Published
2 years agoon
By
adminThis article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.
Political partisans are always dreaming of final victories. Each election raises the hope of realignmenta convergence of issues and demographics and personalities that will deliver a lock on power to one side or the other. In my lifetime, at least five permanent majorities have come and gone. President Lyndon B. Johnsons landslide triumph over Barry Goldwater in 1964 seemed to ratify the postwar liberal consensus and doom the Republican Party to irrelevanceuntil, four years later, Richard Nixons narrow win augured an emerging Republican majority (the title of a book by his adviser Kevin Phillips) based in the white, suburban Sun Belt. In 1976, Jimmy Carter heralded a winning interracial politics called the Carter coalition, which proved even shorter-lived than his presidency. With Ronald Reagan, the conservative ascendancy really did seem perpetual. After the Republican victory in the 2002 midterm elections, George W. Bushs operative Karl Rove floated the idea of a majority lasting a generation or two.Explore the January/February 2024 Issue
Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.View More
But around the same time, the writers John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira published The Emerging Democratic Majority, which predicted a decades-long advantage for the party of educated professionals, single women, younger voters, and the coming minority majority. The embodiment of their thesis soon appeared in Barack Obamaonly to be followed by Donald Trump and the revenge of the white working class, a large plurality that has refused to fade away.
Recent American history has been hard on would-be realigners. The two parties are playing one of the longest deuce games since the founding. Even with the structural distortion of the Senate and the Electoral College favoring Republicans, the American people remain closely divided. The Democratic presidential candidate has won seven of the last eight popular votes, while the national vote for the House of Representatives keeps swinging back and forth between the parties. Stymied by a sense of stalemate, both now indulge in a form of magical thinking.
Neither side believes in the legitimacy of the other; each assumes that the voters agree and will soon sweep it into power. So the result of every election comes as a shock to the loser, who settles on explanations that have nothing to do with the popular will: foreign interference, fraudulent ballots, viral disinformation, a widespread conspiracy to cheat. The Republican Party tries to hold on to power by antidemocratic means: the Electoral College, the filibuster, grotesquely gerrymandered legislatures, even violence. The Democratic Party pursues a majority by demography, targeting an array of identity groups and assuming that their positions on issues will be predictably monolithic. The latter is a mistake; the former is a threat to democracy. Both are ways to escape the long, hard grind of organized persuasion that is politics.
From the January/February 2022 issue: Barton Gellman on how Trumps next coup has already begun
Two other jarring features define our age of deadlock. One is a radical shift in the two parties center of gravity. The signature of elections today is the class divide called education polarization: In 2020, Joe Biden won by claiming a majority of college-educated white voters, the backbone of the old Republican Party. Trump, with a lock on the white working class, lost despite making gains among nonwhite, non-college-educated voters, yesterdays most reliable Democrats. Meanwhile, on the political stage, cultural and social issues have eclipsed economic issueseven as every facet of American life, whether income or mortality rates, grows less equal and more divided by class.
These two trends are obviously related, and they have a history. From the late 1970s until very recently, the brains and dollars behind both parties supported versions of neoliberal economics: one hard-edged and friendly to old-line corporate interests such as the oil industry, the other gentler and oriented toward the financial and technology sectors. This consensus left the battleground open to cultural warfare. The educated professionals who dominate the countrys progressive party have long cared less about unions, wages, and monopoly power than about race, gender, and the environment. In the summer of 2020, millions of young people did not come out of isolation to protest the plight of meatpackers laboring in COVID-ridden processing plants. They were outraged by a police killing, and they called for a racial reckoninga revolution in consciousness that ended up having little effect on the lives of the poor and oppressed.
For their part, Republicans have spoken the traditionalist language of the working class ever since Nixons silent majority; Trump dropped the mantra of low taxes and deregulation that used to excite the party when it was more upscale, and directed his message to a base that votes on issues such as crime, immigration, and what it means to be an American. More recently, Republican candidates have turned to anti-woke rhetoric. In losing its voice as the champion of workers, the Democratic Party lost many of the workers themselves, and during the past half century, the two parties have nearly switched electorates.
This remapping helps explain the outpouring of new books that pay political attention to those overlooked Americans of all races who lack a college degree, many employed in jobs that pay by the hourfactory workers, home health aides, delivery drivers, preschool teachers, hairdressers, restaurant servers, farm laborers, cashiers. During the pandemic, they were called essential workers. Now theyve been discovered to hold the key to power, giving rise to yet another round of partisan dreaming of realignment, this time hinging on the working class. But these Americans wont benefit from their new status as essential voters until the parties spend less effort coming up with what they think the working class wants to hear, and more effort actually delivering what it wants and needs.
The economic decline and political migration of the American working class receive the most compelling treatment in Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream, by the New York Times writer David Leonhardt. He describes the rise and fall, from the New Deal to the present, of what he calls democratic capitalismnot a neutral phrase, but a positive term for a mixed economy that benefits the many, not just the few. By now, the story of growing inequality and declining mobility is familiar from the work of Thomas Piketty, Gary Gerstle, Raj Chetty, and other scholars. Leonhardt has a gift for synthesizing complex trends and data in straightforward language and persuasive arguments whose rationality doesnt fully mute an undertone of indignation. He appreciates the power of stories and weaves obscure but telling events and people into his larger narrative: a 1934 strike in the Minneapolis coal yards that showed the political potential of worker solidarity; the mid-century businessman Paul Hoffman, who argued to members of his own class that they would benefit from a prosperous working class; the pioneering computer programmer and Navy officer Grace Hopper, who saw the economic benefits of military spending on technological research.Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American DreamBy David LeonhardtBuy Book
