The 2026 Northwestern Essay, #10--How Things Change

Northwestern (6-2) takes on No. 21 ranked Iowa (6-2) in a 7:30 p.m. night game at The Library on Fox. Last week, Northwestern raced out to a great start in Eugene, leading 20-6 with 2 minutes left in the 1st half.  And then the bottom fell out, losing 34-26.  It was disappointing, but I am still very positive on this team, with another change to get a win over a ranked team in Iowa.  

Iowa is a total enigma to me, as is often the case with Iowa.  They crushed Wisconsin last week and looked dangerous on offense, but the week before against Minnesota they looked like the bad Iowa offenses of the past.  So, which Iowa are we going to get?  

Northwestern has four games left--Iowa at home, at Ohio State, at Minnesota, Illinois.  I think Northwestern will be favored against Illinois, but the other three games (I think even Ohio State given their QB situation, though that is the biggest stretch) are both winnable and losable.  I would be thrilled at going 2-2, which was my best case scenario to begin the season.  Beating Iowa puts us in the driver seat for that outcome.  And it is always fun to beat Iowa.  

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I am going to do a dangerous thing here, and talk a bit about politics.  Specifically, to talk a bit about how change elections happen, and why I think the one last Tuesday happened.

Ernest Hemingway famously said in The Sun Also Rises that you go bankrupt gradually, and then suddenly.  You sometimes hear the same idea expressed as something happens "slowly, then all at once."  This is my experience with everything that changes.  In retrospect, you can usually plot out a pretty linear sequence of events for how you get from Point A to Point B, no matter how large the distance between those points are.  But the subjective experience in the moment is sudden, even sometimes violent.  

The same thing happens with change elections.  In my lifetime, there have been two change elections.  One was 1980, which I certainly don't remember (I was 2) but was technically alive for, which was the end of the post-War alignment and the rise of the modern Republican Party.  And the other was 1994, which was the death of the post-War Democratic Party.  I think last Tuesday, 2026, was the third one.  Lots of people want to argue that 2008 and/or 2016 were change elections, and they looked that way at the time, but I don't think they really changed the fundamental landscape.  It might be the case that 2026 proves illusory, but I don't think so.

Change elections are always over-determined, in that it is always an intersection of multiple events. I think there are a series of issues that have been festering for a long time that boiled over in 2026.  I have four of them discussed below--I think there are others, especially relating to race and immigration, but I am less sure how that is going to play out, so I will go with just these four.

1.  The US Place in the World.  Since the end of the Cold War, the American consensus has been in favor of the idea of the US intervening in various locations in the world, but especially in the Middle East, to try to make the world a better place.  During this period, there have been of course lots of disagreements over how to do that and where to do that, but I think there was broad agreement over the basic premise.  It is very important to remember that the war in Iraq circa 2003 and 2004 was broadly popular--John Kerry ran in 2004 on the idea that he would run the war in Iraq better.  Obama in 2008 ran against the Iraq War, but he didn't run against interventionism as such.

After 30 years of this, what have we gotten out of this?  Have we made the world a better place?  Have we really changed anything?  And, in the process of doing not much of anything, we have spent an inconceivable amount of money, money that could have been spent on all sorts of other things.  I have become skeptical of foreign interventionism, I like to think as a result of learning from the experience of the 2000s and 2010s.  And I think this is a broadly shared view, cutting across other political divisions.

Then Trump attacked Iran.  At the most generous reading, it was more of the same bullshit we have been trying unsuccessfully for 25 years.  And, unlike in previous interventions, it caused immediate negative economic effects, particularly with regard to gas prices.  So it was not only more of the same, but it confirmed the idea that we are giving up our own personal flourishing for these dubious and probably illusory developments across the world.  

The war in Iran was one intervention too many, and the voters punished Republicans for it.  I think this is going to be the last intervention of this kind made by the United States for a very long time. 

2.  The Tech Bros.  If you were to poll how popular "the Internet" was in, say, 1998, I think you would find something north of 90% approval.  But, since then, it has gotten increasingly unpleasant.  A big part of it is the complex and multi-faceted, but nevertheless real, phenomenon of "enshittification."  Basically, the products of technology that we increasingly have no choice but to use have become increasingly not good at doing the things they are supposed to do, annoying to use when they do work, and are increasingly predatory and manipulative.  

