The War Nerd – The American Prospect

This article appears in the April 2022 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.

Part of their economy is picking pecans off the ground. Old people pick pecans from under trees, Lucas Kunce explains to me as we turn onto Braggadocio Road. Its his third trip to Hayti Heights, a 537-person town in the cotton country of southeastern Missouri, and Kunce, a candidate for U.S. Senate, knows his way around.

He met Mayor Catrina Robinson last year, and drove out to attend a town fundraiser. They were just sitting down to Polish sausage and bratwurst when Robinson said she had to step away. Kunce tagged along.

Five times a day, Robinson drives around a circuit of four pumps that push sewage from one end of town to the other. Since she took office in 2019, only one pump has been working. To get wastewater moving, she uses hand-powered gas generators that work like lawnmower engines: You fill the tank with gas, pull the chain, and wait for the sewage to flow.

I swear to God, it was like I was in Iraq again, says Kunce, a veteran of two wars who still serves in the Marine Corps Reserve. When Id drive around on missions in Iraq, Id see all these gas-powered pumps all over the place, moving irrigation water, moving sewage. People would go out and crank them. It was just crazy to see right here in Missouri.

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It has been 50 years since Hayti Heights, an all-Black town, split off from neighboring Hayti, which is about half white and has a handful of businesses. Hayti Heightss economy is rudimentary. Besides the pecan pickers, one resident participates in a USDA program that sends her vegetable seeds. The town pays Hayti for water under an emergency contract, and also pays to empty sewage into a disputed lagoon.

Robinson has been working to get the citys finances in order to reclaim the municipal water system, which is currently in receivership. But much of her time is spent manually running the wastewater pipes, fixing leaks and dusting spillage sites with lime when sewage bubbles up in residents front yards. People sometimes bootleg electricity by running a power cable to the water tower, which currently stands empty. Also complicating her efforts, Robinson said, most of the towns records were destroyed when the city hall was twice set on fire.

Its a town of firebugs, Robinson said. Theyll set fire to try and cover up anything.

There is a staggering amount of arson. Almost every corner shows some evidence of fire damage. The last commercial business in the Heightsa joint barber shop, tire shop, and loungeclosed after a 2019 fire that Robinson said was set deliberately. Even one of the gas generators was torched. In one especially bad week, Robinson said, a car, a business, and a house were set on fire. Every night, something was burning.

Hayti Heights is the first place Kunce takes me during the three days I shadow his campaign. He doesnt offer much commentary, but since the place gets almost no attention from journalists, he presses Robinson to detail its problems.

The town is emblematic of a point Kunce makes often in his populist campaign for Roy Blunts old Senate seat: Weve spent trillions on failed nation building abroad, and none at home. And unlike many politicians, he can speak from experience. During tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, he oversaw a bevy of failed adventures in state development. He watched multimillion-dollar buildings erected in the middle of the desert that would only be used to enrich defense contractors.

Over the same period, economists took to comparing Americas hinterlands to the developing world. A 2017 United Nations study found that 5.3 million Americans live in Third World conditions of absolute poverty. John Ikerd, an emeritus economist at the University of Missouri, calls land and labor use by agribusiness giants a form of economic colonization. Democrats, meanwhile, have been almost eradicated in rural America.

Kunce, who has never won elected office, wants to rein in the reckless adventurism of Wall Street bankers and rechannel imperial vanity back into Missouri. A century ago, Roosevelts Rural Electrification Administration helped bring light and heat to towns including Hayti. If Kunce wins, he wants the Plains States to manufacture and install the next generation of energy. You wont hear him talk about a Green New Deal, but his campaign pays homage to the postwar eras program of public investment. And populists have won before in Missouri, on similar plans to stanch corporate greed. The Show-Me States only native-son president climbed to fame off a war profiteering investigation. Kunce now lives in the same town where Harry S. Truman grew up: Independence.

Kunces plainspoken style has earned him the attention of national media. TV news has turned to him to explain failed wars, Russian energy, and his pitch for banning stock trading by sitting members of Congress. With an entirely grassroots-funded campaign, Kunce raised more money in 2021 than anyone else running. Private polling shows him within striking distance. His slogan is targeted at places that have been left behind by globalization: Its time to Marshall Plan the Midwest.