An economy that gives most people the chance for a decent life doesnt arise by accident or through impersonal forces. It has to be created, and Leonhardt identifies three agents: political action, such as union organizing, that gives power to the have-nots; a civic ethos that restrains the greed of the haves; and public spending on people, infrastructure, and ideasa form of short-term sacrifice, an optimistic bet on what the future can bring.The labor movement lost interest in social justice, and progressive politicians lost interest in the working class.
All treepower, culture, and investmentcombined in the postwar decades to transform the American working class into the largest and richest middle class in history. Black Americans, even while enduring official discrimination and racist violence, closed the gap in pay and life expectancy with white Americansprogress, Leonhardt writes, that reflected class-based changes more than explicitly race-based changes. In other words, the right of workers to form unions, an increased and expanded federal minimum wage, and a steeply progressive tax code that funded good schools all reduced racial inequality by reducing economic inequality. But after the 1960s, the economys growth slowed, and the balance of power among the classes grew lopsided. American life became stratified. Wealth flowed upward to the few, unions withered, and public goods such as schools starved. In their rush to cash in, elites knocked over taboos that had once restrained the worst extremes of greed. Metropoles prospered and industrial regions decayed. Despite the end of Jim Crow and the growth of a Black professional class, the gap between Black and white Americans began to widen again as the countrys top 10 percent pulled away from the rest.
This economic analysis comes with a political argument that will not be welcomed by many progressives. Leonhardt places blame for the decline of the American dream where it belongs: on free-market intellectuals, right-wing politicians, corporate money. But he also points to the shortsighted complacency of union leaders, and, even more, the changing values and interests of well-educated, comfortable Democrats. Beginning in the early 70s, they dropped concern about bread-and-butter issues for more compelling causes: the environment, peace, consumer protection, abortion, identity-group rights. The labor movement lost interest in social justice, and progressive politicians lost interest in the working class. Neither George Meany nor George McGovern sang from the New Deal songbook. After the 60s, the country no longer had a mass movement centered on lifting most Americans living standards.
Why did the white working class abandon the party that had been its champion? In the standard progressive telling, Leonhardt writes, the explanation for this political shift is race. Race had a lot to do with it, and Leonhardt affirms that Democrats embrace of the Black freedom movement in the 60s, followed by white backlash (exploited by Republicans with their southern strategy) and persistent racism, is a major cause. But the progressive telling falls short on three counts. Its morally self-flattering and self-exonerating; its politically self-defeating (accusing voters of racism, even if deserved, is not the way to convince them of anything); and it fails to explain too many recent political trends. For example, nearly all-white West Virginia remained mostly Democratic decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and only turned indelibly red in 2000. According to one estimate, almost a quarter of the working-class white voters who gave Trump the presidency in 2016 had voted for a Black president only a few years earlier. The stark polarization of the current college-educated and non-college-educated white electorate shows the key role of class. And what are we to make of an openly bigoted president running for a second term and increasing his share of the Black and Latino vote?
Leonhardts subtler account is rooted in the working classs growing cultural and economic alienation from a Democratic Party ever more dominated by elites and activists, and out of touch on the issues that hurt less affluent Americans most, especially crime, trade, and immigration. The financial crisis of 2008 was a pivotal event, leaving large numbers of Americans with the sense that the countrys upper classes were playing a dirty game at the expense of the rest.
That fall, I reported on the presidential campaign in a dying coal town in Appalachian Ohio. To my surprise, its white residents were giving Obama a close hearing, and he ended up doing better in the region than John Kerry had. But at a local party gathering, an older white man told me that neither party had done anything to reverse the decline of his town, and that he would no longer vote Democratic, for one reason: illegal immigration. I listened politely and discounted his grievanceI didnt see any undocumented immigrants in Glouster, Ohio. Why did he care so much?
Leonhardt provides an answer. In a comprehensive analysis, he shows that the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which liberal politicians sold as nondiscriminatory but still restrictive, opened the gates to mass immigration. The result put downward pressure on wages at the lower end of the economy. Again, racial resentment partly explains hostility to large-scale immigration, but Leonhardt shows that rapid demographic change can erode the social bonds that make collective efforts for greater equality possible: Low immigration numbers in the mid-1900s improved the lives of recent immigrants by fostering a stronger safety net for everybody. As Democrats were reminded in 2022s midterms, immigration is less popular among working-class Americans of all races than among college graduates. The mayor of my very progressive city, a son of the Black working class, recently sounded like that working-class white ex-Democrat in Ohio when he warned that the arrival of more than 100,000 migrants will destroy New York.
David Leonhardt: The hard truth about immigration
These positions reflect class differences in approaches to morality. Drawing on social-science research, Leonhardt distinguishes between universal values such as fairness and compassion, which matter more among educated professionals, and communal values such as order, tradition, and loyalty, which count more lower down the class ladder. It shouldnt be surprising that working-class Americans of color sympathize with migrants but dont necessarily want an open border, that they fear crime at least as much as police misconduct. But their views confound progressives, who see these issues through the almost metaphysical lens of group identitythe belief that we think inside lines of race, gender, and sexuality, that these accidental and immutable traits dictate our politics.Illustration by Mike McQuade. Sources: Brooks Kraft / Corbis / Getty; Leif Skoogfors / Getty; Cynthia Johnson / Getty; Bettmann / Getty.