People are looking for someone to blame.  And the leaders of the tech industry have offered themselves up for blame by becoming increasingly, frankly, bizarre and off-putting as people.  Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are, at a baseline level, extremely unlikable people.  They seem to be increasingly divorced from any sort of normal interactions and behavior.  They seem to be embracing increasingly strange ideological and philosophical positions, bordering on cult-like behavior.

All of this culminates in AI.  The pitch we have received from the Tech Bros is "AI is either going to take away your job or make you into a serf to us, and to accomplish this we are going to take all of your water and electricity to stick a data center on your land that sounds like something out of a horror movie."  This is basically a middle finger to everyone that is not directly Tech Bro aligned, especially because it at the same time it screws white collar folks by taking away their jobs and it screws rural people by dropping these data centers in their back yard.

Last Saturday, we drove out to Lynd's Fruit Farm, which is about an hour outside of Columbus.  An hour outside of Columbus is unquestionably rural America.  As soon as you got outside of Columbus, you saw sign after sign after sign for anti-data center ballot initiatives, which ended up passing by a large margin.  That's when I knew that the Tech Bros had a massive problem.

Republicans in general and Trump and JD Vance in particular have hitched their wagons to the Tech Bros, and it blew up in their face because the Tech Bros have become too toxic.  The Tech Bros are wildly unpopular, and I think they are going to be wildly unpopular for a while.

3. Tariffs.  It used to be the case that there was a wing of the Democratic Party that was protectionist, and the framing was between elite opinion that supported free trade and more base-oriented protectionist position. You still see that a little bit in the Democratic Party via Bernie Sanders, but that energy moved over to the Republican Party, at least during the Trump period.  In its initial framing, as with the 80s/90s Democratic debate, was between elite opposition to tariffs versus a more populist pro-tariff position.  

In a way, tariffs are the ultimate example of an elite versus populist issue.  Economists are basically unanimous that tariffs are a bad idea and don't work.  But this conclusion is not obvious, and the case for tariffs protecting domestic industries makes logical sense.  So it makes sense why the idea of tariffs is attractive as part of a populist program.  

The problem is that the tariffs have completely blown up in Republicans faces.  And the epicenter of the melt down is the center of populism--rural America.  Tariffs have hurt everyone but they really hurt farmers.  I think 2025/2006 has taught rural America that tariffs are bad for them and for their interests.  Sometimes you have to learn from experience, painful as it may be.    

Between this is and the AI thing, pretty much the entirety of rural America swung hard away from Republicans.  It is possible that Republicans will ditch their unpopular positions and everything will swing back.  But they are going to have a hard time doing that on Tech if it means giving up Elon's money, and there are, I think, some true believers on the tariff issue as well. If Republicans can't count on rural America, then the fundamental political landscape is permanently changed. 

4.  Old People.  37 versus 63.  42 versus 63.  58 versus 73.  43 versus 67.  These are the comparative ages of the Democratic candidate for the US Senate versus the Republican candidate in Texas, South Carolina, Maine, and Mississippi, respectively.  Democrats won all four of these states.  The Iowa Senate race was between two people in their 40s, and the Great Survivor Sherrod Brown was older than Husted.  But the overall trend was older Republicans versus younger Democrats, and the Democrats romped. 

Ever since 1992, a single generation--the Baby Boomers--has been in charge of our public life.  That generation is now old.  Democrats paid an enormous price in 2024 for having 81 year old Joe Biden leading the party and being at the top of the ticket until well into the election cycle.  Republicans now have 80 year old Trump as the leader, and I think even his biggest defenders will admit that he doesn't have his fastball anymore.  I think people are just done with having that generation of leaders in charge of things. 

The story of the 2026 election is a that a wave of very talented Democrats in their 30s and 40s got elected to prominent positions.  There are very few equivalents on the Republican side, and that is an enormous advantage for Democrats going forward unless or until the Republicans find comps for themselves. The old well of Boomers and old Gen Xers is not going to get it done.  Democrats have moved on from the old folks, and Republicans are going to have to do the same if they are going to compete.