At times, Kunce seems to see Missouri as a foreign country. Driving across the state, he marvels at the cattle country of the north, the Ozark mountains of the south, cobalt mining, corn and cotton. The state map is a microcosm of America: a reddening core flanked by two blue coasts, complete with a Florida-style southern bootheel. Its all, he frequently remarks, very interesting. I suggest adjectives beyond interesting. Diverse? All-American? Its the biggest softball question for any candidate: Tell me about the district. What binds Missouri together?

The most he can offer is a kind of kid glee: We touch the most states! Eight. (Missouri is tied with Tennessee as the state with the most neighbors.)

Kunce is reluctant to spell out exactly who hes fighting for. Instead, he gets animated about pressing back hostile forces: the Wall Street raiders, monopolies, and foreign oligarchs that have stripped Missouri for parts. Hes allergic to talk of identity, which he sees as an elite PSYOP. Culture wars keep workers fighting each other instead of the owner class, so hell have no part in them, thanks. But in a state drifting right where two-thirds of the citizens believe in hell, can he write off unifying values and build his coalition around a common enemy?

Kunce grew up in the state capital of Jefferson City with Christian parents who were conservative Democrats. Working-class and pro-life, the Kunces opposed abortion, the death penalty, and nuclear weapons. Lucas was a Boy Scout, and his dad, who worked for the state Department of Conservation, was a scoutmaster. Together they tagged deer and chopped down invasive plant species. When his youngest sister was born with a heart condition, his parents went into debt and eventually declared bankruptcy. But neighbors made them resilient. His mom would write a check and ask the grocer not to cash it yet. The cashier would oblige, Kunce says, because we grew up in a magical neighborhood.

Benyam Tesfai, a fellow Boy Scout, remembers Kunce as the kid who made it cool to wear shabby clothes. Kunce is more diffident. I was super nerdy, he says. I was not, like, a sought-after commodity.

Kunce spent middle school ashamed of his grubby socks and his dads rusted-out van. Then, a classmates fatherthe warden of Algoa state penitentiary, who drove a black Cadillacgave him a ride home from their fancier house. Kunce tried everything to avoid it, but the man insisted. When they pulled up, seeing Kunces distress, the warden stepped out of the car, and told him to be proud of where he came from.

The episode gave Kunce a lasting confidence. He became class president and valedictorian, and also sat on the homecoming court. He then breezed through four years at Yale, running track and trying a stint as a male cheerleader. In fact, he seemed to do everything without trying. He joined the Marines and is running for office, Tesfai thinks, because he wanted to be challenged by something.

Kunce deployed to Iraq with his Marine unit in 2007. Much of his work involved state capacity-building. This was tracked through a system called stoplight charts, color-coded lists of skills for Iraqi partner forces, assessing them on how they conduct community policing, for example. Red meant the forces were poor, yellow would mean making improvement, and green stood for excellence.

When Kunce first got his stoplight chart, it was mostly green. I was like, damn, these guys are good, he said. Then he was assigned to assess Iraqi detention facilities in the field. We discovered, theyre not green on any of these things. He told higher-ups the charts were inaccurate. They came back and were like, No, there will be no re-review. And, at the end of this thing, they better have gone up in a couple of categories, and were not gonna ever put them down in anything.

Iraq was his first lesson in the disconnect between on-the-ground reality and happy talk. Afghanistans corruption was worse. As an attorney, he was charged with reviewing infrastructure projects, water wells, and combat forces. We would do reviews of the security forces we were paying for, and discover that most of the soldiers or police didnt even exist. One guy would invent a sheet of people, and get the salaries for all of them.

That experience gave Kunce the nerve, last summer, to unequivocally support withdrawal from Afghanistan, as other critics hemmed and hawed. I learned Pashto as a U.S. Marine captain and spoke to everyone I could there: everyday people, elites, allies and yes, even the Taliban, he wrote in a widely circulated op-ed for The Kansas City Star. The Afghan National Security Forces was a jobs program for Afghans, propped up by U.S. taxpayer dollars. As a curtain-raiser for a national audience, the op-ed gave Kunce a name as a straight talker.

