This Rural Congresswoman Thinks Democrats Have Lost Their Minds. She Has a Point.

Opinion

Guest Essay

Jan. 12, 2026

By James Pogue

Mr. Pogue, a contributing Opinion writer, has been covering 

rural America and the West for 15 years.

This essay is the fifth installment in a series on the thinkers, upstarts, and ideologues battling for control of the Democratic Party.

In July, Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington proposed an amendment to a bill, calling for an inquiry into what she described as a “plague in this country of headlight brightness.”

She introduced the provision in a short speech in which she lapsed into obscenity and suggested that blinding lights on American roads were part of the inexorable deterioration in basic quality of life so many people feel today, implicitly gibed her fellow members for their failures to respond to that feeling and seemed to acknowledge that many of her listeners had heard talk like this before. When a solitary colleague interrupted to clap, she turned and joked, “I’ll give you your $20 later.”

A Democrat, she was gesturing to the central point of her political project, which has remained obscure to many political observers, even as her profile has risen sharply in the past year. She implored people in the room to show that they were “living in the same reality” as regular people, and suggested that paying attention to the sense of helplessness or the anger caused by small issues like the proliferation of absurdly bright headlights offered a path to a more profound and potentially radical new style of Democratic politics. “He who is faithful in a small thing,” she quoted from the Gospel of Luke, “is faithful in a great thing also.”

Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez is 37 and lives on a homestead in rural Skamania County, Wash., not far from Portland, Ore. She owns an auto repair shop with her husband and drives a 1997 Toyota Land Cruiser to the Capitol.

Her worldview is widely held in rural America but almost completely unrepresented in national politics — neither reactionary nor exactly liberal; skeptical of big business and big government alike. She believes our society ought to be oriented toward working with your hands, living in nature and fostering deep and considered connection to a community. Her two biggest influences, her former senior adviser guessed, are the Bible and the ruralist Kentucky farmer-author Wendell Berry.

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez was 34 when she flipped Washington’s Third Congressional District. Now she’s taking aim at the Democratic elite.

When we first spoke in the summer of 2024, Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez was in the middle of her first re-election campaign, and analysts were calling her one of the most vulnerable members of Congress. She’d come from nowhere in 2022 to win a crowded primary, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee refused to back this strange young candidate, running in a district Donald Trump had won twice. She won by less than 3,000 votes.

Once in Congress, she angered the left by voting against President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan and repeatedly criticizing his administration’s incomprehensible border policy. On Election Day in 2024, The Hill’s poll tracker gave her only a 23 percent chance of holding her seat. “Trump won my district,” she reminded me later. “I won by more.”

She was suddenly a star. She was feted on cable news and “hailed by some as a model,” as The Associated Press put it — a thrilling example of how Democrats could win back the rural and working-class voters who have turned so rapidly away from the party. She seemed, to some of the most prominent commentators in the Democratic sphere, to promise that this could be done by simply adopting a bit of Bill Clinton’s folksy, business-friendly moderation. This view was based on a misunderstanding.

Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez’s signature cause is known as the “right to repair.” In its simplest form, it is a call for manufacturers to make smartphones and farm equipment and headlights that can be fixed and tinkered with at home — so it’s possible to truly own them, unlike the disposable products or subscription services that surround us today.

To make this possible at any real scale, you’d have to change the whole value system shaping our increasingly financialized society, which incentivizes the rapid consumption of cheap imported goods and businesses built on the collection of what policy types describe as rents, rather than producing material things of lasting value. That’s what Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez has set out to do.

“We don’t want to be perpetual renters of disposable crap,” she told an interviewer for the website Front Porch Republic. “We want things that last.”

For the past half-century, the promise of affordable mass consumption has been the central justification for a host of changes that reshaped America as we know it, driving inequality, disrupting life in whole regions and contributing to a pervasive feeling that we’ve been reduced to “hapless consumers,” as Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez put it to me, describing what she calls the “high cost of cheap goods.”

To question the value of those goods, though, is to question the judgment of the leaders who sold them to us.

This reckoning has been central to the MAGA movement. The Trump administration’s mass deportations and tariffs are the twin pillars of an attempt to create an economic system governed not by gross domestic product data and consumer spending, but by conservative values and nationalist geostrategic ends. Kids don’t “need 37 dolls,” Mr. Trump has said. They should have “three dolls or four.”

Democrats have avoided a reckoning of their own. Their party remains defined by faith in the power of data and expert knowledge, and this has made it difficult for Democrats to really understand criticisms of a system that has brought many Americans a vast bounty of easily measured material wealth. It’s hard to entertain criticisms of the liberal technocratic order when you’re trying to defend it against a populist insurrection.

Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez is offering her party a path out of this trap. Her central argument is that academics, economists and political consultants tend to fixate on a set of narrow, divisive issues that obscure what’s really driving alienation and anger in our society today. That angst, for many, is about a basic worry that neither party is seriously listening to today: a fear that we are losing what the philosopher Henri Bergson once described as an “open society” and replacing it with a society of the “anthill” — with most people living a drone-like existence, reduced to data points in a system run by technocrats and corporations. It’s a way of life that’s anathema to both America’s economic promise and its cultural traditions.

I know of little polling or expert data to back up this view. That is, however, a reflection of the problem Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez is trying to solve. She is now the most visible member of a small movement that has taken the name of the decades-old Blue Dog congressional caucus.

The Blue Dogs have been arguing that Democrats cannot win over rural or working-class voters simply by studying them; the party will have to elevate people who genuinely share their values and concerns — even if those values and concerns are an uncomfortable fit with those of the people guiding the party today.

This little movement may well get driven out of the party before Democrats grasp what it’s truly offering. Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez recently started a podcast called “Blue Dog Radio” with Jared Golden, a congressman from Maine who represents the most conservative district held by any Democrat in the House. Mr. Golden sometimes describes himself as a “progressive conservative,” and he is virtually the only vocal critic of globalization left in the Democratic Party.

Together, they’ve tried to articulate a friendly and Americana-inflected cultural politics “for people who still believe in community, country and the common good,” as the intro to one of the podcast episodes put it, coupled with an economic vision that is arguably more radical than programs offered by many leftists. It encompasses antimonopoly policies, right to repair and regulatory changes to smooth the path for people to start businesses, buy and work land, even build their own houses and invent things.

Jared Golden, a Maine congressman, believes you can’t win back the working class unless you elevate leaders who understand their concerns and values.

Mr. Golden has backed a 10 percent base-line tariff. Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez voted for the SAVE Act, requiring proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections. These are popular positions in their districts, but Democrats who see politics as a national contest between warring camps often deride the Blue Dogs as “Trump-lite,” or worse. (Even the “Blue Dog” moniker risks alienating cultural liberals, many of whom remember the group in its previous incarnation — as an “old-school, largely Southern boys’ club” within Congress, as one Washington Post piece put it.)

They have had a hard time securing a place in Congress, despite having unparalleled success in areas where Democrats often struggle. In 2024, Mary Peltola, a Native Alaskan best known for her work on a fishery policy board, lost a House seat she’d won two years earlier with a platform of “Fish, Family, Freedom.” (She announced that she was running for Senate on Monday.) Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez is now facing a liberal primary challenger. Mr. Golden, facing his own primary challenge, recently announced he was withdrawing from his 2026 race.

A party that was able to absorb the lesson of why these candidates have been successful, though, could be a truly national party again. It would be in a position to see not just why it has become so culturally off-putting to so many Americans, but also why it has failed to advance its priorities on issues like climate change. It could even, potentially, be a party willing to imagine another possible future — one that differs from both reactionary Trumpism and the system we have now.

America today would look very different if it weren’t for a view encoded in economic textbooks and the beliefs of most policy professionals: that the “ultimate purpose” of our economy, as the head of Dwight Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisers once put it, “is to produce things for consumers.”

In 2012, the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, famously questioned whether true well-being could be shown by metrics that mostly capture the volume of stuff we have, a term now used in some political debates to mean everything from Chinese bike parts to energy to condos. Mr. Bernanke acknowledged that we lacked a good measure for “autonomy,” the importance of “social ties and community” and “perceived inequality.”

The new Blue Dog movement is, in part, a reflection of a wide and rapidly growing intellectual sphere focused on finding a way to capture those variables and build a better politics that takes them into account. It’s visible in publications like Front Porch Republic and in the breakout success of my friend Paul Kingsnorth’s book “Against the Machine.” People in this realm might have described Mr. Bernanke as suffering from “spreadsheet brain.” Do you really need 10 years of data to conclude that it’s not a great idea to let kids have smartphones in junior high math classes? Or to predict that Mr. Bernanke’s policies, designed to foster growth by boosting stock prices, would alienate the 80 percent of Americans who don’t hold significant assets?

The policies he put in place during the Great Recession widened the difference between our material well-being and the kind of agency the Blue Dogs care about. Americans could now easily afford a new flat-screen TV, but they were losing the ability to buy a house and start a family, set up a bike repair shop, or purchase some land and step away from the rat race.

