The author of The Hospital asks: Can one poor city show the way to restore faith in government and reimagine the nation’s future?

Chester, PA, a poor, majority Black city just south of Philadelphia, is plagued by gun violence, decrepit infrastructure, a hospital at risk of closing, and a scary reputation. After more than a century of mismanagement, people have lost all faith in government.

Stefan Roots, a wastewater plant operator, wants to do something to clean it up. So he runs for mayor with an unlikely cast of political aides: a former kid drug dealer, a one-time hip-hop impresario, a white evangelical graduate student, and a wealthy white business man. Can these neophytes save the soul of the city, restore faith, and set an example for the nation? Brian Alexander argues that the problems Chester faces have germinated over a century of political malfeasance, and the deification of market capitalism. Now, these forces are doing to the rest of the country what they did to Chester long ago as inequality, privatization, and unrestrained profit-seeking spread, wrecking communities and delivering Trump.

Alexander also tracks a quixotic former state legislator in Maine, West Virginia’s only elected transgender office holder, and a young Black Democratic Socialist in a well-to-do and mostly white Philadelphia suburb as they struggle to, and sometimes succeed in, reversing the tide. At times ripping, tragic, and hopeful, The Mayor is extraordinarily timed to illuminate our current crises while offering a way forward.