The Real America Doesn’t Want Revolution, it Wants Roads: Alaska, West Virginia, and the Ghost of a Forgotten Country
I was recently in Alaska for a rugged vacation. Starting in Anchorage, I drove up into Fairbanks, took the famous “Dalton Highway” up to the Arctic Circle, and to the truckstop-turned-small-village, Cold Foot. When you’re up that far North — among the tundra, ice, reindeer, and awfully annoying mosquitoes — you’re struck by how harsh and unforgiving the environment can really be to human inhabitants.
And yet, people still live. The oil economy of Prudhoe Bay supports a community of people up at the northernmost point in North America, with Barrow sharing a similar story. I had the opportunity to live amongst the truckers and travelers who stopped in for a plate of food and to share a little bit of warmth and community in the solitary trucks and motorbikes that dot the trek.
The biggest topic of conversation? A bit of road that had been washed out by a storm, which had held up the truckers and their valuable oil from reaching the bay to transfer to the rest of the country. In that small container-turned-mess hall, the most important issue was that road. That was it. The road is what people depended on. It’s what they needed. Without it, they, me, and indeed everyone in that room would have been swallowed up by Mother Nature without so much as a second thought.
All over America, but especially in rural communities like Alaska, people need things to be dependable. There is no time to waffle. There is no time to bicker. If that road had stayed unrepaired for so much as a week, me and all the truckers would have run out of food and propane to heat our rooms. In simpler terms, we would have been dead. And so, the road was fixed in a day and a half. No arguing, no complex permitting regulation, no bickering over costs: it just got done.
In contrast, the national government has chronically failed to deliver much of anything to fix issues plaguing Americans. I’m not just talking about large issues, but smaller things. Things like that road I mentioned earlier. When our government fails to pass any legislation, as it has been, it ignores issues that have been eating away at Americans across the country.
Why That’s a Problem
Maybe that works in places like my native San Francisco, where our AI-Tech revolution can keep pumping away without the government doing anything. However, for communities in Alaska and elsewhere, government inaction can quite literally be deadly. For many Americans, from Appalachia to the Yukon and the green hills of Vermont, residents rely upon their politicians to actually deliver on the local issues that affect their lives.
There is no time to bicker: these roads need to be fixed. And so, politicians from those areas have responded. They have broken the partisan gridlock, and have worked across the aisle to actually deliver for their constituents. At a time when our nation continues to be plagued by dysfunction, their model of governance provides a window into how to break free from it.
From my time in Alaska, I could see why they elected someone like Lisa Murkowski. Lisa Murkowski has done a — quite frankly — shocking amount of working across the aisle to the benefit of Alaskans. So what roads has she built? Murkowski expanded Social Security benefits to 15,000 Alaskans working with President Biden. She secured historic investments for rural committees as part of Biden’s infrastructure deal (literally building roads!), she passed a bill establishing a committee to investigate this country’s long history of abuse at Indian Boarding Schools, and she passed the ELDER act, which expands services for elderly American Indians, just to name a few!
That’s a lot! These acts aren’t really controversial, large-scale pieces of legislation. Rather, they are small bills that tackle issues that are no doubt hugely important to specific communities in her state but also elsewhere. These types of small, local, bread and butter issues, are the type of things Americans across the country depend on their government to solve. Very few Americans care or want the vice president to chastise the free speech commitments of European countries, or wine and dine with the elite of Qatar for million dollar jets. They want roads.
Another road builder is Washington representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat in a District that went for Trump in 2024. Just last month, she was instrumental in getting the appropriations committee to investigate “overly bright headlights.” It might seem like a novelty non-issue, but in rural committees, where people and roads meet, it can be a real issue for visibility. It’s also been quite stagnant, with the standards for headlights not changing since before Perez was even born!
It’s a big problem. But one that goes ignored in favor of such theatrics as Representative Bowman pulling the fire alarm to protest voting on a bill, or Rashid Talib yelling about who knows what in Gaza, all while failing to deliver legislation to the benefit of Talib’s constituents.
