Russell Dalton, one of America’s politically homeless, speaks:

I am a union tradesman. Our bread is buttered maintaining the coal-fired, gas-fired, and nuclear power plants that scatter this country and provide the only reliable sources of power to keep our iPhones and electric cars charged. Yet as a citizen who casts his ballot like everyone else, I keep asking myself, who represents our interest? To put it succinctly: No one. …

The Democrats long ago turned their back on the working class. They abandoned Labor. They cheered as honest work was sent overseas. Yet they still take our union money and hope we don’t notice when they side with the Sierra Club.

It is Democrats who now occupy every cultural, financial, political, and educational institution, yet somehow maintain the façade that they’re still the underdog. Then they’re repulsed upon facing the actual underdogs. …

Republicans are just Democrats with a five-year lag time, chasing the same pool of money and spreading a different set of lies. They do not believe themselves worthy to rule and do not posses the confidence in themselves to govern. What little authority they allow themselves to flex is happily deployed in service of pumping the brakes. Without the ability to steer the ship, they giddily become the tugboat of controlled opposition.

So where does that leave a tradesman like me?

Politically homeless and cast aside.

There are millions more like Russell Dalton experiencing the same frustration and feelings of political homelessness and alienation. But here’s the thing: millions of Americans have always felt politically homeless, I think partly because the nature of democratic politics is that it creates faction and confrontational friend/enemy conflict.

Our political parties are, like it or not, the machines by which political power is exercised in American institutions and in public life.