When Howard Schultz criticized Seattle this week, he wasn’t inventing a grievance. He was re-enacting one.

He was the latest in a long line of people who’ve stood up in Washington State and said that Seattle has turned against the people who built it. That line goes back at least to the shopkeepers and labor organizers who faced off over Chinese exclusion in 1886, who believed roughly the same thing, and who were right and wrong in roughly equal measure. The players change. The tension underneath doesn’t.

To understand what’s actually happening in Washington State in 2026, the warnings about businesses leaving, the fights over taxes, the feeling that something has broken, you have to start not with Schultz but with a couple of historians who’ve spent their careers trying to explain why this place is the way it is.

Colin Woodard’s argument, in his book American Nations, is that the Pacific Northwest was built by two groups of settlers who had almost nothing in common. The first he calls the Yankee impulse. These were New Englanders who came west with a plan: build a better society, governed by rules and institutions, by people who believed government could actually improve human life. They founded the universities and the civic organizations and the reform movements. They also believed in the power of commerce and capitalism. For them, business was the building block of community and it wasn’t just a nice idea. It was a moral obligation.

The second group, what Woodard calls the Appalachian surge, came for the opposite reason. They weren’t building anything. They were getting out. They brought a deep suspicion of authority, a commitment to being left alone, and what Seattle critic Fred Moody would later call in Seattle and the Demons of Ambition, an “ethos of anti-ambition.” A pride in opting out. In refusing the terms the powerful had written. Seattle became a city that welcomed dropouts and rebels, a place with what Moody affectionately called “slob appeal.”

Put these two groups together and you get a region that’s been arguing with itself ever since. It wants good government and hates being governed. It builds large corporations and then turns on them as symbols of the conformity it was trying to escape. Woodard calls this a “fecund hybrid.” It can produce both Microsoft and the WTO riots in the same decade.

Moody’s account of the WTO riots, which he called “Apocalypso,” is still the best explanation of what happens when these two traditions crash into each other with nothing in between. Mayor Paul Schell, a classic Yankee “vision guy,” genuinely believed Seattle’s niceness would make it a model for the world. Instead, the streets blew up. The bicycle cops, the friendly symbol of the city’s relaxed self-image, were replaced overnight by what Moody called “Darth Vaders,” riot police in black gear. Beneath the utopian surface there’s always what Moody calls a “truncheoneer” waiting. Starbucks, which had been a scrappy local success story, had transitioned to the New England ideal of the Pacific Northwest corporation, along with Boeing and Microsoft and became a window to smash.

The pandemic, two decades later, showed what the synthesis looks like when it works. Christine Gregoire’s “Challenge Seattle” coalition pulled the private sector together fast. Boeing made PPE. Starbucks helped streamline vaccination logistics. It was the New England tradition at its most functional: disciplined, science-first, with business and government pulling in the same direction. The curve bent.

That spirit is gone now, or at least that’s what Schultz and Gregoire both say. And the question of why is where the standard take on this story goes off the rails.

Most of the coverage frames this as Seattle versus business, progressivism versus capitalism, taxes versus growth. It’s not a useless frame. But it misses the most important political fact about Washington State right now: the Republican Party hasn’t produced a statewide elected official or protected a statewide incumbent in a generation. So, this is a civil war inside the Democratic Party. And once you see that, Schultz’s op-ed looks completely different.

As a sidenote, this isn’t the first time Washington State politics have been defined by the internal politics of one party. In the 1920s, Republicans had been so dominant for so long, that only a handful of Democrats were elected to the state legislature. All the important political debates happened between various kind of Republicans.

But Schultz isn’t writing to Republicans. There are no Republicans to write to, not at the statewide level. He’s writing to the centrist, business-aligned Democrats who used to run Washington State, the people Christine Gregoire represented, that Gary Locke represented when he crafted a policy package to keep Boeing here. These are the ones who thought you could keep labor and the Chamber of Commerce in the same coalition. That coalition is losing ground inside the party, and Schultz knows it. His column isn’t really an economic argument. It’s a distress signal from a faction that’s being outmaneuvered within its own party.

Once you see it that way, everything shifts. The new taxes, the “socialist rhetoric” Schultz attributes to Mayor Katie Wilson aren’t accidents or failures of economic understanding. They’re the deliberate choices of a coalition that’s decided it doesn’t need the Schultz wing to win elections in Washington State. Lately, they’ve been right

But here’s where Woodard’s framework, useful as it is for understanding the past, might actually lead us astray.

He’s right about the history. The Yankee and Appalachian traditions really did shape this place, and the tension between them really does explain a lot, from the WTO riots to the pandemic response to what’s happening now. But those traditions aren’t frozen. They’re being recombined.