To solve this problem, you have to understand how we got to this point. The economic historian Nic Johnson recently depicted the global economy as a vast “conveyor belt”: Capital continuously flows into safe and fungible American assets, offering American financial institutions, as well as the federal government, huge pools of money and raising the value of the dollar, which, in turn, makes material goods, from timber to phones, expensive relative to those produced abroad. The money gets lent out at mass scale, driving economic dynamism in sectors like tech, which powers G.D.P. growth, while making manufacturing, logging and farming less and less relevant to how we create and measure value in this country.

This is what Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez means when she says that “work has been devalued” in America today.

In 2000, Bill Clinton smoothed China’s entry onto the global conveyor belt, leading to what came to be known as the “China Shock.” Close to six million American manufacturing jobs were lost over the course of the next decade.

It was quite a “‘whoops’ moment,” the journalist Michael Hirsh later wrote, in an account of economists reckoning with “all the ruined American communities and displaced millions of workers” who became casualties of this experiment. Even when officials in the Biden administration came to criticize the idea that “all growth is good,” many prominent Democrats still pointed to the “central importance” of importing inexpensive goods, as former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers put it. “That is a substantial part of what determines the living standards of Americans.”

This technocratic fixation on the material comfort offered by cheap things made it hard for many people guiding Democratic policy to grasp the revulsion many Americans felt about a system that produces a handful of hugely successful businesses in sectors such as tech, but reduces many of us to the life of the anthill: buying stuff rather than producing, accumulating debts rather than owning things and paying as many monthly fees as possible. Many Americans think that this is the system Democrats want.

JD Vance once said to me that if his project were successful, he and his allies would restore a world where his son’s “masculinity” would be devoted to serving his community and nation, rather than functioning as a cog in a consumer system designed by consultants at McKinsey — a soulless future “worse than anything, in your wildest nightmares.”

Many liberals only hear these kinds of critiques of the global economy through the MAGA right. So they often assume that our only choices are between some kind of reactionary fascism and saving the system we have. In an account of a recent public debate over the merits of the so-called abundance agenda, and whether or not the “stuff” it promises could answer the real needs of our society today, Ted Nordhaus, the founder and president of the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental think tank, wrote that it was impossible to get “culture and community back without bringing poverty and precarity, provincialism and patriarchy along for the ride.”

This is the sort of abstract thinking that Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez loathes. “I just think it’s too dumb to debate,” she said. The idea that any rejection of a narrow economic conception of a good life must involve “some kind of fascism or Luddism” is “false thinking.”

Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez thinks her party is missing what’s really driving alienation and anger in our society today.Credit...M. Scott Brauer for The New York Times

It took me a long time, and several conversations with Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez, Mr. Golden and the people around them before I understood what they meant with their project to “make politics real again,” as a recent profile in the journal Compact put it.

I later stumbled on a typically icy description of the problem, though, in a dispatch by Joan Didion about Michael Dukakis’s 1988 campaign. She described witnessing the rise of a “new kind of managerial elite,” who “tend to speak of the world not necessarily as it is but as they want people out there to believe it is.”

Ms. Didion drew a distinction the Blue Dogs often make — between a theoretical understanding of the world and the kind of anecdotal knowledge experts often dismiss. Mr. Golden, similarly, talks about governing from the “gut” and about how he hopes for more Blue Dogs who could sit “on the back porch, smoke cigarettes and drink beer” and, as he said pointedly, “know when they’re the butt of the joke.”

“Spreadsheets can contain a part of truth,” Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez told me. “But never all of truth.”

Looking to illustrate this, I bought the recent book “White Rural Rage” and opened it more or less at random to a passage about rural pickup trucks. It cites a rich portfolio of data and even a scholarly expert on the psychology of truck purchasers, to make what might seem like an obvious point — that it’s inefficient and deluded for rural and suburban men to choose trucks as their daily driving vehicles. The passage never does explain, though, how you’re supposed to haul an elk carcass or pull a cargo trailer without one.

It’s all but impossible to go into any rural bar in America today, ask for thoughts on pickup trucks and not hear complaints about the size of trucks these days, about touch screens and silly gimmicks manufacturers use to justify their ballooning prices. Our economy, awash in cheap capital, has turned quality used trucks into something like a luxury asset class.

It’s often more affordable in the near-term to buy a new truck than a reliable used one. Manufacturers are incentivized by federal regulations, and by the basic imperatives of the thing economy, to produce ever-bigger trucks for ever-higher prices to lock people into a cycle of consumption and debt that often lasts a lifetime.

