This past decade has forced every American to reckon with profound doubts about the resilience of our democracy. As our nation grows increasingly divided, certain bedrock assumptions have begun to crack: just how free and fair are our elections? Is the United States climbing a path of moral progress, or tumbling into chaos? Will we recognize our country a year from now?
Beneath each splintering axiom of the American project lies the most urgent question: what does political representation actually mean, here in the 21st century? Our democracy depends upon a few hundred people, chosen by the rest of us, to make intelligent, moral decisions. Ideally, these representatives would be driven only by a sense of service to their fellow citizen.
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Yet there is ample evidence that most politicians are motivated instead by self-interest. The median net worth of a United States Congressman is 14 times greater than the median American household. Each day we read a new story about the flagrant corruption occurring inside our nation’s capital. When holding public office becomes synonymous with personal enrichment, a society is in great danger indeed. Vicious polarization, mass disaffection, political violence: it all stems from the knowledge that we have been betrayed by those in power.
Restoring faith in American democracy will require new leaders. Leaders who understand themselves as of the people, not above them. Leaders who do not crave power, but reluctantly accept it. Leaders loyal to the struggling many, not the wealthy few.
I met Sam Forstag, a candidate for Montana’s first Congressional district, when we were fourteen years old. Back then, Sam was a small, scrappy kid living in one of Portland’s poorest neighborhoods. Every morning, he took the bus across the river to attend our Catholic high school, where he was on full financial aid. As one of the few students from a low-income family, Sam was often the butt of derogatory jokes. My earliest memory of Sam is when he volunteered to coordinate the Christmas canned food drive for our homeroom. Over the titters of our peers, the teacher made a crack about how Sam better not pilfer the donations.
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This financial gulf became a defining feature of Sam’s adolescent years. While other students took ski trips to Europe, Sam’s mom pulled extra shifts as a nurse to keep the lights on. While other students lived in sprawling mansions, Sam slept in a small, unheated room in his dad’s garage. These experiences of structural inequality informed Sam’s emerging ethics. Even as a teenager, he demonstrated an uncommon concern for those on the margins, going out of his way to make less popular kids feel included and standing up to those who bullied them.
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After high school, Sam and I attended the University of Montana. In Missoula, Sam’s talent for leadership blossomed: he was elected student body president senior year, then helped run an advocacy firm to protect constitutional freedoms in Montana. In 2018, Sam joined the Forest Service, and for years he alternated between fighting fire in the summers and fighting for policy reform in the winters. In 2022, Sam underwent rookie training at North Cascades Smokejumper Base, where I was in my second year. After Sam graduated, I had the enormous privilege of spending a summer parachuting into wildfires with my oldest, closest friend.
Thus far, the articles about Sam in outlets like The New York Times and The Guardian have focused on his smokejumping bona fides as the kind of background that might convince a swing voter to check his name on the ballot this November. But it is not the flashy nature of his career that should convince Montanans to elect Sam. It is the depth of his decency.
Here’s a story: in Sam’s second year as a smokejumper, instead of leasing his home in Missoula to the highest bidder, Sam rented it far below market-value to a veteran who was trying to get back on his feet. Later that summer, Sam tore his calf muscle while working on a wildfire. As he hobbled up and down the fire-line, Sam began receiving texts from neighbors saying his new tenant had trashed his house, invited squatters to live inside it, and was using drugs on the property. So Sam hiked out of the fire with a bum leg and drove seven hours back to Missoula in excruciating pain. When he got home, Sam’s small house had been destroyed, and there were several people in the depths of a drug-fueled psychosis holed up in his basement. But even with a calf on the verge of compartment syndrome, even confronted by thousands of dollars of property damage, Sam did not react with anger or fear. Instead, he talked everyone down, bought his tenant a hotel for the night, then gave him money for treatment. Imagine what our country might look like, if every politician, in the midst of such stress, displayed this same humane regard for those in crisis.
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But beyond Sam’s instinctive empathy, it his ability to stand up to tyranny that makes him such a compelling leader for our moment. Last year, during the chaos that was DOGE, Sam spoke at a rally in Missoula. At that point, thousands of federal employees in the BLM, Forest Service, and National Park Service had been laid off, with no warning, for no good reason. In his capacity as union leader, Sam described the pain so many of us felt, watching our coworkers fired in the most heartless manner possible. Sam gave words to what was plainly true: the richest people in our country had ruined the lives of dedicated public servants, all in the name of a cruel spectacle meant to sow discord among the American people.
After Sam’s speech, the Secretary of Agriculture’s office pressured the Missoula Smokejumper Base to fire Sam. In the ensuing weeks, whenever we spoke, I could hear the stress inside Sam’s voice, as he wondered aloud what would happen if he lost his job—how would he afford his mortgage, his groceries, his power bill? Our conversations felt surreal. Was this really what America had become? A country where presidential cabinet members terrorize public servants for speaking honestly?
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That experience was an inflection point. Sam wasn’t fired, because the smokejumper community and our union rallied behind him. But by the end of the summer, it became clear that Sam was uniquely positioned to stand up against the corruption and violence infecting our federal government. So Sam resigned his post as a smokejumper and entered the congressional race.
Since then, he’s been offering a rare glimmer of hope for those of us who want a representative who will serve his constituents, rather than exploit them.
‘Our Democracy’ = Their Oligarchy
Not since the Civil War has American democracy faced such existential danger. If we hope to overcome this moment of crisis, we must finally set aside our partisan disagreements and help put people like Sam Forstag into office. We must judge our leaders not on the basis of political identity, but on the strength of their character. We must elect those who represent not the worst of us, but the best.
