One of the better understandings I’ve read of the current American mindset is Ben Casselman’s Five Thirty Eight piece “The Economy Is Better — Why Don’t Voters Believe It?” The reporter travels to Davenport, Iowa, to get a sense of why voters in a city with a mercifully low unemployment rate still have a profound fear of falling. 

The passage below is poignant and a little heartbreaking. Local citizens (and others, no doubt, across America) yearn for a return to the time when you were educated when you were young and then coasted to success for the rest of your life on that foundation. Not only is that not coming back, but it’s going further and further away. We’re just at the beginning of a very bumpy technological and cultural transition.

An excerpt:

I was in Davenport just days before a closely contested local election in which the city’s mayor was unseated after eight years in office. The campaign was focused on local issues — a riverfront development project, a new on-shore casino, the controversial firing of the city manager — but Jason Gordon, a city alderman running for re-election, said he had heard voters talk about how the economy had changed.

Gordon, who was re-elected, got his start in politics working for U.S. Rep. Jim Leach, a moderate Republican, and is drawn to mainstream presidential candidates, not the insurgents. (Local government races in Davenport are nonpartisan.) But he said he understood voters’ concern about the long-term direction of the economy.

“This is a county that 40 years ago, you could go to college and you’d be set for life, or you could come out of high school and get a job at Deere or Case or wherever and also be set for life with a solid, middle-class lifestyle,” he said. “That doesn’t exist here anymore, and I don’t think it exists anywhere anymore.”

The recession may not have hit Davenport hard, Gordon added, but it nonetheless revealed how fragile the economy can be, shattering what was left of the illusion of stability.

“If you look at a lot of the numbers, unemployment and other data, they look good, but I still sense some angst that you’re one development away from a dire set of circumstances,” Gordon said. “It’s not your house that burned down, but your neighbor’s did.”•