This looks like progress, in G.D.P. figures, but we are rapidly grinding away the freedom and agency once afforded by the ability to buy a good, reasonable-size truck that you could work on yourself and own fully. You can learn a lot about why people feel so alienated in our economy if you ask around about the pickup truck market.

Instead, the authors of “White Rural Rage” consulted data and an expert to argue that driving a pickup reflects a desire to “stay atop society’s hierarchy,” but they do not actually try to reckon much with the problem that passage raises — that consumer choices, such as buying trucks, have become a way for many Americans to express the deep attachment they have to a life rooted in the physical world. A reader might conclude that people who want a vehicle to pull a boat or haul mulch are misguided, or even dangerous. And a party led by people who believe that is doomed among rural voters, the Midwestern working class and probably American men in general.

This approach to politics governed by data and experts is what we mean when we talk about technocracy. It’s a system that no longer really functions today because the broad societal trust that once allowed data and experts to guide political choices has broken down. Democrats, increasingly, live in a world where data and researchers convincingly show that low-wage immigration raises the economy and our gun laws are reckless and misguided.

Conservatives, increasingly, don’t really care what this data says. No one produces data on what’s lost when an influx of migrants rapidly changes the culture of a small town or the pride that comes from living in a nation with an armed citizenry. The result has been a kind of breakdown in our shared national sense of reality.

The New York Times

A few years ago, I was at the election-night party for Representative Liz Cheney’s last Republican primary race, which she lost. A folksy and hipster-inflected country band was playing by the bar, and at one point they played “Paradise,” by John Prine, who often sang about loss and dislocation in Middle America, even as he retained his hippie ambivalence about what conservatism came to represent. You could think of him as the bard of this new style of Blue Dogism.

Discussing this moment later, a rancher threw out the idea that John Prine Democrats, as he called them, could save America if they ever became a coherent force in our politics. “Our thesis is that you have to speak to the cultural stuff,” said Phil Gardner, a leader of a new group called Blue Dog Action, which has raised $2.5 million since it began in May and is recruiting new Blue Dog-aligned candidates. “That’s what the left doesn’t get.”

He was describing a kind of politics Democrats rarely imagine today. The Blue Dogs talk a lot about dislocation, whether it’s the cultural loss Alaska Natives face when a salmon fishery collapses and they have to leave their fishing towns, or the ghosts Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez talks about wanting to represent in her own district: “The invisible graveyard looms very large in my mind,” she has said. “The families that got kicked out, that had their trucks repossessed, that lost their land, that committed suicide. That is as vital to me as getting a lens on why we are where we are.”

This kind of thinking can strike many people today as reactionary. The Blue Dogs see it as inseparable from policies that actually work, and appeal to real people.

Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez, like all the Blue Dogs, has a background that lets her see both sides of this picture. She grew up in Texas amid a conservative home-schooling circle, with a gay brother and a Mexican immigrant father. She’s still deeply religious and capable of summoning a Bible verse for almost any occasion, but she talks often about how a near-fatal miscarriage helped to cement her support for legal abortion. “I’ll protect our freedoms,” one campaign ad put it, “the Second Amendment and our right to make our own health care decisions.” This is what Mr. Golden means by “progressive conservative.”

Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez can seem almost showy in the way she describes her rural mind-set. She talked on “The Ezra Klein Show” about how she would rather give her kid dirt, strings and sticks than toys to play with, and she likes to hike in volcanic areas where the iron-rich rocks make compasses malfunction.

The first time we spoke, I said that I’d recently been in her district to visit people I described as anarchist beekeepers. “Who do you know?” she asked immediately. She guessed they might be friends.

Growing up, she split time between Texas and small-town Washington, where her mother’s family had worked for generations in the region’s timber industry.

They had seen up close how a series of complex environmental and regulatory fights in the 1990s were recast as an abstract conflict between loggers and environmentalists. First, forestry experts and managers got swept up in what one researcher called a “conspiracy of optimism” and began approving timber sales at a rate that would have swiftly destroyed America’s last great old-growth forests.

Then the prevailing expert paradigm shifted. The clear-cut forestlands began to grow back in overpopulated and dense stands of trees, and regulations and opposition by environmentalists made it virtually impossible to do the forest-management projects that residents of all persuasions agree were needed to reduce the risk of massive wildfires.

