The Same Mountains, The Same War
In which thirty people in a gym in Roy, Utah, accidentally discover what Teddy Roosevelt already knew.
I graduated from Utah State in 1992 with an English Literature degree and a first apartment that cost me five hundred dollars a month. We were at war in the Middle East. The Herald Journal landed on doorsteps every morning, thick enough to swat a fly. Logan was a cheap place to be young and figuring things out, which is what cheap places are for.
It is now 2026. We are at war in the Middle East. The Herald Journal publishes three days a week and hopes you’ll visit their website. A studio apartment in Logan — the same valley, the same mountains, the same lots where I learned to be a grownup — averages eleven hundred and fifty dollars a month. You can find one for nine-fifty if you’re not picky and you move fast.
In 1992, the federal minimum wage was $4.25 an hour in 1992 dollars. My $500 apartment in 1992 dollars cost me about 118 hours of work. Today, the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour in 2026 dollars — a three‑dollar raise stretched across thirty‑four years. That $950 studio in 2026 dollars — the cheap one, the one you have to race for — costs 131 hours at today’s wage. The average one‑bedroom studio, around $1,150 in 2026 dollars, now costs 159 hours. That’s a full month of forty‑hour weeks, every dollar for the roof, nothing left for food or gas or the electric bill. Also, these numbers ignore taxes completely.
And if you’re wondering: that $4.25 in 1992 would be $9.40 today just to keep pace with inflation. The wage crept forward; the rent broke into a run.
In Logan, Utah. Not San Francisco. Not Brooklyn. Logan.
Same war. Same small university town, in the same mountains. The numbers just don’t work anymore.
I mention this because last night, on Saint Patrick’s Day, Lady T and I drove to a school gym in Roy, Utah, for the Democratic caucus. We are not Democrats. I’m a registered Republican — tactically, because this is Utah and the Republican primary is where decisions actually get made, or at least where they used to get made. But the Democratic caucus is open to all registered voters, and we wanted to see what was happening on the ground.
What was happening on the ground was about thirty people, folding chairs, and a table with cookies and brand-name soda. This was not the scene from Salt Lake City, where the new First Congressional District brought out packed gymnasiums and seven candidates jockeying for a seat that leans Democratic by twenty-four points. Weber County is a different animal. We knew that going in.
But here is what I want to tell you about those thirty people in Roy: they were serious. They were neighbors. Three of them live within a few blocks of our house — not quite within Commune distance, but close enough to wave at. They weren’t activists. They weren’t ideologues. They were people who had decided, on a Tuesday evening, to show up instead of not showing up, and they had done this knowing full well that Weber County is not where Democrats go to feel powerful.
I introduced myself as a Teddy Roosevelt Republican. I said I want to vote for candidates who will educate the kids and fill the potholes. And if those candidates also vow to protect democracy, that’s even better. Nobody threw a cookie at me. One woman went home and subscribed to this Substack.
Lady T put her name in as a delegate. Because the Republicans want to check your ID. The Democrats are happy just to see you show up.
Meanwhile, across the country, something is stirring that the consultant class hasn’t quite figured out how to process.
Jay Kuo, writing at The Big Picture, published a piece this week called “Economic Populism Is Not Just For The Left Anymore,” and it is one of the sharpest pieces of political analysis I’ve read this year. His argument, threaded through polling data and recent election results, is that the old left-right spectrum is breaking down, and what’s replacing it has less to do with ideology than with a simple question: whose side are you on?
The evidence is stacking up. Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayor’s race on an unapologetically populist economic platform. The same night, center-left “normie” Democrats Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill won governorships in Virginia and New Jersey by hammering affordability. Pat Ryan turned a one-point win in his New York swing district into a fourteen-point blowout by going after corporate price-gouging. Chris Deluzio outran Kamala Harris in his western Pennsylvania swing district by making a direct economic argument she never quite made. James Talarico surged to a Democratic primary win in the Texas Senate race on a populist message. And Graham Platner, a Marine veteran and oyster farmer, is polling ahead of both the sitting Democratic Governor of Maine and Republican Senator Susan Collins on an explicitly anti-corporate, pro-worker platform.
These are not all progressives. They’re not all moderates. They’re not all anything, according to the old categories. What they are, collectively, is proof that “whose side are you on?” is the question that’s eating American politics alive.
Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona — who won his Senate seat by three points the same year Trump won the state by five — put it as cleanly as anyone when he told the New York Times what the Democratic Party kept getting wrong: the party wanted to talk about the things it was comfortable talking about. It didn’t want to go where the voter was. And where the voter was, in Arizona and everywhere else, was staring at a rent payment that didn’t make sense anymore and wondering why nobody in a suit seemed to notice.
Here’s the part that should alarm the consultant class and encourage everyone else: recent polling shows that seventy percent of self-identified moderate Democrats view Bernie Sanders favorably. Seventy-four percent support single-payer healthcare. Fewer than five percent think the party is too aggressive in taxing the rich and holding corporations accountable.
Read that again. The moderate middle of the Democratic Party is not asking for centrism. It is asking for someone to fight for them. The word “moderate” doesn’t mean what the op-ed pages think it means. It never did.
Kuo’s piece also cites a political science paper by Christopher Williams and Leon Kockaya that introduces a concept worth tattooing on the foreheads of every campaign strategist in America: the “anti-system voter.” These are people who distrust both parties, believe elites are corrupt, and think the political system is rigged against people like them. Many of them hold economically progressive views. They support redistribution, social spending, and government intervention — but they’re deeply skeptical of the institutions that could use their power to deliver any of it.
This is the voter who went Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump. In a left-right framework, that’s incoherent. In an anti-system framework, it’s perfectly logical. They’re not moving along a spectrum. They’re throwing a brick through whichever window is closest.
“In case of emergency, break glass.”
Here’s the finding that matters: the stronger someone’s anti-system orientation, the less they distinguish between left and right. What matters is whether the candidate is fighting the machine or running it. In 2016 and 2024, Trump claimed that ground. In 2026, with Republicans holding the presidency and both chambers of Congress, they are the machine. The anti-system lane is wide open. The question is whether Democrats have the nerve to drive in it. Or will they let the 'consultants’ at Uniparty Inc. keep their deathgrip on the wheel?
I think about this through a particular lens, because I always have.
Theodore Roosevelt was a Republican. This is a fact that both parties have spent a century trying to forget, because what Roosevelt actually did is inconvenient for everyone’s current branding. He busted the trusts. He regulated the railroads. He created the national parks. He pushed through the Pure Food and Drug Act. He took on J.P. Morgan personally, not as theater but because Morgan was functionally running the economy as a private fiefdom and Roosevelt thought that was incompatible with a republic.
None of this was “left.” None of it was “right.” It was the radical, unfashionable assertion that the economy exists to serve the people, not the other way around, and that when concentrated wealth captures the machinery of government, someone has to break the grip. Roosevelt called it the Square Deal. Pat Ryan calls it patriotic populism. Deluzio calls it fighting corporate consolidation. Gallego calls it going where the voter is.
I call it educating the kids and filling the potholes. And then protecting democracy, because without the democracy part, the kids and the potholes don’t matter — the people who own the paving companies will decide which roads get fixed and the people who own the testing companies will decide what the kids learn.
Roosevelt didn’t fit on the left-right spectrum of his era, either. He was a rich man from New York who hunted grizzlies and read poetry and thought millionaires should pay their fair share. The establishment of both parties loathed him. He won in landslides. Because when you stand in front of people and say “I see what’s happening to you and I’m going to fight the people doing it,” the left-right question evaporates. The only question is whether the people believe you.
Thirty people in a gym in Roy, Utah, is not a revolution. I want to be clear about that. Weber County is not going to flip blue because Lady T signed up as a delegate and a nice woman subscribed to my newsletter over cookies.
But here’s what I think those thirty people represent, and what Kuo’s data confirms: the realignment is not ideological. It’s structural. People are not moving left. They are moving toward whoever will fight for them against a system that charges eleven hundred and fifty dollars a month for a studio apartment in a town where you can see the same mountains I saw in 1992 when I was paying five hundred.
The old categories — left, right, moderate, progressive — are becoming noise. The signal is simpler. Whose side are you on? Do you see me? Do you see what’s happening to me? Are you going to do something about it, or are you going to talk about the things you’re comfortable talking about?
Teddy Roosevelt understood this. So did thirty people in a gym on a Tuesday night. The question is whether anyone with actual power is listening.
The mountains haven’t moved. The money has.
Consider sharing this with someone who’s staring at their rent and wondering whose side anybody is on.
(Do I dare hope a little ?)
You haven’t accounted for inflation. The rental price has basically just kept up with the rate of inflation 1992 - 2026.