts of the reality are true, but they're different.

Aaron Powell, are they paying attention to what's going on?

Yes.

I mean, everybody, I'm sure, is aware of the big lineup of candidates, but here is the

big lineup.

That it's a big lineup.

I saw some graphic on the cable news a week ago, and there's one person I couldn't identify.

I could do it.

And it wasn't Eric Swelwell.

He's been out since the summer, Jim.

And it may have been a bad picture of Bullock.

That could have been.

So Bullock, who's an interesting guy.

But here I think,

let me offer this proposition.

You can tell me whether it rings true to you.

My experience is if we ask, if my wife Deb and I ask people in, let's say, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, how the very significant refugee population there is working for better and worse in Sioux Falls,

they have answers about that, about how the Somalis are good business people and how they've affected life in the packing house, et cetera, et cetera.

If you ask people in Erie, Pennsylvania about whether young people are moving in or moving out, our experience is you get the same kind of interestingly 3D answers you would if you listened to Sports Talk Radio, which actually is quite astute.

But if you ask them, what do you think about Trump, you don't hear anything interesting.

It's all, we love Trump or we hate Trump, and it's a universe of, it's like everybody's IQ has gone down 60 points.

Is that what you find when you ask them those questions?

It's funny.

I'm thinking, as you said, of outside of the debate in Ohio,

there was

a block where all of the campaigns and supporters were all lined up shouting at each other.

And

they were shouting Trump, Trump, Trump, and love, Trump's hate, and all sorts of things that were all signs every which direction.

And someone in the crowd said, it's like watching a Twitter war in real life.

And that's what happens right around these political events.

But it is clearly not what is happening outside of that radius.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: And obviously, this matters.

It matters that Trump got into office.

It matters from my point of view that he not stay in office.

And this matters.

And I guess the complementary part of the perspective that I've been trying to write about is it's part of American life, but it's not the entirety of American life, which you would think from cable news each night.

And it's important, but it's not the only thing.

Aaron Powell, you use the term forgotten Americans.

Are they forgotten by Washington?

Are they forgotten by

reporters?

Are they forgotten?

And do they think that they're forgotten?

I think that

there was a narrative after the 16 election that I disagreed with.

And that narrative was, you know, I find myself, I don't think I've used the word narrative in

my expressive past, but there was a concept that dominated a lot of news coverage after the 16 election, which was, oh, we have lost sight.

We, the mainstream media, have lost sight of how unhappy they are out there and how resentful and how bitter.

And our experience, having been in places almost all of which Trump carried, having been there for the past three or four years, was that if you asked people specifically, do you trust Hillary Clinton?

They'd say, oh, no, we hate her.

She's a big liar.

You know, those Clintons are crooks, et cetera.

And a few would say the reverse.

But if you ask them, Dodge City, Kansas as a community, what's happening here?

They talk about how actually the school system was now majority Latino, and the white taxpayers were happy to fund that, and that they recognized this was how things were evolving.

And so you had

there was this particular realm in which people were, quote, forgotten and resentful, which was national media discourse and attention.

And then there was the rest of their lives, which were not in the same boiling cauldron of resentment.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.:

what

many reporters did after the 2016 election was head out to Diners in the Midwest.

That was

fill a very fat book with the articles that were written from Diners in the Midwest and what they really had to say about Trump and what they really had to say about the Democrats.

You and your wife did something very different.

And

it is idiosyncratic in a number of ways, including how you made your way between these towns.

So let's just rewind and walk through what it is that you guys did.

We had been living in China from 06 to 2011, and most of the time then, and we had spent most of our time in China out in the boondocks.

We'd take buses, and one time we took an ox cart, and we'd do things just to kind of get away from Shanghai and Beijing, each of which were our base.

So when we came back to the U.S., and after we had recovered and regained our breathing ability and things like that, we thought it was

through my eons with the Atlantic, I've been sort of back and forth in D.C.

I've worked for the Atlantic for more than 40 years.

