The upstart: young people are moving toward the Democratic Party. Has Rep. Tim Ryan found a way to keep them there?

• Author: Roth, Zachary

THE SINGLE BIGGEST FAULT LINE in today's Democratic Party is between those who think that expanding international trade is the key to our prosperity, and those who think that it's what's putting that prosperity at risk. And in that debate, last fall's midterms seemed to boost the latter faction: from Virginia to Montana, voters chose Democrats who promised to fight future trade deals and renegotiate old ones. "Free trade has definitely left the building," declared Slate's Jacob Weisberg, writing in the Financial Times the day after the election.

Few congressional districts in the country were more receptive to that anti-free trade pitch than Ohio's Seventeenth, a gritty, blue-collar region of Irish, Italian, and Polish Americans in the northeastern part of the state, along the Pennsylvania border. For much of the twentieth century, the local area's economy was centered on the steel industry, and it was devastated by the closure of many of the area's largest steel plants in the late 1970s and early '80s, thanks to increased global competition. Auto and auto-parts factories remained the only large-scale employers, but in the wake of the free trade deals of the '90s many of those jobs were lost as well. Today, telemarketing, which offers almost exclusively minimum-wage work, is one of the area's few real growth industries.

Unsurprisingly, an antipathy toward increased global trade pervades the region's political culture. Sherrod Brown--perhaps the most prominent free trade opponent of any Democratic candidate last year--swept to victory in Ohio's U.S. Senate race, in part by winning 73 percent of the vote in Trumbull and Mahoning counties, the heart of the Seventeenth District. Says William Binning, the chair of the political science department at Youngstown State University: "We've been protectionists since McKinley"--a local product himself.

The district is represented by Tim Ryan, a six-foot-three former high school quarterback who was elected in 2002 at the age of twenty-nine and remains one of the youngest members in the House. Not surprisingly, given his constituents' profile, Ryan is known as a hard-nosed economic populist, recently sponsoring a bill that threatens to impose tariffs on Chinese goods in response to China's manipulation of its currency. He's also a definite up-and-comer in the Democratic caucus, and, thanks to some fiery anti-Bush speeches, a favorite of liberal bloggers, who see him as the archetype of the youthful new brand of "fighting Dem."

So it was something of a surprise that, when Ryan gave an expansive speech at the Akron Press Club in January, he said nothing about fighting free trade deals, or unfair global competition, or the evils of corporate outsourcing. Instead, he began by lecturing his audience on the phenomenon of "base transition," which he described as a principle of thermodynamics in which the electrons in an atom begin to move in the same direction. "Our country and our community and our world are in the midst of a base transition," he continued, requiring us "to move away from the old way of thinking."

Inching closer to his theme, Ryan segued into a discussion of the ideas of Alvin Toffler--a name, it's safe to say, that has rarely, if ever, been invoked at the Akron Press Club before. The futurist writer's new book, Revolutionary Wealth, Ryan explained, argues that human civilization has passed through two complete stages, or "waves"--the agricultural and the industrial--and that we're now in the third wave, which Toffler calls "knowledge-based." By substituting "evermore-refined knowledge for the traditional factors of industrial production--land, labor and capital," Toffler and his wife, Heidi, write, we'll soon be able to drastically curtail global poverty, and "unlock countless opportunities and new life trajectories."

For a politician whose district has essentially been devastated over the last thirty years by the shift from an industrial to a knowledge-based economy to be touting the work of one of the foremost champions of that shift was, to say the least, a little odd. But Ryan told the crowd he'd been so impressed with Revolutionary Wealth that he'd called Toffler, and last year the two had ended up talking for hours in Ryan's Capitol office. (He later gave Sherrod Brown, among others, a copy of the book.)

Ryan is tall, dark, and broad-shouldered. His speaking style can be fiery when he gets carried away, but in Akron that night, in a suit and tie, he seemed to be making an effort to come off as a sober, thoughtful, and mature adult in front of the local party activists, business and labor leaders, and daily news reporters--many of them twenty or thirty years older than he--in the crowd. Still, as he returned to the theme of a world in transition, a faint edge appeared in his voice. "Our kids and our grandkids are gonna grow up and say, 'When all this stuff was going on, what were you doing? Were you trying to hold on to something that was no longer existing? Were you the one pushing the edge?'" he warned the crowd. "'Were you participating in this? Or were you obstructing this natural evolutionary flow of our species?'" He ended by evoking Bobby Kennedy's promise of "weariness, hardship, and sacrifice."

Ryan's listeners appeared to receive his speech as a vague but inspiring call for idealism and public service--"Ryan Presents Concept of Team" was the headline the next day in the Akron Beacon Journal--and the applause at the end was warm. But hidden amid the heroic Kennedy allusions and the slightly self-conscious references to atoms, electrons, and waves of civilization was a profound challenge to the audience: the industrial economy isn't coming back. He couldn't, of course, come out and say that directly to a roomful of people for whom the industrial economy represented the greatest period of stability and prosperity they'd ever known, which was why Ryan needed Toffler and his sometimes flaky futurism--to act as a kind of sugarcoating for the pill he was asking his audience to swallow. "In our part of the country, we have a very strong cultural tie to steel," Ryan told me later. "And whether we like it or not, the world has changed." The speech, he said, "was a challenge to change your way of thinking."

Ryan's audience may not have known quite what to make of that challenge. But his faith in capitalism to deliver a better way of life for his constituents--which echoes both Bill Clinton and even Newt...