Elite adventurism in the Middle East did other lasting damage, he found. American rivals grew stronger: Europe became more reliant on Russia for fossil fuels and on China for green technology. He was further convinced that America was getting screwed during a stint in the Pentagon, where he led arms negotiations with Russia and NATO. And while working in weapons system procurement, he worried about parts sourcing for jets like Boeings KC-46 refueler. Where dozens of contractors had once competed to sell military equipment, he noticed, many key systems now had only a single supplier.

To talk about his concerns, Kunce asked Matt Stoller, a researcher on monopolies, to lunch at the Pentagon. They hit it off: Both now work for the American Economic Liberties Project, a nonprofit that opposes corporate consolidation, and they co-wrote an article for The American Conservative on monopolization among military contractors. At the nonprofit, Kunce found that the dynamic he had identified in defense was part of an economy-wide takeover by a handful of firms and financiers. Within six months of leaving the Pentagon in 2020, he was back in Missouri plotting his Senate run.

In 2006, while getting his law degree at the age of 24, Kunce ran for the Missouri state House, taking on an incumbent Republican in an ideologically indistinct district with a campaign Kunce said he had been planning for three years. He came up short by about 1,600 votes, but narrowed the gap relative to 2004 by 17 points.

That was 16 years and a world of time ago for Missouri. In 2006, the state had five statewide elected Democrats and four Democrats in the U.S. House. Today, state auditor Nicole Galloway is the only statewide Democrat, and she was demolished in a 2020 run for governor. The Republican-Democratic split in the House delegation, once 5-4, is 6-2.

The red tide is glaring in a state that has passed progressive ballot measures like expanding Medicaid and legalizing medical marijuana, while overwhelmingly rejecting a proposal for an anti-union right to work law. Adjusted for cost of living, Missouris minimum wage trounces New Yorks and Californias. Yet Democratsonce the party of workersare in dismal shape in the former swing state.

Kunce is undeterred. High-profile Democrats pitched right to cling to their seats. Former Sen. Claire McCaskill lost after repealing tax cuts on the rich and pushing for a balanced budget. By contrast, Kunce focuses on fighting corporate power, a message he thinks cuts across party lines. Studies have found that Republicans and Democrats alike see big tech companies and hospital conglomerates as wielding too much power. One poll had farmer opposition to the 2018 merger of Bayer and Monsanto, two agribusiness giants, at 93 percent.

His model is FDR, whom he admires for reviving the adversarial relationship between the state and the private sector, watching contractors like a hawk. He cites the takedown of aluminum giant Alcoa, decided a month before Roosevelts death in 1945. Appeals court judge Learned Hand argued that, despite a lack of evidence of illegal conspiracy to exclude competitors, a single enormous producers market position could itself be a form of abuse under the Sherman Act. Not to find Alcoa guilty of monopolization, the court found, would emasculate the Act.

Kunce would like to use the same logic against Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi, three insulin producers he says set abusive prices. He proposes that the government set up its own insulin production facilitiesideally in Missouri, which already has a biopharmaceuticals presence. It will be important to spin these off to the private sector, he says, since the government should fund things, not run things.

Clean energy is also a big chance for public investment. In March, conservative talk radio host Pete Mundo asked him if the U.S. should drill more oil, given recent geopolitical shocks. Since 2018, Kunce pointed out, the United States has been the worlds biggest producer of oil and natural gasbigger than Russia and Saudi Arabia. Yet the market-driven volatility of U.S. oil production has made Americans more vulnerable, despite controlling a huge slice of global production. Meanwhile, Europe is sourcing big shipments of renewable-energy infrastructure, like solar panels, from China.

We are going to find ourselves replacing Russia and Saudi Arabia, as people who control the global dominance of energy, with China, Kunce told Mundo. Add clean energy to the list of sectorsincluding rare earth elements and pharmaceuticalsthat he fears are controlled by Chinese producers.

In raising concerns about foreign capital penetrating American markets, Kunce is reviving an old script. The Peoples Party, which merged the China-hawkish Union Labor Party with the Farmers Alliance in the 1890s, once organized Missourians against the interests of railroads, corporations, and national bankers. Populists combined left-wing, pro-worker views with strident protectionism, arguing in an 1892 platform for giving Native American land freely to settlers while banning foreign ownership of land.