This worldview provided a sense of meaning to a generation that came of age after 2008, amid upheaval and disillusionment. Because the new progressivism flourished among younger, educated Americans who lived online, its cultural reach was disproportionate, making rapid inroads in universities, schools, media, the arts, philanthropy. But its believers badly overplayed their hand, giving Republicans easy wins and driving away ordinary Democrats. Americans remain a wildly diverse, individualistic, aspirational people, with rising rates of mixed marriage, residential integration, and immigration from all over the world. Any rigid politics of identitywhether the lefts obsession with marginalized communities, or its sinister opposite in the reactionary paranoia of white replacement theoryis bound to shatter against the realities of American life.
Identity politics has been a feverish interlude following the demise of the neoliberal consensus that prevailed from Reagan to Obama. What will take its place? Leonhardt hopes for a Democratic Party that learns how not to alienate the nearly two-thirds of Americans without a college degree. He believes that education can be a force for upward mobility, but that the current version of meritocracybuilt-in advantage at the top, underfunding belowhas created a highly educated aristocracy. He advises a renewed emphasis on economic populism, a hard line on equal rights for all but reasonable compromise on other controversial social issues, and a general attitude of respect. His hero is the martyred Robert F. Kennedy, whose 1968 presidential campaign was the last to unite working-class Amerians of all colors.
Yascha Mounk: Where the new identity politics went wrong
A version of the same argument, with less historical depth and feeling but more charts and polemics, can be found in John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeiras Where Have All the Democrats Gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes. Judis and Teixeira have been explaining their earlier books thesis for two decades even as the majority of its title kept failing to emerge. Now they diagnose their error: What began happening in the last decade is a defection, pure and simple, of working-class voters. Thats something that we really didnt anticipate. Like Leonhardt, they call on Democrats to embrace New Dealstyle economic liberalism (but not Green New Dealstyle socialism) and to reject todays post-sixties version of social liberalism, which is tantamount to cultural radicalism. In a series of scathing chapters, Judis and Teixeira show how far left the Democrats shadow party of activists, donors, and journalists has moved in the past 20 years on immigration, race, gender, and climate.Where Have All the Democrats Gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age of ExtremesBy John B. Judis and Ruy TeixeiraBuy Book
The authors want a return to the partys cultural centrism of the 90s. Instead of decriminalizing the border, which most 2020 Democratic presidential candidates advocated, they call for tighter border security, enforcement of laws that prohibit hiring undocumented immigrants, and a way for those already here to become citizens. They show that middle-ground policies like these and othersthe pursuit of racial equality that focuses on expanding opportunity for individuals, not equity of group outcomes; support for equal rights for trans Americans without insisting on a gender ideology that denies biological sexremain majority views, including among nonwhite Americans. Judis and Teixeira are less persuasive on climate change: Although their gradualism might be politically helpful to Democrats, the country and the planet will be at the mercy of extreme weather thats indifferent to such messaging.
Joshua Greens fast-paced, sober, yet hopeful The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics argues that a Democratic renewal is already under way. Like Leonhardt, Judis, and Teixeira, Green traces the Democrats estrangement from working Americans back to the 70s; he begins his story with a moment in 1978, when Jimmy Carter abandoned unions for Wall Street. The narrative reaches a climax in 2008, when the financial crisis destroyed home values and retirement savings while taxpayer dollars rescued the banks that had triggered it, convincing large numbers of Americans that the system was rigged by financiers and politicians. Because of policy choices by the Obama administrationDemocrats last spasm of neoliberalismmuch of the blame fell on the former party of the common people.The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American PoliticsBy Joshua GreenBuy Book
Yet out of the wreckage rose a new group of Democratic stars who sounded like their New Deal predecessors, many of whom were every bit as radical. Taking aim at corporate elites, Greens protagonists want to increase economic equality through worker power and state intervention. Though Sanders and Warren failed as presidential candidates, Green argues that their populism transformed the party, including the formerly moderate Joe Biden, who has pushed a remarkably ambitious legislative agenda with working-class interests at its center.
Green is a first-rate journalist, but his book suffers from a blind spot: It ignores the role of culture in the partys struggles with the working class. His analysis omits half the story until the 2016 election, when, he acknowledges, Trump reshuffled Democratic priorities. As he moved cultural issues to the center of national political conflict, race, gender, and immigration eclipsed populist economics as the focus of the liberal insurgency. In the face of Trumps bigotry, Democrats felt compelled to adopt the maximalist positions of activists, assuming that these would align the party with the groups on the receiving end of Trumps ugliest barbs, such as Latino immigrants. Instead, the partys working-class losses began to extend beyond white voters. Greens answer is to double down on economic populism: Rather than fear the Republicans culture warsor respond to them by racializing policies that benefit everyoneDemocrats should take the opportunity to reestablish the party as serving the interests of working people of every race and ethnicity.
None of these books offers a shortcut to a new Democratic majority. The erosion of working-class support is too old and too severe to be easily reversed. In fact, its the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, in Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP, who imagines a coming realignmentfor Republicans. Ruffini cant resist making the case that, in addition to transforming the party, this coalition could become the next permanent majority. To do so, he breezes through some of the same history, and reaches a similar conclusion: Democrats have fallen into a cosmopolitan trap, losing their hold on a key constituency in the process.Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOPBy Patrick RuffiniBuy Book