I've lived in D.C.

for half that time and half elsewhere, sort of back and forth.

So it was time to get on the road again.

And so I've also been a long-time small plane pilot.

We have a little four-seat single-engine plane, a Cirrus SR-22, equipped with a parachute for the entire plane.

That's a whole separate topic.

And we thought, let's just go to some of these little communities we've seen over the years.

And the idea was not to ask them what they thought about Obama, who would be...

So you just take off in the plane?

Yeah, you just take off in the zone.

And are you ⁇ how much advanced work are you doing to decide which city or town to fly to?

A little bit.

But not a lot.

No,

what people would be surprised by, among many things, in small plane flight is it's surprisingly like just getting in your car and going someplace.

You can go pretty much where you want.

If you're not headed to LaGuardia or SFO, you can go basically any place and just show up.

Did you just call down to the airport and say we're landing?

Yeah, and only about a tenth of airports in the U.S.

have control towers.

So the other 90%, you radio from 10 miles out.

You know, this is Cirrus.

We're 10 miles to the south.

We'll be entering on the left pattern.

So you.

And so

we planned.

We had a reason to go first to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, because I'd never been there in my life, and it seemed to be interesting and really was.

Then we went to Holland, Michigan, now famed as the home of Betsy DeVos or Kirk Cousins, you know, take your pick.

And that was quite interesting, too.

It's now majority Latino, and we're going up into

rural Maine.

And so, just cumulatively, what we thought was going to be about a two or three-month project, we spent most of four years doing and developing an idea that there was an undercovered part of the current American experience that we were seeing in Red Oak, Iowa, for example, or in Abilene.

And you do a little bit of work to decide where you're going.

When you land, then what happens?

What is

the process then of trying to get your arms around what's going on in the town?

So Deb, who is the sort of ground support manager of this whole project, she would have booked usually a week stay in something like an embassy suites or something that had suites in its title, because then you would have a kitchen and also a laundromat.

So we would go, we'd have booked that.

Usually we'd arrive at places on a Sunday afternoon, and we'd try to find some ride from the small airport into the hotel.

Often that was borrowing a crew car, which were 90% of the time these old crown VICs with spotlights on the side of them, you know, or recycled from the sheriff's office.

Sometimes we'd, one time, we kind of hitchhiked in Mississippi.

A couple places had rental cars.

Hitchhiked?

Yes.

It was only about three miles, but it was, there was a guy in a pickup truck who could have been a character from Slingblade who took us in to town in his pickup truck.

Literally, there were hay bales in the back of the pickup truck.

So this was part of the glamorous life of the reporter.

I do a lot of things on the campaign trail that are not that glamorous, but I've never been in an hitchhiked into a truck with hay bales in the back.

Well, you're still young.

So we would set up a shop.

We usually had a sort of first day day or two of places we knew we were going to talk with the editor of the newspaper, the mayor or other city official, the librarian, head of the school system, some chamber of commerce.

And what we'd ask these people essentially is, what's the story of the town right now and who should we talk to?

And then the who should we talk to tentacles went out in unexpected directions to business people, to universities, to whatever.

But overall, you've done a lot of these at this point.

Is it

the same sort of classes of people, and I don't mean class in the economic sense, but they say, oh, go talk to the fire chief, or go talk to this person who runs a neighborhood association or whatever it might be.

The starting point was the same categories of people just because they're ones we could learn about from afar.

But usually by the end of the first week, and we usually do two one-week immersions, we were talking to people we hadn't known existed at the beginning of the time.

We were recently in San Bernardino, California again, which is the area I'm from.

And the person who was sort of the civic leader of the moment is a former prize fighter who is now running a sort of prize-fighting and guitar and chess academy for

prize-fighting, guitar, and chess?

Yes, for young kids there.

And we hadn't known he was around before we started.

So the world is, the country is full of this amazing stuff.

We're going to take a quick break and we'll be back with more in a minute with Jim Fallows.

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When I go around, and it's not just flying around, I'm often driving for stretches

between stops.