The Sierra Club maintained a blanket “no cut policy,” and one of its longtime board members, the ecologist Chad Hanson, wrote a book describing calls for this kind of work as “environmental hate speech.” The result was a betrayal of a promise the federal government made when it established the National Forest system: a model based on “stewardship,” as Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez puts it, carried on by “people who live where they work, and who are dependent on a relationship to the woods.”

I was living in rural California in 2021 when the small town of Greenville burned to the ground — after rural pleas for programs to reduce the risk of megafires had largely been ignored. The fires the previous year had released more carbon emissions than the state’s complex cap-and-trade program had saved in its entire history. Some prominent commentators then began to argue against rebuilding burned towns and urged rural people to consider moving to cities because of the risk of wildfire.

The tragedy here is that an environmental movement that had paid a bit more attention to rural perspectives and a bit less attention to urban transit policy would have had a chance in the Pacific Northwest to build something genuinely transformative for American environmental politics, mobilizing people in ways that would have addressed both ecological issues and the overwhelming desire in much of rural America for jobs doing productive work out in natural landscapes.

“It’s always the people with the least amount of power who foot the bill,” Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez argued to me. “We’re not out here lobbying members of Congress to, like, tell the fuller picture.”

The Blue Dogs talk a lot about dislocation, whether it’s the cultural loss Alaska Natives face when a salmon fishery collapses or the ghosts Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez talks about wanting to represent in her district. Credit...Amanda Lucier for The New York Times

Leland Olds, one of the great New Deal-era technocrats, talked in the early 20th century about his despairing hopes of finding a new order in an unequal, divided and chaotic nation. America had welcomed a huge surge of immigrants, and the economic and technological changes of the industrial age had created a society divided between a few winners and a growing, angry underclass.

Olds talked about how neither fascism nor European-style statist socialism was a practical unifying vision in America, with its unique politics and culture. He looked for a “promise, answering the yearning of people in an American environment,” which had so far “been lacking.”

Olds became chairman of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Federal Power Commission and his rural electrification program helped to bring the promise of new technology and industry home for rural Americans. The system he helped build worked in part because it came together piecemeal. A generation later, Lyndon Johnson could go campaign for John F. Kennedy in little towns in rural Virginia asking, “What’s Dick Nixon ever done for Culpeper?”

This is the kind of moment Democrats are facing today. It’s entirely possible that Republicans will prove so divided and incompetent that they will virtually hand power back to Democrats, the party promising to restore us to normal. This won’t absolve Democrats, or anyone hoping to govern America, of the need to offer a political vision that speaks to the great issues of our age: the tyranny of tech in our lives, the financialization of our economy and the geographic and social cleavages shaping our country.

I don’t think Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez or any of the Blue Dogs have all the answers. Some of her choices, like voting to support Israel’s war in Gaza, have alienated potential young or left-wing allies, and she sometimes seems to disdain the effort of trying to win people over. But she is making an important point: that you make choices based on a new value system, even if all this means at first is encouraging manufacturers to make a washing machine that again lasts 20 years. Catch-as-catch-can, a new order might well emerge.

The hardest part for Democrats is that no new vision will be possible without a changeover in the professional political class guiding the party. “That’s the main hope,” Mr. Golden told me. He sounded disillusioned when we talked, having seen his own idiosyncratic program of listening to Maine’s blueberry farmers and lobstermen swamped in a campaign that cost $58 million in 2024. He had little option but to run at least in part on the terms of the consultants he blames for making politics abstract.

“I look at some of that and I just don’t even feel like it’s talking about me,” he told me. “But this Blue Dog movement is a lot bigger than me, and what it will mean is drawing people who actually come from and care about these communities.”

During a debate in her second campaign, Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez dismissed her opponent’s immigration policy. “He wants a white majority,” she said. “I want a secure border.” She didn’t support a mass deportation program, but she thought the fentanyl problem was real and that there were people to blame for it.

There is a path here, if Democrats want to take it. The first time we spoke, Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez brought up a term from motorcycling. Democrats, she said, had grown so obsessed with the threat of fascism that for them, it had become an “obstacle fixation” — an intense focus that causes you to end up running right into the thing you’re afraid of hitting. “You do not save democracy by running around, yelling about saving democracy. You do it by demonstrating that democracy and Democratic values deliver better quality of life for normal people.”

At the time, I thought it was a cheap metaphor. A lot of liberal fears about Trumpism seemed justified to me. I wasn’t thinking, though, about how obstacle fixation works in the real world. It narrows your field of vision, until all you see is the object you’re trying to avoid. You focus so much that you can’t see the path that would take you around it, and on down the road.

James Pogue is a contributing Opinion writer.