Ruffinis most original contribution is to apply close statistical analysis to the past few election cycles as he builds his case for a Republican multiracial coalition. He supplies strong evidence of the moderate social views of most Black, Latino, and Asian American voters. On that basis, Ruffini doesnt think Democrats can win back their lost supporters just by changing the subject to class. Democrats may calculate that, simply by focusing on economic issues, they can keep cultural issues from eating into their base, but theyre wrong, he writes. When voters economic views and social views are in conflict, ones social stances more often drive voting behavior Cultural divides are what voters vote on even if politicians dont talk about them. Ruffini offers no data to support this conclusion, but it underpins his counsel for a politician like Biden. Never mind his legislative accomplishments that benefit the working class; what he really needs, Ruffini advises in political-operative mode, is a hard pivot against the cultural lefthe seems to have in mind a Sister Souljah momentto neutralize Republican attacks.
Though Ruffini doesnt spend much time on economic policy, its worth noting that a few high-profile Republicans have recently discovered that monopolistic corporations can be oppressors, that capitalism tears communities apart. Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marco Rubio of Florida, as well as other politicians, limit this insight to their partisan enemies in Silicon Valley, but a few conservative writers, such as Sohrab Ahmari, the author of Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American LibertyAnd What to Do About It, are open to ideas of social democracy. This internal party battle between the old libertarians and the new egalitarians doesnt seem to interest Ruffini; oddly, given his populist ambitions, he remains unmoved by the anti-corporate critique. Nor does he have much to say about the Republican Partys descent with Trump into authoritarian nihilism.Social issues arent manufactured by power-hungry politicians to divide the masses. They matterthats why theyre so polarizing.
Ruffinis formative years as a professional Republican came during the George W. Bush presidency, and his thinking hasnt kept up with the America of fentanyl and Matt Gaetz. The populist future of Ruffinis desires is a wholesome mixture of culturally conservative, pro-capitalist families and low taxes. His commonsense majority would combine white people who didnt graduate from college and nonwhite people of all classes, because the education divide makes a much bigger diffeence in the attitudes of whites than it does among nonwhites. It sounds like a twist on the Judis-Teixeira emerging majority of two decades ago. Demography as destiny seduces realigners on both sides.
Ruffini recognizes that Republicans are a long way from attracting enough nonwhite voters to achieve his majority. But, he argues, if the party battles job discrimination based on a college degree, makes voting Republican socially acceptable among Black Americans, and apologizes for the southern strategy, his goal could be realized by 2036. By then, the Democratic Party would presumably be a pious rump of overeducated white people demanding open borders and anti-racist math.
These writers are all trying to solve a puzzle: One party supports unions, the child tax credit, and some form of universal health care, while the other party does everything in its power to defeat them. One president passed major legislation to renew manufacturing and rebuild infrastructure, while his predecessor cut taxes on the rich and corporations. Yet polls since 2016 have shown Republicans closing the gap with Democrats on which party is perceived to care more about poor Americans, middle-class Americans, and people like me. During these years, the energy on the left has been fueled by an identity politics that resisted Trump and became the orthodoxy of educated progressives, with its own daunting lexicon. Many Democrats fell silent, out of fear or shame or confusion.
Now, encouraged perhaps by the excesses and failures of a professional-class social-justice movement, and by the relative success of Bidens pro-worker agenda, they seem to be finding their voice. Judis and Teixeira cite polling data from Wisconsin and Massachusetts as evidence that Americans are less divided on cultural issues than activists on both sides, who benefit by stoking division, would like: If you look at the countrys voters, and put aside the culture wars, what you find are genuine differences between the parties voters over economic issues. The real disagreements have to do with taxation, regulation, health care, and the larger problem of inequality. Democrats way forward seems obvious: emphasize differences on economics by turning left; mute differences on culture by tacking to the middle. If the party can free itself from the moneyed interests of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and the cultural radicalism of campus and social media, it might start to win in red states.
I want Leonhardt, Judis, Teixeira, and Green to be right. Having long held the same views, Im an ideal audience for these books and other new ones making related arguments, such as Yascha Mounks The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, Susan Neimans Left Is Not Woke, and Fredrik deBoers How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement. Yet the solutions that some of them propose for the Democrats working-class problem leave me with a worrying skepticism. In an age of shredded social bonds and deep distrust of institutions, especially the federal government, we cant go back to New Deal economics. If Ruffini is right, the culture wars arent easily put aside. Guns and religion, in Obamas unfortunate phrase, are genuinely held values, not just proxies for economic grievance; conservative politicians manipulate them, but they arent inauthentic. Race and gender are more important categories than class for millions of Americans, especially younger ones. Illegal immigration legitimately vexes citizens living precarious lives. Social issues arent manufactured by power-hungry politicians to divide the masses. They matterthats why theyre so polarizing.
The working class is immense, varied, and not all that amenable to being led. Its more atomized, more independent-minded, more conspiracy-minded and cynical than it was a couple of generations ago. Although unions are gaining popularity and energy, only a tenth of workers belong to one. Abandoned to an unfair economy while the rich freely break the rules, bombarded with images of fame and wealth, awash in drugs, working-class Americans are less likely to identify with underdogs like Rocky and Norma Rae or the defeated heroes of Springsteen songs than to admire celebrities who pursue power for its own sakenone more so than Trump.
The argument over which matters more, economics or culture, may obsess the political class, but Americans living paycheck to paycheck, ill-served by decades of financial neglect and polarizing culture wars, cant easily separate the two. All of itwages, migrants, police, guns, classrooms, trade, the price of gas, the meaning of the flagcan be a source of chaos or of dignity. The real question is this: Can our politics, in its current state, deliver hard-pressed Americans greater stability and independence, or will it only inflict more disruption and pain? The working class isnt a puzzle whose solution comes with a prizeit isnt a means to the end of realignment and long-term power. It is a constituency comprising half the country, whose thriving is necessary for the good of the whole.
This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline What Does the Working Class Really Want?
?When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