Someone who does work for the benefit of his constituents is Joe Manchin. While in the Senate, Manchin sponsored numerous bills to increase investments in West Virginia while also pushing through permitting reform that often holds up new energy projects. West Virginians, like Alaskans, can’t wait for D.C. bickering to approve the roads: they need them chop-chop.
Despite the good work of Manchin, Murkowski, Perez and others not mentioned, I can already hear the wincing from Democrats and Republicans alike: “These people are obstructionists.” After all, Manchin held up the IRA (Inflation Reduction Act), and Murkowski killed the Obamacare repeal.
I don’t deny Manchin and Murkowski’s opposition to key legislation proposed by their side of the aisle. In fact, I think that’s a positive. Many congressmen and women alike often just… rubber stamp these types of bills without actually reading them. This is how we get awkward situations like Marjorie Taylor Greene voting for the Big Beautiful Bill, then later admitting she had not read it and that she would have voted differently had she. Murkowski and Manchin serve as a “filter” to make sure we see the effects of these types of large, oftentimes “radial-esque” bills, and make sure they don’t come with unintended consequences.
This is how lawmaking is supposed to work: senators and representatives pointing out flaws in legislation and offering alternatives to it. Thus, our system would produce a better bill. The fact that this no longer happens, and instead we are seeing a strong arm rule on the part of President Trump, where senators are threatened with primary challenges if they don’t speed approve legislation, is how we get hugely harmful bills like the reconciliation package and the Big Beautiful Bill.
With those pieces of legislation in mind, times where bipartisanship, incremental reform, and attention to the needs of Americans on a local level seem long gone. Such is the mark of a forgotten country.
Where We Stand Today
And voters want that country back. Polls have repeatedly shown that the voters care most about cost of living issues over anything to do with “traditional values”, or the “revolution.” Part of the reason the Democrats lost major ground with working class voters is because they failed to deliver on easing the economic burden on Americans backs, and because they de-emphasized those very issues in favor of a muddled message of “democracy.” Democracy is all well and good, but it does not fill bellies. That left an opening for the Republicans to split the Democratic coalition, and re-elect Trump primarily on the backs of working class Americans looking for their economic woes to be eased. Of course, Trump has not answered any of those concerns, and has spent the entirety of his whole term preoccupied with issues more befitting a rant on 4chan than an agenda to help the working class — the class that built this country.
We need to reclaim a country that worked for them — that “good government” that used to be the norm, the kind that is essential for our democracy to work the way it’s supposed to.
To that point, partisan bickering only further divides this country: only further divides us into red and blue states, turning us brother-on-brother. Well, there are no red states and blue states—only one United States. The real divide in partisan government is between doers and non -doers.
I’ll be honest, like many Americans, I’m not happy with either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. I believe both have failed to live up to the imperative of making a government devoid of infighting and responsive to the needs of all Americans.
The increasingly authoritarian nature of Trump 2.0, including his attacks on the rule of law, queer and especially trans youths, and the general toxic fiefdom he’s turned the GOP into have left a dark stain on this country. For those reasons I’ll be sticking with Democrat candidates, and the Democratic Party broadly speaking, for the foreseeable future.
Despite that, I think there is a path to restoring that mission of “good government” that runs outside the two major parties.
Full disclosure: this article was not written with, or approved by, the Forward Party.
Andrew Yang’s Forward Party! is just that: a collection of Republicans, Democrats, and Independent moderates who want to break free from the partisan bickering that prevents Congress from getting things done by working with candidates like Manchin and Murkowski, who put delivering for their constituents over partisan theatrics.
I’m already a registered member, and I would encourage everyone who’s fed up with D.C. gridlock skirting the needs of ordinary Americans to register here. https://www.forwardparty.com
The Forward Party shows there’s a way out of the endless partisan stalemate — a way that backs leaders like Joe Manchin and Lisa Murkowski, who put delivering for their constituents above party loyalty. If we want a government that works, we can’t keep playing the same red-versus-blue game and expecting different results. The time to reclaim good government is now. Not right. Not left. Forward.