For educated Americans, Tuesday’s election was a great sigh of relief. The wheels are coming off the clown car; the American legislature will no longer be giving a demented fascist everything he wants. Americans can turn to the understandably furious Canadians and say: that is not who we are. Over and over, candidates ran against the tariffs and won.

For me, it’s the victories in Texas that are personal. I kept hearing people say “we don’t believe the polls, Texas can’t possibly go Democratic”, and I thought: that’s not my Texas. I lived in Texas for only a year, but I loved it then and still do – and I am a brown-skinned gender-fluid immigrant socialist. My Texas is the Austin costume shop with a wide variety of stiletto heels in men’s sizes. It’s the parade of girls in resplendent dresses getting their quinceañera pictures taken in the Dallas botanical gardens on a typical Sunday. It’s the miles of shops selling saris and barfi in the suburbs of Houston. It’s the old Spanish canals of downtown San Antonio, built before there was a United States. It’s the local chain supermarket selling dozens of kinds of dried chiles in bulk. It’s the Burning Man-inspired Meow Wolf immersive art exhibitions outside Dallas and Houston. It’s the Rio Grande Valley where 90% of the people are of Mexican origin. It’s Ethiopian barbecue fusion in a Dallas suburb. And this week, after a drought of more than thirty years, my Texas finally won at politics.

I’m proud of Gina Hinojosa, finally giving a Mexican-origin governor to a state where less than half the residents are white. I’m delighted that the state house and other statewide offices went Democratic too. But I’m absolutely tickled by the young senator-elect, James Talarico.

Talarico’s magnificent victory speech reminded me a lot of the 2004 speech that brought Barack Obama to the world’s attention – the one where Obama proclaimed that “We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States.” Like Obama, Talarico wisely appealed to a move beyond the left/right urban/rural distinctions that have polarized the United States and the world – but with a twist. Talarico wasn’t quite saying that everyone should get along. Rather, he rightly said that there was a fight, a conflict to be fought, but a different one:

The real fight in this country is not left versus right. It is top versus bottom. The people at the top work so hard to keep us angry and divided, because our unity is a threat to their wealth and their power. We saw it in this race. We saw it in every billionaire-funded attack ad.
The people at the top divide us by party, by race, by gender, by religion, by culture, so we don’t notice that they are picking our pockets. That they are defunding our schools, that they are gutting our healthcare, that they are raising taxes on all of us while they cut taxes for themselves. It is the oldest strategy in the world, divide and conquer.

The driving factor polarizing the US has been culture war: battles over race and gender, including gender identity. But Talarico explicitly refuses this in favour of the more urgent message of class war – which is a genuinely populist message, and one that has become particularly urgent in our age. The less-educated white Americans who voted for Trump did so for many reasons, but among them was anger at their immiseration, the declining American dream that leads so many of them into deaths of despair. That anger, at the time, was directed not at the corporations and wealthy who (I would argue) have pushed them down through their dominance since the Reagan-Clinton era, but at educated “élites” like myself (and probably you, if you’re reading a philosophy blog) who were doing better financially and also tended to look down on them as “deplorables” or “bigots”.

But now we’re hurting too, we “élites”. It’s not just the Trump administration’s attacks on universities and funding organizations that have had a devastating effect on educated Americans – though they have. Now, AI is rapidly making the kind of work that we do obsolete. Despite low unemployment numbers for the US in general, in my highly educated Boston-area circles, I’ve never seen so many people – from chemists through educational technologists to video-game designers – out of a job. I walk around the streets of this highly educated metropolis and see empty storefronts everywhere. Economically, we were considerably less devastated by COVID than we are by the combined punch of Trump and AI. Talarico, like many Democrats running on a left-populist platform, understands this: we “élites” need to make common cause with the white rural “bigots” to fight against the Elon Musks of the world who are making unprecedented riches by immiserating us all. Yes, even if they want us to use the wrong bathroom! That’s what the term “ally”, so abused by the Social Justice movement, actually means: you work together with people who have different goals and interests, despite your disagreements, because your biggest goal is one you share in common.

I think many Democrats this year, to their credit, understood this point – including Talarico’s partner Hinojosa. But what helped Talarico land the message, in particular, was Christianity, the Christianity that led him to a career as a preacher, and one that, far more than Obama’s “awesome God” comment, suffused Talarico’s speech from start to finish. He drew from well-known Bible stories – David and Goliath, Jesus flipping tables – and above all on Jesus’s commandment to love thy neighbour, a phrase written on his podium and one rather absent from recent American political discourse. When 62% of Americans still describe themselves as Christian – many of them outside of our “élite” circles – this visible faith is a huge asset to making common cause. (Indeed, a majority of Democrats still identify as Christian too.)

By most of those Christians’ standards, Talarico’s is a weird sort of Christianity, to be sure – but still recognizable to them as Christianity, in its closeness to biblical text, and therefore a lot less weird than my Buddhism or the secular mishmash that characterizes most of us graduate-educated types. Talarico claims to be a major admirer of Pope Leo XIV, and it shows, since that pope too has shown a strong and traditionally grounded suspicion of tech overlords and their AI designs.

And finally it makes me happy that Talarico is ready to think through his Christianity, to be theological – not just accept received text but think about the underlying concepts. He understands that if there is an ultimate power underlying the universe, an omnipotent omnibenevolent being, it makes little sense for that being to be pinned down by categories as small as sex and gender. And Talarico learned to understand the Bible in its original Hebrew, to note that Genesis refers to God in both masculine and feminine terms. I’m happy that he later walked the comment back to build more of an alliance with a culturally conservative audience, but nevertheless his original comment was right: God is nonbinary!