What’s happening isn’t the old synthesis falling apart. It’s two new versions of it forming, competing for the same ground.

The first version mixes the communitarian side of New England with the live-and-let-live ethic from the Appalachian tradition. The result is a politics that’s comfortable using collective power on social questions, pro-trans, pro-DEI, anti-racist, committed to equity as something the community actively builds, while also holding to the Appalachian idea that the government has no business regulating who you are or how you live. This coalition is fine with progressive taxes because it doesn’t read taxation of the rich as government overreach. It reads it as investment. It’s not anti-business, exactly. It’s indifferent to business as a civic priority. The economy, in this view, is plumbing. It needs to work, but it’s not the point.

The second version mixes the rules-based, institutionalist side of New England with the pro-business instinct from the Appalachian tradition. This is the Schultz coalition. It believes in civic partnership, in the kind of collaboration between business and government that made the pandemic response work. It also believes that growth comes first, that you can’t redistribute your way to prosperity, and that treating your biggest employers as adversaries is a serious mistake. It’s not against government. It’s against incompetent government. Those are different things.

These two coalitions have more in common than either would like to admit. They both trace back to the same regional mix Woodard describes. They both say they believe in good government. They both say they’re fighting for the soul of the Pacific Northwest. Meanwhile, the Republican Party has spent a generation mostly absent from statewide politics, occasionally trying to woo the Schultz coalition with pro-business appeals, but unable to get past what the national party has become.

So Democrats fight each other. In primaries. In city council races. In the pages of the Wall Street Journal. The party is big enough to hold both coalitions right now. But probably not forever.

Fred Moody has this image he uses for the history of the Northwest. He calls it a “bucking-bronco sine wave”: boom, bust, purge, renewal. He’s always liked tech collapses as what he calls “cleansing opportunities,” moments when the phantom wealth burns off and the region gets back to its actual self. There’s something glossy about that view. It suggests that what’s happening now is just another dip, and that the region will find its way back, as it always has.

But this time feels different. The automation rolling through Amazon and Microsoft isn’t a market correction. It’s structural.

Moody actually wrote about an earlier version of this. When he was covering the 1990s tech boom, he would recognize the Microsoft and Amazon generation as a new mutation of Woodard’s Yankee New Englanders: same utopian conviction, same faith that the right tools could perfect the world, just expressed through software instead of civic institutions. The people building Encarta thought they were democratizing knowledge. The VR evangelists thought they were reinventing human experience. Moody wasn’t unsympathetic, but he wasn’t fooled either. These were the “vision guys” in updated form, with the same blind spot the original ones always had: their utopia tends to arrive on the backs of people who don’t get to share in it. The Encarta team got laid off when the internet made their product obsolete. The VR evangelists mostly got absorbed or let go when the hype ran out. Now the engineers who built the AI tools are being displaced by the AI tools. It’s the same pattern, one cycle later, except this time the technology actually worked.

When Weyerhaeuser replaced loggers with machines through the 1980s, the region eventually settled on a story about spotted owls and environmental regulation that let everyone off the hook. The real story was that automation had been eating jobs for years before the spotted owl became a symbol. We’re probably going to be tempted to do the same thing now, to make this a story about taxes and progressive overreach, and miss what’s actually happening to workers as AI takes over more of what software engineers and middle managers used to do.

The Schultz coalition wants to restore what made the old tech economy work, without quite admitting that the new one is walking away from workers.

Which is why the debate Schultz is asking us to have might be the wrong one. Whether Jeff Bezos stays in Washington or moves to Miami, whether Starbucks shifts five hundred corporate jobs to Tennessee, those aren’t the numbers that will define this region’s future. The numbers that matter are the software engineers, the middle managers, the logistics coordinators whose jobs are being automated away by the same companies that spent decades making this one of the most prosperous places in the country.

Both political traditions, in their remixed forms, actually have something to offer here if they’re willing to use it. Progressive taxation applied to the profits of automation isn’t just redistribution for its own sake. It’s a way to make sure that when an algorithm replaces a team of engineers, the gains don’t just flow to shareholders while the engineers figure out what to do next. That instinct, using collective power to push back when technology rewrites the terms of work, is older than either coalition. It’s what the Yankee communitarians and the Appalachian labor organizers were both doing, in different ways, from the beginning.

Schultz ends his column calling for a “new compact,” and he’s right that one is needed. But the compact he’s describing is between government and business. The one that’s actually needed is between the economy that’s coming and the workers who built the one we have. That’s been the argument in this region from the start. The actors keep changing. The stakes don’t.