This is one of the things that really stands out to me, is that the country, the way that we think about it, and the divisions that we think about it, and this goes there and this goes there,

don't really match up.

There was in the spring, I was covering an event that Pete Buttigiege spoke at in a park that was in South Carolina, but very close to the Georgia border.

And in the recreation center attached to the park, there was a Kinsen Yard going on.

Smelled great, Mexican food, but it's not what you would have expected in that part of South Carolina.

You go around and see CBD for sale in a lot of places, various different ethnic markets

that are in spots that you would never guess.

I agree entirely.

And as you have that story from the Kinsenera, I'm thinking of a time when, in the first couple of days, Deb and I were in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

They have a giant bike trail that's like 25 miles long that goes around the whole town.

And the town itself is a tableau.

There's a giant slaughterhouse in the sort of center of Sioux Falls.

There's a penitentiary that's there.

There's all kinds of high-tech businesses.

And we were driving by some soccer fields that were by a river.

And we saw two things in succession.

One was a group of people bow fishing in the river, which is apparently a big thing in South Dakota, which I had not seen before.

But you see these archers in the river.

And then about another mile or so down, we saw all these a really festive soccer game and picnic attitude that was almost all Latinos.

And, you know, Sioux Falls now has a significant, it's traditionally, you know, all-white town, but and Native American, but

a significant immigrant and refugee population now.

And so, again, our version of what you saw in Georgia and South Carolina was in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, this festive thing that could have been in Latin America or Los Angeles, but it's not what you'd think from the red state, blue state narrative.

Yeah, and I guess it's not just

the division, but it just feels like

for most people

living their lives in the country,

they are much calmer

than

we have never been more divided as a country than we are now, on the one hand, but most people go about their days not at each other's throats.

And I wonder how you see that playing out in a way that maybe can inform the way that we're all thinking about what's happening.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So I will offer a typically a piece of data, and then I will have a question for you, actually.

Turning on to you.

So the piece of data is something that a guy named Sam Abrams, who's from Sarah Lawrence and the American Enterprise Institute,

a giant study he's running of sort of public attitudes towards America, the first installment of which came out early this year.

And what they found in a very, very large-scale survey is that by a significant margin, probably 60, 40, even more than that, people felt that that America as a whole was dysfunctional, polarized, unable to

talk about things, et cetera, et cetera.

By a bigger margin, about 2 to 1, they felt as if their own communities were able to do those things.

They felt as if their own communities had some practical basis and were able to cooperate.

And by a larger margin than that, they felt good about their own prospects.

It feels a little bit to me like when there are polls done about opinions on Congress, it's always in the toilet, but then people will say, well, well, what do you think about your own member of Congress?

And they're 90% approval rating.

Yes.

And so there's something about, number one, the reality of national politics, which actually is as

it's not as bad as during the Civil War, but it's pretty bad.

So national politics, the reality of it is bad.

And also the way in which people understand national politics that's not within their direct personal experience makes it seem even worse.

Yeah, it's okay here in Greenville, South Carolina, but it's a hellscape out there.

The question I have for you is, Deb and I had the crutch of we never had to ask people, what do you think about Romney?

What do you think about Obama?

What do you think about Hillary?

You have to ask those things.

How do you do that without draining the IQ from people?

It is

asked in as open-ended a way as possible.

What do you think?

What is it that's catching you about this person or that person?

I'm often seeing these people at now an event for one candidate or another candidate.

So I'll ask something like, well, why show up for this person?

And

you can get a

deeper answer, sometimes a clearer answer that way.

If

they are showing up for a Democratic candidate, they're obviously predisposed to not be voting for Donald Trump.

And so it's a somewhat skewed sample group for me.

And that allows me to not ask the question, really.

I know what they think of Trump.

If you're showing up at an event right now in Iowa for a Democratic candidate,

yeah.

And if you're showing up at an event at all, as opposed to being helping your kids with their homework or doing any of the other normal things of life, it shows that you are predisposed to thinking about these national issues.

