Pennsylvania is in the national spotlight this week in a way many Pennsylvanians would have liked to avoid, thanks to one of the weirdest and most hostile primary election seasons in recent memory. The state is usually a moderate state that reliably produces center-right and center-left politicians.
Not this year. Its parties are poised to nominate candidates who represent their farthest wings.
Conventional wisdom is that this is always a sign of deterioration in our political system, but it doesn’t have to be. Having a wider range of views and voices represented in Harrisburg and Washington can be a good thing. It can drive our leaders, and everyday voters, out of complacency. Voices on the edges of the parties can open eyes to new insights and therefore to innovative solutions to our problems. Sometimes “fringe” candidates shift the consensus about what is possible in good ways.
Not with candidates who endorse Donald Trump’s dangerous stolen-election fantasies. State Sen. Doug Mastriano and pundit Kathy Barnette wouldn’t shift Pennsylvania politics toward some new and better place: They would shift it out of the realm of fact and into that of fiction. If this happens, the state Republican Party will have only itself to blame for allowing overcrowded fields of egotists to split the vote, rather than rallying around a better alternative.
The main Democratic candidates for the Senate, the odds-on favorite John Fetterman and Conor Lamb, hold views well on the other side. In economics, Fetterman sits to the left of the mainstream of his party. But neither believes fantasies. Their politics are based on normal concerns.
At the same time, both parties’ leaders continue to fail to grasp the deep sense of unease and alienation that is driving so many voters to the right and to the left. It’s inflation and abortion, infrastructure and foreign policy, broken supply chains and cancel culture. Even more than that, it’s the sense — felt by people on right and left — that leaders of business, government and media share a small and powerful little world and don’t know what’s going on in their lives, and don’t really care. It’s the fear that they can lose their way of life.
Thus the figures who seem to stand against that elite attract attention and admiration, especially from both party’s bases. Those people seem to speak for them. The parties need to capture that chaotic energy and channel it into constructive discourse about the future of America, without capitulating to their fringes.
This year’s political experience will, we hope, drive Republican and Democratic leadership to seek a new and healthier political equilibrium. It would be a tragedy if they gave in to further polarization and demagoguery.
First Published: May 15, 2022, 7:00 p.m.