“America’s Hidden Crisis of Power and Place”

From David Fontana in the Washington Post Magazine. Perhaps a little Wendell Berry in our politics! A snippet:

Paul Ryan was elected to Congress in 1998 from Janesville, Wis., current population about 64,000. Ryan attended college outside Wisconsin. He then moved to Washington, where he would work as an aide to one senator and a legislative director to another. He also worked for influential Republican Jack Kemp — learning things and building relationships far from Janesville that he later described as important in his career.

In 2017, Jon Ossoff ran in a special election in Georgia to fill an empty seat in the House of Representatives. Ossoff was raised in an area close to the district in which he was seeking office, but went to Georgetown University and attended graduate school in London. He had not lived in the area for some time and did not live in the district when he was running for office — so he could not even vote for himself. Ossoff touted his experience as a “national security aide” in Washington during the campaign. He lost that election, but in 2020 ran for the Senate — and won.

Ryan and Ossoff do not share the same ideology, but they do have one thing in common: Like so many of their colleagues, their path to power ran through places other than the ones they were from. It is telling that only about half of new members of Congress in 2021, according to Forbes, had a degree from a college or university in their state.

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