The State Without Qualities
It’s difficult to conjure a Pennsylvanian in the mind’s eye, to extract a cultural essence. Pennsylvania is a cipher. It is not appreciably part of a region – not the northeast, not the Chesapeake, not the Midwest, not the Rust Belt; for geographic reasons, it includes cultural and historical elements of all of these regions, and yet, historically, Pennsylvania is important (the Keystone State), even central.
Pennsylvania (William Penn’s “holy experiment”) was, because of its Quaker inheritance, the most peaceful, least rapacious of the original thirteen colonies; and the Constitutional Convention took place in Philadelphia. Across the 19th and part of the 20th centuries, much of the country – from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Chrysler Building – was built with steel forged in Pittsburgh or Bethlehem. The Pennsylvania Railroad was “The Standard Railroad of the World.”
And yet there’s no essential Pennsylvania culture, or even broad regional culture (there is no “Passhole” equivalent to the “Masshole”). Pennsylvania, the former middle colony, is, to a meaningful degree, a collection of regional identities; at the middle of the American spectrum.
Pennsylvania – and I’m echoing James Carville here – might contain several states nested between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. In the eastern half, where I’m from, you have the Main Line, a sliver of coastal, elite, colonial, WASP-elite culture; you also get the tougher Philly culture: Rocky, Its Always Sunny, WIP, Iggles.
Pennsylvania is a deeply heterogeneous state. It runs east to west, from the edges of coastal elite territory, through woods and mountains, to the fringes of Appalachia and the Midwest. Northeastern Pennsylvania is part of the Rust Belt, where coal mines stand empty. Then there’s deer hunter country, Amish country, and Pennsylvania Dutch settlements. Pittsburgh’s got its own accent, industrial history, and sports culture. Allentown, the third largest city, is now largely Hispanic. There’s old WASP families, Jews in the suburbs, Eastern Europeans in the coal towns, New York transplants, Italians in South Philly, Polish in Scranton, Mennonites in Lancaster, Vietnamese in Harrisburg, Italian-Americans up the Schuylkill, Irish in the coal regions, Black communities in the cities.
Pennsylvania almost feels like an AI simulation of America; it has all the historical inputs in some way. It is a weird state.
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For the first time maybe since 1789, Pennsylvania is the center of American political life. Pennsylvania will likely decide the presidential election – the Lehigh Valley, where I’m from, the third most populated, and maybe the least politically predictable part of the state, may, by extension, swing the election for the entire country. The stakes for voting in Pennsylvania are high; the temperature has been turned up. Elon is raffling away millions; there are already claims of election fraud; there are tensions in my own family, in my fiancé’s family; I imagine in just about every native Pennsylvanian’s family.
And when that, or this, happens – when you're a writer or media figure from a place that other media figures and editors find obscure – you will find yourself called upon to psychoanalyze your own roots, to historicize your neighbors and your family and friends, to try to make sense of what they’re doing and why. You’ll be called upon to develop a theory, to make the heterogeneous lumps of America into a synthetic whole. But as I sketched above – this is uniquely difficult for Pennsylvania: a state without qualities, or, rather, with every quality – but not in sufficient enough quantities to create a character.
I can only draw conclusions from my own particular experience. Bethlehem, which somehow evaded post-industrial decline – a genuinely nice, even ideal place to grow up – demarcates an invisible border between coastal elite territory and what I can only call the “backwoods,” which essentially runs down through Tennessee. Bethlehem has universities, a small prep school in addition to public schools; you can commute to New York or Philly. But twenty miles west, the touches of coastal affluence vanish; you’re in a completely different, distinctly Trumpian lifeworld. There’s something about growing up in Bethlehem that makes you feel like an American stem cell: undifferentiated, capable of becoming anything – and therefore capable of becoming nothing.
There’s no real track or funnel for someone who grows up in Bethlehem now; 75 years ago, that was the steel. Now there’s just a postmodern range of outcomes. Go east, stay home, fade into the western woods. I had friends become successful meritocratic strivers; I saw opioid addiction; I saw classmates slip into the easy normal Boomer-esque lives of their parents, sometimes in the same homes. I see the divide clearly: some slipped into the underclass, the gig economy; others, fewer in number, clambered into the managerial overclass. The split between Trump and Biden voters back home seems to come down to who gets blamed for the decay: the opioid crisis, housing costs, the unstable job market facing Millennials.
I can chart it in my own family’s evolution: we were all Hillary voters in 2016, split in 2020, and now three-quarters of us, myself included, are voting Trump (though I'm now registered in New York). My extended family is neatly divided between Republican Catholics and anxious, secular liberals. Christmas, since COVID, has grown more tense. There is a world in which the family doesn’t unite, for political reasons, for the holidays (though I hope that isn’t the case). I know it’s the same for the families of some of my oldest friends (who say things are tense).
In a deeper sense, it feels like Bethlehem, and towns like it, in PA, are choosing what they will be, politically, for decades hence; in the absence of the old affiliations between industrial workers and the Democratic Party – Bethlehem voters (the children and grandchildren of steel workers) are liberated to choose anew. And what Trump and Harris represent, I suspect, for voters in my hometown is something like this: do you affiliate with the people west of you (hunters, farmers, workers) or do you affiliate with those east (white collar, urbanites, progressives)?
A stem cell cannot be a stem cell forever. I think for my own generation (now approaching middle age) there is a sense that this election marks politics for the back half of life. Will you be a Democrat like your parents and grandparents – or do you think the name doesn’t mean what it used to? Some will answer yes, some will answer no. National, and frankly, hysterical or hyper politics has come to Pennsylvania, at least for a few weeks, and I suspect will leave it permanently changed.
Finally, there may be something to the very old 18th century idea of Pennsylvania as the middle state, the pacifist state, which is perfectly suited to balancing the extremes of the rest of the country. Just as Philadelphia once hosted the great experiment in self-governance, perhaps Pennsylvania's characteristic quality of being quality-less – its ability to contain multitudes without fully embracing any single identity – is exactly what makes it the ideal crucible for working out America's present ideological schisms.