And of course, Iowa knows that's their job right now.

Right.

I was in Iowa

just about exactly a year ago with Kamala Harris when she went for her first trip there, and we were in a town called Indianola, pretty close to Des Moines.

It was a Monday afternoon, I think, at 2 p.m.

The bar that this was going on at was not open,

but the upstairs room where she was speaking was completely full.

And I was like, Of course, because it's Iowa, that's what happens on a Monday afternoon.

Everybody shows up to a person who at that point wasn't even running for president, although we all knew that she would be running for president.

And that experience has replicated many times with with

why are you even here?

But they are committed to it.

And

that is one of the things that has been sort of strange to see play out

in a more intense way with this election than ever before, that people will just go and they'll go to as many events as they can.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And to ask you a related question,

I have long been ⁇ so I'm from Southern California originally, and so I have long had the view that New Hampshire and Iowa, two very different kinds of states, very small, less ethnically diverse than others, they have too much influence in how we choose our lives.

Everybody outside of Iowa and New Hampshire thinks that that's true.

But as you've seen it on the ground,

what's the good and bad of having Iowa play the role it does?

The bad is

pretty simple.

They are not representative of the country as a whole in

demographic or economic terms

to

pick two of the most major categories.

Iowa is

overwhelmingly white, for example, although there are some African Americans there, some Latinos there.

And the issues that drive New Hampshire and Iowa can be somewhat idiosyncratic and not connected to

what's going on in other parts of the country.

The most famous example is ethanol.

Ethanol, of course.

I will tell you...

In covering this campaign, I believe that of all the events I've been to in Iowa, only one time did it come up

as an issue.

And it was on Bed O'Bourg's first trip to Iowa.

And

he was

at a bar.

All these events happen at bars.

Not a lot of drinking going on.

In Mount Pleasant in Iowa.

And he was asked about what he felt about.

ethanol and that he was from Texas, so obviously had taken,

it's been well documented, a lot of campaign contributions for people who work for oil companies.

And he answered in a way

clearly was not the right Iowa answer on ethanol to this woman.

And then I went up to her and asked her afterwards, this was in March,

well, he didn't say what you wanted to be.

This is a full commitment to ethanol.

Do you care?

And she said, no, it seemed interesting.

And so that

as the race has gotten more nationalized, those local issues are not playing out as much.

And some of that, I think, is really at a disadvantage to the race and to the people in the states.

For example, in New Hampshire, the opioid crisis is intense, and you do not hear that as an issue talked about in the campaign trail very much as opposed to bigger things like what we're going to do about health care or immigration, economy, all very important issues, not local issues.

So those are the knocks on those states.

The real

pro

for Iowa and New Hampshire is sort of at this point, Iowa and New Hampshire voters are very sophisticated and taken very seriously.

And

they are smaller states, so it is possible to, at this point, sometimes in the course of a day, go see a bunch of candidates.

They can get a little cocky about this and say, you know, famously

in Iowa, they say, like, well, I've only met a candidate three or four times.

Not sure what I think of him or her at this point.

And so,

but

the kinds of questions that they get asked are usually pretty sophisticated

and certainly not just whatever's playing on cable news.

When the Mueller report came out,

the immediate cable news reaction was, well, what are Democrats going to talk about on the campaign trail?

And having been on the campaign trail at that point for a long time already, six months or something when the Mueller report hit,

it didn't come up that much at all.

And it still hasn't.

And impeachment now is obviously more

an active topic, but even that is not what is coming up so much.

Aaron Powell, here's another question for you.

So, Jim, I mean,

this is not the way that we leave this podcast.

Well,

this is

the improvisational world of journalism, making it up as we go.

So there have been a number of these cable news-sponsored Democratic debates, and there's a line of questioning that to me epitomizes a difference between how people in journalism think about vetting the candidates and how most of the voters do.

And that is all the sort of pushing, looking for minute differences on what the Democrats are going to push about a health care plan.

Is it Medicare for all?

