'We Just Want Someone Sane': What Happens When a Small Town Goes MAGA
Washington County was never known as Crazytown. The parameters of local power weren’t hard to discern when steel and coal dominated the economy. They’re not much different now. Situated at the western edge of Pennsylvania, the county of 200,000 sits atop the Marcellus Shale. Gas is plentiful and the industry that extracts it is influential. Some farmers have gotten rich leasing rights to their land. Plenty of workers, blue- and white-collar, are doing well servicing the industry. The county, still crawling out of the deep pit left when union steel and coal jobs vanished, has made itself a reliable partner to drilling.
Yet if you look at local politics, the landscape appears as disfigured as a mountaintop lopped off for quick, gruesome profit. The volcanic dissolution of Republican politics, from conservative to MAGA, from solidly corporate to chaotically Trumpist, has remade state capitals around the country. But it has worked its way deep into small towns and counties, too. In nearby Allegheny and Butler counties, election denial, extremism and furious infighting among factions have upended Republican politics. In Union Township, in Washington County, four of the five township supervisors resigned last fall along with the township’s accountant and solicitor. One departing supervisor cited public harassment and “intimidating behavior,” including “heinous comments and false accusations.”
Despite a shared MAGA faith, and fealty to every carbon-based energy form, local Republicans appear in a near-constant state of one against all. At a Washington County Republican “unity” event around Christmas, the incumbent county controller threw a drink — glass included — at another Republican. Meanwhile, the incumbent Republican county prothonotary — the civil court clerk — is under investigation for accessing a county database to gain “potentially confidential information of various prominent political figures, attorneys and private citizens.”
A GOP candidate forum on March 28 in Washington, the county seat about 30 miles south of Pittsburgh, put the MAGA-fication of local politics on full display. If such events were once predictable in a certain way, with local candidates doing their best imitations of Ronald Reagan or some local worthy, they have become familiar in an entirely different way, with candidates aping the professional wrestling ethos of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, Lauren Boebert and other MAGA performers. The candidate forum, held in a dark and cavernous event space containing perhaps 100 people, presented local politics as burlesque.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/2023/05/07/gop-election-deniers-are-gunning-big-for-pennsylvania-local-government/a47b48c6-ecd1-11ed-b67d-a219ec5dfd30_story.html
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