You may like
US
At least 51 people killed in Texas flooding as authorities face scrutiny over response
Published
2 hours agoon
July 6, 2025By
admin
At least 51 people have died after heavy rain caused flash flooding, with water bursting from the banks of the Guadalupe River in Texas.
The overflowing water began sweeping into Kerr County and other areas around 4am local time on Friday, killing at least 43 people in the county.
This includes at least 15 children and 28 adults, with five children and 12 adults pending identification, Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said at a news conference.
In nearby Kendall County, one person has died. At least four people were killed in Travis County, while at least two people died in Burnet County. Another person has died in the city of San Angelo in Tom Green County.

People comfort each other in Kerrville, Texas. Pic: Jason Fochtman/Houston Chronicle via AP

Large piles of debris in Kerrville, Texas, following the flooding. Pic: Reuters//Marco Bello

An unknown number of people remain missing, including 27 girls from Camp Mystic in Kerr County, a Christian summer camp along the Guadalupe River.
Rescuers have already saved hundreds of people and would work around the clock to find those still unaccounted for, Texas governor Greg Abbott said.
But as rescue teams are searching for the missing, Texas officials are facing scrutiny over their preparations and why residents and summer camps for children that are dotted along the river were not alerted sooner or told to evacuate.
More on Texas
Related Topics:
AccuWeather said the private forecasting company and the National Weather Service (NWS) sent warnings about potential flash flooding hours before the devastation, urging people to move to higher ground and evacuate flood-prone areas.