On the campaign trail, thats now an applause line. In Greene County, it hits home with James Tucker, a corn, cattle, and soy farmer who counts himself lucky to be in business. He is a sixth-generation independent farmera lifestyle that now needs routine cash transfusions. USDA data shows that most income for family farms now comes from somewhere other than farming.

Tucker is concerned that Chinese firms are buying up farmland. Kunce homes in on the issue, pointing out that the 2013 buyout of Smithfield Foodswhich left its Chinese parent company raising 1 in 4 hogs in the United Stateswas organized by bankers at J.P. Morgan.

Jamess father, Jim Tucker, is also worried about Chinas rise. But he is less thrilled about Kunce using elite as an insult. The royals had cross-eyed kids, but they were informed people. Weve given choices over to the citizens of this country. So youve got to have an informed electorate, he tells me privately, adding that he has worked on promoting agriculture around the globe with Englands Princess Anne, who is a farmer. Dont go picking on elites.

He eventually raises the issue with Kunce, who explains that, by elite, he doesnt mean any schoolteacher or professor thats gone and gotten a college education. He just means the unpatriotic owner class of monopolists and bankersoligarchs, you could call them. Tucker seems unconvinced.

You might say the same about Missouri. Galloway highlighted foreign ownership of farmland in her bid for governor. Widely thought to be sharp and sensible, Galloway lost by 17 points. Democrats have a toxic brand.

Local Democrats arent thrilled with Kunce, either. Many view him as an unknown quantity. Another telegenic veteran, Jason Kander, came within three percentage points of unseating Blunt in 2016, when Donald Trump carried the state by a 18.5-point margin. Kander, Missouris former secretary of state who had put in years at the state capitol, was criticized as an outsider who spent too much time on the Kansas side of Kansas City.

Virvus Jones, the former comptroller of St. Louis and father of current mayor Tishaura Jones, wont entertain Kunces claim to be a populist. Jones sees a Reagan Democrat, the latest in a string of candidates willing to alienate the partys African American base to pull in intolerant rural Missourians.

In Kunces hawkishness toward China, Jones hears the latest iteration of McCaskills anti-immigrant promise to protect borders. Thats not where the base is. I dont know whos telling him that the base has some kind of Chinese fetish. I talk to a lot of people, and I have not talked to anybody who tells me the problem in this country are the Chinese. And to me, its a xenophobic kind of approach. Truth be told, we opened up China, China didnt come to us, Jones said.

Maybe Jones is a Kunce supporter who doesnt know it yet. In March, he condemned a liberal law firm for promoting spending a million dollars to attract immigrants from Afghanistan & $0 to recruit or retain black people to STL.

Kunce played Magic: The Gathering throughout his tours of duty overseas. At the facility in Afghanistan, one of the communications Marinesthe data nerdsordered a box of cards from the makers, Wizards of the Coast. (Now its a subsidiary of Hasbro, Kunce notes, because everythings consolidated.)

Inspired by role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, Magic is a fantasy trading card game in which players summon creatures or cast spells using sets of cards with names like The Orzhov Syndicate, Elite Spellbinder, and Subtlety. It is a game of strategy whose developer has a Ph.D. in combinatorial mathematics, and involves a heavy dose of chance. Some commentators have argued that possession of land early in the game makes play strategy too dependent on luck.

Kunce has played Magic in every place hes lived. Theres always Magic people, everywhere you go, he says. I joke that it must be the only globalist community hes a part of, and he clarifies that he has only really played with Americans.

These days, he plays on Friday nights when hes home in Independence, at a game shop around the corner from his home. He takes me on a Tuesday, but the regulars still recognize him. One player tells me his play style is highly controlled: Its mostly reactive. He wants to see what were doing and try to beat that. But mostly, he just stops us from doing our thing.

In tight spaces, Kunce tends to hunch. Six-foot-two with a lantern jaw, it is sometimes unavoidable. He looks very Captain America at the fantasy card shop and seems to feel it, tilting his body forward, scrunching up. Hed rather just be a war nerd.