Is it Medicare for all who want it, et cetera, et cetera?

The reason I object to that is my experience in politics teaches me, number one, that whatever they're saying now has basically no bearing on what it would be like to get something through the Congress if any of these people wins.

And number two,

the differences among the Democratic candidates are like 1 percent of the difference between any of them and the Republican position.

And so this seems like it's

a political journalist's attempt to find, oh, here is division among the candidates as opposed to something that matters to the voters.

What say you?

I think we've now had six nights of debates.

Health care has been a topic for about 30 minutes at each of them.

So that's like two hours worth of conversations about healthcare.

Most of them have been inscrutable to me, and I am paid to

go and to be sitting there and to be watching it, and I'm paid to know the details of this.

I do think that there are some fundamental questions of do people actually want to get rid of private insurance, which is what Medicare for All would entail.

How do you pay for Medicare for All if you want to do that?

That's obviously been an issue that Elizabeth Warren was really pressed on in the last debate

and

I think gets at bigger issues for her.

But

I would,

as a professional campaign reporter who has been covering this campaign for now a year.

My first trip to Iowa for the sake of this campaign properly, although the previous one trips also, was the beginning of October 2018.

So over a year of campaign, I could not, and I would challenge the candidates themselves to do better than I would at this point,

tell you the difference really on the details of this plan versus that plan.

What Warren would do, what Sanders would do, what Buddha Judge would do, what Harris would do, what Biden would do,

going down the list.

They all have their health care plans, and they all are different, and they all have smart people who have spent time building the policy.

But

it's all these theories.

And

there was one moment in the second night of the second debate in Detroit when Kirsten Gilbrand, who has since dropped out, stopped the conversation.

She said, you know, I think that this comes down to we as Democrats want to protect Obamacare and build it out and the Republicans want to get rid of it.

And that was one of those moments that just sort of caught the attention of everybody because it is,

these discussions have gone often into very strange places.

And I do think that you also see that each set of moderators, and moderating a debate is hard,

but each one wants to get that answer on health care.

And so they have often been asking the same questions.

a related short question for you, then an observation.

So I was in my mid-20s when I was working for Carter.

I felt as if on the campaign trail I got a year older every day.

Is it the same feeling if you're covering it on the last year?

Are you 100 years older than you're 300 years older than you were?

In covering previous campaigns, I talk about it often as like a vice that you feel getting tightened day by day.

So I'm starting to really feel it, and I think that we will.

By the time the Iowa caucus has come on February 3rd, we'll see.

I might have as much gray hair as you, Jim.

You'll be as old as me then.

Then you'll overtake me.

All right.

Well,

let's just close with this.

You have spent all this time going around to these towns.

We have this

overlay of national politics and national division and the national conversation.

Where does this all land us?

Are we going to be okay as a country?

I realize when James Bennett, our former Atlantic editor, I was talking with him six or eight years ago

when he was here, and I was saying that essentially every piece I've done for the Atlantic in 40 years has essentially had the theme, is America going to make it?

Because it's been from the Vietnam era, you know, through Japan and China or whatever.

And I think that it is not certain that the American national governing model is going to make it.

One of the arguments I pushed in my time in in China is that only a country with as many things in its favor as the U.S.

has, scale, resources, all the institutions we have, location, et cetera, only a country with as much in its favor as the U.S.

has could stand our system of national government, which I think is really

out of date in many ways.

So it is possible that it's sort of reached its breaking point.

It is more likely, I think, and I say this having seen a lot of bad times for the U.S.

myself personally and having tried to learn about them, it is possible and more likely that there will be a sense in the public, we're better than this, we can do better.

We have all these examples locally of schools and drug programs and sustainability programs, and somebody will come up, as happened with Carter, you know, 40 plus years ago, just saying that

we can do better.

And so I think we will find a way to be okay, but the battle is with all of us every day.

All right, Jim Falos, thanks for being here on Radio Atlantic.

My pleasure, Isaac.

Thank you.

That'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

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Catch you next week.

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