“As I traveled between Clarksburg and Chicago in that year of election, I was sometimes struck that, for all their differences, Black Chicagoans and white Appalachians had come to share a sensation that was calcifying in America’s political culture – a feeling of being trapped by an undertow of economics and history, of being ill-served by institutions, of being estranged from a political machinery that was refined, above all, to serve itself.”