Debris on the banks of the Guadalupe River in Hunt. Pic: AP Photo/Julio Cortez

An overturned vehicle is caught in debris along the Guadalupe River. Pic: AP
The NWS later issued flash flood emergencies – a rare alert notifying of imminent danger.
“These warnings should have provided officials with ample time to evacuate camps such as Camp Mystic and get people to safety,” AccuWeather said in a statement that called Texas Hill County one of the most flash-flood-prone areas of the US because of its terrain and many water crossings.
But one NWS forecast earlier in the week had called for up to six inches of rain, said Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management.”It did not predict the amount of rain that we saw,” he said.
Officials said they had not expected such an intense downpour of rain, equivalent to months’ worth in a few short hours, insisting that no one saw the flood potential coming.
One river near Camp Mystic rose 22ft in two hours, according to Bob Fogarty, meteorologist with the NWS’s Austin/San Antonio office. The gauge failed after recording a level of 29.5ft.

A wall is missing on a building at Camp Mystic in Hunt, Texas. Pic: AP/Julio Cortez

Bedding items are seen outside sleeping quarters at Camp Mystic. Pic: AP/Julio Cortez

A Sheriff’s deputy pauses while searching for the missing in Hunt, Texas.Pic: AP/Julio Cortez
“People, businesses, and governments should take action based on Flash Flood Warnings that are issued, regardless of the rainfall amounts that have occurred or are forecast,” Jonathan Porter, chief meteorologist at AccuWeather, said in a statement.
“We know we get rain. We know the river rises,” said Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly, the county’s top elected official. “But nobody saw this coming.”
Judge Kelly said the county considered a flood warning system along the Guadalupe River that would have functioned like a tornado warning siren about six or seven years ago, before he was elected, but that the idea never got off the ground because “the public reeled at the cost”.

A drone view of Comfort, Texas. Pic: Reuters

Officials comb through the banks of the Guadalupe River in Hunt, Texas. Pic: AP/Julio Cortez
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was asked during a news conference on Saturday whether the flash flood warnings came through quickly enough: “We know that everyone wants more warning time, and that is why we are working to upgrade the technologies that have been neglected for far too long.”
Presidential cuts to climate and weather organisations have also been criticised in the wake of the floods after Donald Trump‘s administration ordered 800 job cuts at the science and climate organisation NOAA, the parent organisation of the NWS, which predicts and warns about extreme weather like the Texas floods.
A 30% cut to its budget is also in the pipeline, subject to approval by Congress.
Read more from Sky News:
Elon Musk says he’s created his own political party
Trump’s ‘big beautiful bill’ passes final hurdle in Congress
Professor Costa Samaras, who worked on energy policy at the White House under President Joe Biden, said NOAA had been in the middle of developing new flood maps for neighbourhoods and that cuts to NOAA were “devastating”.
“Accurate weather forecasts matter. FEMA and NOAA matter. Because little girls’ lives matter,” said Frank Figliuzzi, a national security and intelligence analyst at Sky’s US partner organisation NBC News.
UK
How Prevent is tackling young extremism 20 years after the 7/7 bombings
Published
5 hours agoon
July 6, 2025By
admin
Radicalised nine-year-olds, teenagers mixing incel culture with extreme right ideologies and a Muslim who idolises Hitler – this is just some of the casework of those tasked with deradicalising young extremists in the UK.
Monday will mark 20 years since the 7/7 attacks on the London transport network when four suicide bombers killed 52 people and injured 770 others.
A year later the government set up its deradicalisation programme Prevent as part of its counter-terrorism strategy.
Sky News has spoken to two leading intervention providers (IPs) at Prevent who both say their work is getting ever more complex and the referrals younger.
The Metropolitan Police’s Prevent co-ordinator, Detective Superintendent Jane Corrigan, has also told Sky News it is “tragic” that when it comes to terrorism, “one in five of all our arrests is a child under 17”.
She believes parents should talk to their children about what they are reading and seeing online.
“Parents instinctively know when something doesn’t feel right when their child is becoming withdrawn or isolated – not wanting to engage,” she says.
More on Prevent
Related Topics:
People worried that someone they know has thoughts that could lead to terrorism can refer them to Prevent.

File pic: iStock
‘A pic-n-mix of ideologies’
Home Office figures show 11-year-olds are the largest age group to get referred.
Concerning cases are passed on to IPs such as Nigel Bromage who told Sky News: “Often there will be a pic-n-mix of ideologies.
“From my own examples and experience, we are aware of people looking at the incel culture and mixing that with some far-right elements.”

Sky’s Jason Farrell with intervention provider Nigel Bromage, who was exposed to extremism when he was a child
Incels, meaning “involuntary celibates” are men who have been unable to have a relationship with women despite wanting one and become misogynistic and hateful as a result.
Like many IPs, Mr Bromage from Birmingham comes from an extremist background himself, having once been a regional organiser for the proscribed Neo-Nazi group Combat 18.
For him too, it began as a child.
“It all started with someone giving me a leaflet outside my school gates,” Mr Bromage says.
“It told me a horrific story about a mum getting killed by an IRA bomb explosion – and at the end of the leaflet there was a call to action which said: ‘If you think it’s wrong then do something about it’.”
He developed a hatred for Irish republican terrorism which morphed into general racism and national socialism.
“At the very end I thought I was going to go to prison, or I would end up being hurt or even killed because of my political beliefs,” he says.