The next day, walking on the street where he grew up in Jeff City, full of small houses and empty lots, Kunce is more at ease. He made this same walk last year for a campaign announcement video called Home. This is where we build our future. On the cracked streets, in the forgotten neighborhoods

Josh Hawley, the senator Kunce would serve alongside if elected, begins his speeches invoking similar imagery. Quoting scripture, he said in November that its the job of men to build up the ancient ruins repair the ruined cities. But Hawley frets that governing a republic calls for manly virtues, and Americas men are withdrawing from society to watch pornography and play video games.

Others in the race are tripping over each other to provide thick models of masculinity. Mark McCloskey, a personal injury lawyer who shot to fame brandishing an AR-15 outside his St. Louis mansion, has just joined the race. Hawleys preferred choice, Rep. Vicky Hartzler, has made banning transgender athletes from womens sports a key campaign plank.

Kunce cant quite bring himself to rehearse cultural scripts ascribed to Middle America. He likes Clint Eastwood moviesand Star Trek. What does he watch while lifting weights? Netflixs most frivolous rom-com, Emily in Paris. His campaign wardrobe, endorsed by his two young sons, emphasizes animal print: button-downs embroidered with lemurs, butterflies, and dinosaurs. He thinks people should figure out their private preferences, and politicians shouldnt be in the business of moral edification.

Whether you want to frame it positively as a guiding light, or negatively as a controller, Kunce says, the government should never seek to steer individuals moral choices. It should just give people the resources to figure out their own lives. Government should be a self-determination freedom provider.

What about issues like abortion, guns, and trans rights, where the boundaries of self-determination are disputed?

In his 2006 campaign, Kunce opposed abortion. Today, he cautiously supports a womans right to choose, and stresses the language of individual choice, framing anti-abortion laws as another area where elites are passing Big Brother laws to keep Americans weak and divided. He refers to a Texas law that relies on private citizens for enforcement, pushing neighbors to spy on one another.

If youre one of the people whos profiting massively off our economic system and want to keep the status quo, he explains, its great to fund culture war stuff, on either side, because you keep everybody distracted.

Since he was a teenager, Kunce has played computer games like Sid Meiers Civilization. (He once retorted to Hawley that he and his fellow Marines played video games between missions.) But unlike family-values conservatives with high-flown talk about the decline of masculinity and a looming clash of civilizations, Kunce knows the difference between battleground and fantasy.

Globalists have these ideas like theyre playing a computer game, and they dont even know whats going on in their own backyard. Or if they do know, then theyre particularly evil, Kunce says. What about Hawleys vision for reviving American manliness?

Thats Star Wars: Clone Wars crap, Kunce says. Does he want us all in his image? I wouldnt want to be like him. To me, that would be emasculating.

Democrats build handsome careers these days losing long-shot campaigns in red states. McCaskill and Kander, the last two high-profile Democrats to fall short in Missouri, are now frequent contributors on MSNBC, where Kunces star is rising. Several Democrats, convinced the state is irretrievably red, suggested that he could be running for a book deal.

If thats the gambit, he is playing masterfully. Nearly everyone who meets Kunce is charmed. The bigger worry is not that Kunces honest intentions will fail to come through, but that his authenticity may be beside the point. If he makes it past a field of seven primary challengersincluding one former state senator who is basing his candidacy on electabilityKunce may not get a chance to make his general-election pitch to voters, because Missouri, like the nation, is deeply divided.

With each passing year, fewer and fewer Missourians think of themselves as temporarily estranged Democrats. The state is drifting right, so the question is less whether you have a perfect message, and more where that message breaks through. Americans increasingly consume their news on Facebook, where inflammatory culture war content plays best.

He may have the resources to overcome that. Despite not taking corporate PAC money, Kunce has consistently outraised not only his own fellow Democrats, but all the Republicans in the race, which includes two sitting members of Congress, the current attorney general, and a former governor.

Given his new role as a media gadfly, it may not be surprising that a large share of Kunces grassroots contributions come from out of state. Does that make him, in the old populist lingo, a carpetbagger? Money isnt in Missouri, is his response, since whats happened in Missouri over the past 40 years is basic economic warfare.

In 2012, McCaskill held onto her seat when she faced down an opponent who dismissed the likelihood of getting pregnant from legitimate rape. If Kunce wins, it could be because hes dealt the right hand. Former Missouri governor Eric Greitens, currently the Republican favorite, is a Navy SEAL with a Ph.D. from Oxford in refugee studies.

