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This Rural Congresswoman Thinks Democrats Have Lost Their Minds. She Has a Point.
This essay is the fifth installment in a series on the thinkers, upstarts and ideologues battling for control of the Democratic Party.
In July, Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington proposed an amendment to a bill, calling for an inquiry into what she described as a “plague in this country of headlight brightness.”
She introduced the provision in a short speech in which she lapsed into obscenity and suggested that blinding lights on American roads were part of the inexorable deterioration in basic quality of life so many people feel today, implicitly gibed her fellow members for their failures to respond to that feeling and seemed to acknowledge that many of her listeners had heard talk like this before. When a solitary colleague interrupted to clap, she turned and joked, “I’ll give you your $20 later.”
A Democrat, she was gesturing to the central point of her political project, which has remained obscure to many political observers, even as her profile has risen sharply in the past year. She implored people in the room to show that they were “living in the same reality” as regular people, and suggested that paying attention to the sense of helplessness or the anger caused by small issues like the proliferation of absurdly bright headlights offered a path to a more profound and potentially radical new style of Democratic politics. “He who is faithful in a small thing,” she quoted from the Gospel of Luke, “is faithful in a great thing also.”
Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez is 37 and lives on a homestead in rural Skamania County, Wash., not far from Portland, Ore. She owns an auto repair shop with her husband and drives a 1997 Toyota Land Cruiser to the Capitol.
Her worldview is widely held in rural America but almost completely unrepresented in national politics — neither reactionary nor exactly liberal; skeptical of big business and big government alike. She believes our society ought to be oriented toward working with your hands, living in nature and fostering deep and considered connection to a community. Her two biggest influences, her former senior adviser guessed, are the Bible and the ruralist Kentucky farmer-author Wendell Berry.