A progressive Dem’s plan to save ‘Trump Country’ | Will Bunch Newsletter

It’s Groundhog Day! OK, technically this uniquely American holiday is observed tomorrow — the day when Punxsutawney Phil grabs the groundhog spotlight back from TV’s annoying lottery hawker, Gus. But with COVID-19, Donald Trump’s non-stop blather, and an endlessly frigid winter, I’m feel like I’m hearing Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You, Babe” on the clock radio every day at 6 a.m. How about you?

Did someone forward you this email? Sign up to receive this newsletter weekly at inquirer.com/bunch, and we promise you a different tune every Tuesday morning.

Referring to the vast rural and industrial American Heartland as “flyover country” has become politically incorrect — reeking of coastal elite condescension — yet the phrase aptly describes the life journey of Philadelphia-area native Ro Khanna.

Raised by his Indian immigrant parents in suburban Bucks County, the Council Rock High School grad got his precocious teen political letters published in the Courier Times before flying west as a young man to make a career in Silicon Valley as a lawyer. Then, he flew back over Middle America for Washington when his Northern California district sent the progressive Democrat to Congress in 2016, where he still serves.

Khanna, a 2020 presidential campaign adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, is arguably the last member of Congress you’d expect to become an advocate for the economic revival of the rust-bitten Midwest or the rural South. But he experienced a lightbulb moment when he joined a GOP colleague on a fact-finding trip to the rolling hills of Kentucky during his first term. He saw how the giants of Big Tech — many of them his constituents or campaign donors back in Silicon Valley — could power job growth in America’s forgotten counties. And this sparked an even bigger idea about how rural and Rust Belt development could save democracy.

Khanna has turned his Big Idea into a book — Dignity in a Digital Age: Making Tech Work For All of Us, officially out today — that seeks to flip today’s big debates the growing power of tech giants like Amazon or Meta/Facebook and address the political resentment held by rural voters who feel disrespected by coastal elites. Speaking to me Monday by phone from New York where he was about to tape Late Night With Stephen Colbert, this congressman for one of America’s most affluent and educated districts in America, explained his ideas for growth in the regions where access to learning and wealth have lagged.

» READ MORE: From Council Rock to Congress: Philly-born Ro Khanna is saving U.S. foreign policy from itself | Will Bunch

Khanna explained that most Americans crave what he calls “pride of place.” It’s what he felt in his close-knit and striving middle-class neighborhood growing up in Holland, Pa. but has been robbed from communities with shuttered factories, empty church pews, and rising deaths of despair. “It’s not just lost jobs,” Khanna said, talking about the resentment in these counties that voted heavily for Donald Trump in the last two elections. “And it’s not just telling their kids to move to where the jobs are, but that it’s done in the most condescending and insulting way.”

Not surprisingly for Silicon Valley’s man in D.C., Khanna calls himself “a progressive capitalist,” and the path he envisions in Dignity in a Digital Age — not only for the stereotypical “Trump Country” but also for nonwhite blue-collar swaths of the South and Southwest — involves a partnership of tech firms, government, and higher ed. That means he supports ideas such as the federal government requiring its tech contractors to guarantee new jobs in rural areas, and colleges and universities inventing new kinds of programs that target today’s labor market yet may not require the massive expense of a four-year diploma.

“This is not some charade of, ‘Let’s turn everybody into a coder,’” Khanna said, even as his book notes that new technologies and the work-from-home-ethos that’s arisen during the long pandemic has made it possible for software engineers to now thrive in places like the Kentucky areas that he visited (which bills itself, only half-jokingly, as “Silicon Holler”). He sees last month’s announcement by Intel of a $20 billion investment to build two large silicon plants in central Ohio — with 3,000 permanent jobs and 7,000 more in construction — as an example of what can be done if tech CEOs take a broader view of economic development.

In writing about Big Tech’s role in modern America, Khanna dances close to an overheated third rail, at a fraught moment when politicians on all sides talk about breaking up, regulating, or somehow clamping down on these too-powerful platforms. Khanna told me there needs to be more competition and more rights for consumers. But he also thinks a smarter, more egalitarian vision from the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world could draw the internet back to its original dream of connecting communities and people’s best ideas, rather than spreading misinformation and political venom.

For Khanna, the real goal of both a World Wide Web working for citizens and creating good jobs outside of elite coastal enclaves is the same: a renewed sense of community. That, he believes, can in turn can fulfill the deferred U.S. promise of the world’s first true multi-racial and multi-ethnic democracy — where a child of Indian migrants can thrive, but so can a deep-rooted Kentuckian.

“We have to have an aspirational, patriotic vision for America,” Khanna said. “It can’t all be doomer-ish.” The question, of course, is whether those bleak views of an ever-deteriorating culture war — in which many in so-called “Trump Country” are well past the point of trusting educated outsiders like Khanna — can supersede the once-universal faith in the power of economic development. His new book seems an incredibly timely read. Hopefully it’s not too late.

Question: Why isn’t the media freaking out over Trump’s statement last night about overturning the election? Why aren’t lawmakers? — Via Heather Cox Richardson (@HC_Richardson) on Twitter

Answer: It’s not every week I get a question from such a luminary — Richardson, the Boston College historian and author, writes the uber-popular Letters from an American newsletter. She’s referring to the 45th president’s own news release in which he confessed to asking his veep Mike Pence to “overturn the election” at the January 6, 2021 certification, which Pence refused to do. It’s the latest in a series of overt acts that sure seem criminal in nature — whether confessing his role in a January 6 conspiracy, obstructing justice, or trying to intimidate prosecutors — that Trump carries out in broad daylight. He seeks to numb journalists or lawmakers into complacency — how could it be a crime if he admits it in public? — and it’s worked his entire life. It’s past time for our milquetoast Attorney General Merrick Garland to act, and prove our presidents are not above the law.

They say it’s lonely at the top, but President Biden must have been a tad taken aback last week with the icy welcome he — almost — received from Pennsylvania Democrats on his infrastructure-plan-boosting trip to Pittsburgh. With the 46th president’s approval numbers taking a big hit — over everything from inflation to lingering COVID-19 to general malaise — two of the Keystone State’s best-known Democrats with big 2022 ambitions initially claimed “scheduling conflicts” prevented them from being seen with Biden. While attorney general and lone Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Josh Shapiro stayed away Friday (although he did release a tweet of shooting a basketball called by retired 76ers voice Marc Zumoff), lieutenant governor and Senate hopeful John Fetterman had an abrupt change of plans. When a major bridge over Pittsburgh’s Frick Park collapsed, Fetterman raced to the scene in his trademark winter shorts, where he met Biden — who also diverted to the scene — and exchanged some kind words with POTUS.

» READ MORE: If Dems want to save American democracy, they need to do these 4 things ASAP | Will Bunch

And that’s what Fetterman should have been doing all along! The reality is that there are two competing narratives about both Biden and the Democratic Party right now. The first — embraced not just by the president’s Republican foes but also by much of the mainstream media eager to prove its toughness toward a president not named Trump — is the glass half-empty storyline. The glass-half-full saga is the booming job market and overall economy — aided by Biden’s $1.9 trillion on COVID-19 relief — as well as the passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the restoration of decency and ethics to the Oval Office after The Former Guy. When fearful, deer-in-the-headlines Dems like Shapiro or pre-bridge-collapse Fetterman make headlines for avoiding Biden, they are confirming the “Biden is a failure” narrative, and making it likely that they will lose in November in a GOP tidal wave. It may be the dumbest political strategy I’ve ever seen.