Greitens is ethically challenged. Frequently likened to Trump, the candidate has been embroiled in a scandal surrounding the misuse of a donor list to his veterans charity, and was found by a state panel to have tied up and sexually assaulted a woman in his basement. Before resigning as governor, Greitens said, This is exactly like whats happening with the witch hunts in Washington, D.C.

Scott Faughn, a Republican newspaper owner, said that in a race between Greitens and Kunce, he would probably support Kunce. He cant bring himself to back Greit-ens, he said. Im just not part of the basement wing of the party.

What about Kunces campaign as a positive case study for populism? Can a Marine who loves Magic unite mainline Democrats and disenchanted workers?

Kunce doesnt talk about it in those terms. Hes not rustling up team spirit, but identifying a common enemy. He may be reluctant to name his coalition because its members wouldnt want to be found at the same campaign after-party. Some might suspect each other of being racist whites, politically correct Blacks, or temporarily embarrassed yuppies. His insistent focus on the looting of the American heartland allows him to be many things to many people.

Moderate Democrats, for instance, are forever rediscovering the idea of running brawny veterans in red states, hoping that Republicans get whipped into such a patriotic fever that they accidentally vote blue. They might get more than they are bargaining for. Blandly handsome Kunce has repackaged progressive ideas as sensible plans for investment in green manufacturing, and thunders proposals for trust-busting to cut the investor class down to size.

There is also a growing appetite among national pundits for someone fiscally progressive and socially conservative who can articulate a vision of revived American greatness. That is, in fact, who I thought I would be meeting. Someone who had been to D.C., read the room, and replanted himself in the no-till soil of Independence, Missouri, to refute globalization and the delusions that marketization and growth would be peaceful, and offer a counter-vision for Americas new role in a multipolar world. Instead of managed decline, this would be a vision in which American power is spent more sparingly, but is no longer a dirty word.

He believes in the project of America, Matt Stoller had told me. He wants to wield power Hes saying, Im an optimist.

Actually, Kunce is a realist. He doesnt have much patience for abstract cant about the American project. And he is a conservative, but not the same kind as Hawleys speechwriters. He wants to rebuild a state torn up by the violent invasion of markets. The friend who seemed to know Kunce best was not Stoller but Robinson, the mayor of Hayti Heights, who was most struck by his neighborliness. When he has visited, Kunce has helped her refill the gas generators and prime the sewage pumps. That surprised her. Most people, theyll be deterred by the smell.

Faiz Shakir, a former Bernie Sanders adviser, wrote a recent article with Sarah Miller, Kunces boss at the American Economic Liberties Project, diagnosing Democrats failure to project muscularity. Even amid a surge in bold proposals to curb corporate power, they say, Democrats are still delivering a shaky pitch, deferring value-based judgment and leadership.

Kunce wants to revive public investment and patrol elites. That would seem to be what Shakir and Miller are looking for: building a political coalition around a set of shared values. Kunce suggests otherwise. Hes betting that if you identify a common enemy, your allies are implied.

For her part, Mayor Robinson says she is not a political person. Kunces focus on restricting the power of elites is rousing.

He dont care whose toes he step on, she says. She especially likes his proposal to ban congressional stock ownership. The people who own all this money in stocksthey started getting richer, while the poor are getting poorer. I agree with that. Stop making them get rich. They pick and choose when their stock can go up and downits not fair. I agree wholeheartedly.

UPDATE: The day before this article was published, the St. Louis socialite Trudy Busch Valentine announced that she will join the race as a Democrat. Shortly following that news, former state Sen. Scott Sifton, Kunces top primary competitor, dropped out and endorsed Valentine.

Heiress to the Anheuser-Busch beer baron August Gussie Busch Jr., Valentine is a Democratic party donor who was a major contributor to former Sen. McCaskills campaign. She held a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in 2016 that was attended by McCaskill, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Launched in St. Louis in 1876, Anheuser-Busch makes iconic beers such as Bud Light, and markets itself as America's Best-Loved Brewery. It is now a wholly owned subsidiary of AB InBev, a Belgian multinational.

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The War Nerd - The American Prospect