Mr Bromage says his youngest case involved a nine-year-old
Boy, 9, groomed by his brother
Mr Bromage reveals his youngest case was a nine-year-old who had been groomed by his brother.
“He was being shown pro-Nazi video games, and his older brother was saying ‘when I go to prison or I get in trouble – they you’re the next generation – you’re the one who needs to continue the fight’,” he says.
“Really, he had no interest in the racist games – he just wanted to impress his brother and be loved by his brother.”

Every year, nearly 300 children who are 10 or younger are referred to Prevent.
Home Office figures show that over the last six years 50% of referrals were children under the age of 18.
Eleven-year-olds alone make up a third of total referrals, averaging just over 2,000 a year, with the figure rising even higher in the most recent stats.
Another IP, Abdul Ahad, specialises in Islamic extremism.
He says the catalyst for radicalisation often comes from events aboard.
Ten years ago, it was Syria, more recently Gaza.
“It is often a misplaced desire to do something effective – to matter, to make a difference. It gives them purpose, camaraderie and belonging as well – you feel part of something bigger than you,” he says.

Fifty-two people were killed on 7 July 2005 when four suicide bombers blew up three London Underground trains and a bus. Pic: PA
Clients want someone to ‘hear them’
Some of his clients “don’t fit into any particular box”.
“I’m working with a guy at the minute, he’s a young Muslim but he idolises Hitler and he’s written a manifesto,” he says.
“When you break it down, some people don’t know where they fit in, but they want to fit in somewhere.”
Mr Ahad says the young individual mostly admires Hitler’s “strength” rather than his ideologies and that he was drawn to darker characters in history.
Often his clients are very isolated and just want someone to “hear them”, he adds.
Read more:
What is Prevent – and why is it controversial?
PM warns of new kind of terror threat

Intervention provider Abdul Ahad specialises in Islamic extremism
Mr Ahad is also an imam who preaches at the Al-Azar Mosque in South Shields, a well-regarded centre for community cohesion and outreach.
He uses his understanding of the Islamic faith in his Prevent sessions to help guide his referrals away from extreme interpretations of the Koran by offering “understanding and context”.
He says: “We quote the correct religious texts – we explain their responsibility as a Muslim living in the UK and we re-direct their energies into something more constructive.”
Common theme of mental health issues
Mental health problems are a common theme among those referred to Prevent including depression and autism.
A recent inquest into the death of autistic teenager Rhianan Rudd found she took her own life after being radicalised by two white supremacists.
Her mother was critical of Prevent, as well as the police and MI5 after she had referred her daughter to the deradicalisation programme and Rhianan was subsequently charged with terrorism offences.

Last month a coroner found some failings in the processes around protecting Rhianan, but none of them attributable to Rhianan taking her own life.
Det Supt Corrigan says a referral doesn’t mean individuals end up being arrested or on an MI5 watchlist.
She says: “You’re not reporting a crime, but you are seeking support. I would say the earlier you can come in and talk to us about the concerns you have the better. Prevent is just that – it is a pre-criminal space.
“It’s tragic when you see the number of young people being arrested for very serious charges. Just look at terrorism – one in five of all our arrests is a child under the age of 17. We need to think about how we respond to that.”
Prevent has been criticised for failures such as when Southport killer Axel Rudakabana failed to be recognised as needing intervention despite three referrals, or when MP David Amiss’ killer Ali Harbi Ali went through the programme and killed anyway.

Axel Rudakubana failed to be recognised as needing intervention despite three referrals. Pic: Merseyside police
It’s harder to quantify its successes.
Mr Ahad says he understands why the failures hit the headlines, but he believes the programme is saving lives.
He says: “I think the vast majority of people get radicalised online because they are sitting in their room reading all this content without any context or scholarly input. They see one version of events and they get so far down the rabbit hole they can’t pull themselves out.
“I really wish Prevent was around when I was a young, lost 15-year-old because there was nothing around then. It’s about listening to people engaging with them and offering them a way of getting out of that extremism.”

File pic: iStock
‘Radicalisation can happen in days to weeks’
Det Supt Corrigan says: “I’ve sat with parents whose children have gone on to commit the most horrendous crimes and they all spotted something.
“Now, with hindsight, they wished they had done something or acted early. That’s why we created this programme, because radicalisation can happen in days to weeks.”
Twenty years on from 7/7 the shape of the terrorist threat has shifted, the thoughts behind it harder to categorise, but it is no less dangerous.
Sports
Volpe toss hits Judge as sloppy Yanks fall again
Published
5 hours agoon
July 6, 2025By
admin
-
Jorge CastilloJul 5, 2025, 09:42 PM ET
Close- ESPN baseball reporter. Covered the Washington Wizards from 2014 to 2016 and the Washington Nationals from 2016 to 2018 for The Washington Post before covering the Los Angeles Dodgers and MLB for the Los Angeles Times from 2018 to 2024.
NEW YORK — A blunder that typifies the current state of the New York Yankees, who find themselves in the midst of their second six-game losing streak in three weeks, happened in front of 41,401 fans at Citi Field on Saturday, and almost nobody noticed.
The Yankees were jogging off the field after securing the third out of the fourth inning of their 12-6 loss to the Mets when shortstop Anthony Volpe, as is standard for teams across baseball at the end of innings, threw the ball to right fielder Aaron Judge as he crossed into the infield from right field.
Only Judge wasn’t looking, and the ball nailed him in the head, knocking his sunglasses off and leaving a small cut near his right eye. The wound required a bandage to stop the bleeding, but Judge stayed in the game.
“Confusion,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “I didn’t know what happened initially. [It just] felt like something happened. Of course I was a little concerned.”
Avoiding an injury to the best player in baseball was on the Yankees’ very short list of positives in another sloppy, draining defeat to their crosstown rivals. With the loss, the Yankees, who held a three-game lead over the Toronto Blue Jays in the American League East standings entering June 30, find themselves tied with the Tampa Bay Rays for second place three games behind the Blue Jays heading into Sunday’s Subway Series finale.
The nosedive has been fueled by messy defense and a depleted pitching staff that has encountered a wall.
“It’s been a terrible week,” said Boone, who before the game announced starter Clarke Schmidt will likely undergo season-ending Tommy John surgery.
For the second straight day, the Mets capitalized on mistakes and cracked timely home runs. After slugging three homers in Friday’s series opener, the Mets hit three more Saturday — a grand slam in the first inning from Brandon Nimmo to take a 4-0 lead and two home runs from Pete Alonso to widen the gap.
Nimmo’s blast — his second grand slam in four days — came after Yankees left fielder Jasson Dominguez misplayed a ball hit by the Mets’ leadoff hitter in the first inning. On Friday, he misread Nimmo’s line drive and watched it sail over his head for a double. On Saturday, he was slow to react to Starling Marte’s flyball in the left-center field gap and braked without catching or stopping it, allowing Marte to advance to second for a double. Yankees starter Carlos Rodon then walked two batters to load the bases for Nimmo, who yanked a mistake, a 1-2 slider over the wall.
“That slider probably needs to be down,” said Rodon, who allowed seven runs (six earned) over five innings. “A lot of misses today and they punished them.”
Jazz Chisholm Jr.’s throwing woes at third base — a position the Yankees have asked him to play to accommodate DJ LeMahieu at second base — continued in the second inning when he fielded Tyrone Taylor’s groundball and sailed a toss over first baseman Cody Bellinger’s head. Taylor was given second base and scored moments later on Marte’s RBI single.
The Yankees were charged with their second error in the Mets’ four-run seventh inning when center fielder Trent Grisham charged Francisco Lindor’s single up the middle and had it bounce off the heel of his glove.
The mistake allowed a run to score from second base without a throw, extending the Mets lead back to three runs after the Yankees had chipped their deficit, and allowed a heads-up Lindor to advance to second base. Lindor later scored on Alonso’s second home run, a three-run blast off left-hander Jayvien Sandridge in the pitcher’s major league debut.
“Just got to play better,” Judge said. “That’s what it comes down to. It’s fundamentals. Making a routine play, routine. It’s just the little things. That’s what it kind of comes down to. But every good team goes through a couple bumps in the road.”
This six-game losing skid has looked very different from the Yankees’ first. That rough patch, consisting of losses to the Boston Red Sox and Los Angeles Angels, was propelled by offensive troubles. The Yankees scored six runs in the six games and gave up just 16. This time, run prevention is the issue; the Yankees have scored 34 runs and surrendered 54 in four games against the Blue Jays in Toronto and two in Queens.
“The offense is starting to swing the bat, put some runs on the board,” Boone said. “The pitching, which has kind of carried us a lot this season, has really, really struggled this week. We haven’t caught the ball as well as I think we should.
“So, look, when you live it and you’re going through it, it sucks, it hurts. But you got to be able to handle it. You got to be able to deal with it. You got to be able to weather it and come out of this and grow.”
Trending
-
Sports3 years ago
‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports1 year ago
Story injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports2 years ago
Game 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years ago
MLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years ago
Japan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Sports2 years ago
Button battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Environment2 years ago
Game-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike