IT CAME TO THIS LONG AGO.

Salena Zito continues to chronicle the "destruction" side of "creative destruction" along the rivers of northern Appalachia.

Most people in this town will tell you they'd rather have taken a physical punch to the gut than get the news they received yesterday when Cleveland-Cliffs Steel announced it was idling its tinplate production plant, a move that directly cost 900 people their jobs.

It isn't just those workers who face catastrophic uncertainty; this closure also jeopardizes the jobs of thousands more people whose businesses supported the plant: the barber shops, gas stations, mom-and-pop grocery stores, the machine shops that make the widgets for the steel industry. And there's also the demise of the tax base, which affects the school district and the quality of the roads.

Thirty years ago, more than 10,000 people worked here at Weirton Steel. Now, the last 900 workers left have just lost their jobs.

"It's just another scar to add on what people in power have done to our lives and our community over the past 40 years," said one employee who declined to give his name, adding, "Honestly, how many times does this story have to be told before someone in power cares about our lives."

He points to different buildings downtown, and all of them for him were "used to be this" and "used to be that."

Weirton this week, a few years ago it was Youngstown, it's the same story.  "It would be scant consolation to these men that the closures of steel mills all up and down the Mahoning and Monongahela valleys was creative destruction at work, a shakeout of suboptimally small plants at less advantageous locations."

It might help the people of the mill towns left behind to have the people in power come up with sensible policy responses.  That's not what we're seeing.

Ryan Weld of Wellsburg, 43, grew up in downtown Weirton right behind the local funeral home.

"When I was growing up in the '80s, the mill was still going at full tilt with Weirton Steel employing 10,000 people, including my grandfathers," he said.

The Republican state senator said things started to slow down here in the mid to late '90s after the North American Free Trade Agreement was enacted: 'That dramatically changed the landscape of downtown, it went from a bustling Main Street to dead. I am part of the last age group that remembers the shops and stores and restaurants of downtown.'"

He believes NAFTA, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, essentially made it hard for companies like Weirton Steel, which had to follow strict and expensive Environmental Protection Agency guidelines, to compete with places like Mexico. The towns all up and down the Steel Valley died hard.

"The legacy of the federal government and its refusal to properly enforce trade laws is nothing but empty mills and unemployed workers," Weld said. "That was true in the '80s and '90s, and that is true today."

Trade laws and environmental protection had less to do with those mill towns than new thinking in steel making.

We can't bring back those workers or their health, but we can note that U. S. Steel is still slow to adapt.  It's probably still heretical in the union halls of the Mon Valley or to the northwest along the Mahoning to say Nucor-Yamato.  Never mind that Nucor and Yamato established a joint venture to recycle scrap into heavy structurals a quarter century ago in Blytheville, Arkansas.

Or that there are newer galvanizing lines elsewhere in the United States, or that Cleveland-Cliffs opted not to get involved in the sale of United States Steel.  Or that there is steel production closer to the current markets.

There are still good jobs in steel, but the minimills are located closer to markets: to the extent that the minimills are producing long products, they're more likely to be along navigable rivers (thus look to Arkansas and Louisiana for your H-sections.)  The legacy steel companies failed to take the challenge from the minimills seriously.  As I noted a year ago, "steel consumers gained, but some communities and many steel workers, lost."

Unfortunately, in the upcoming election season, about the best the residents of the valley mill towns might be able to expect is a variation of the potted industrial policy that has brought us Build Back Better and the continuing fiasco that is expanded electric vehicle production.

Forty years ago, the Democratic Party started to slowly shed its working-class base, but not quickly: Democratic officials would still show up for decades at union rallies, putting their arms around workers' shoulders and telling them they have their back while at the same time enacting regulations and trade agreements that stripped them of their livelihoods and dignity and made ghettos of their once beloved communities.

By the 2012 Obama reelection, they traded their New Deal Democrat legacy voters for ascendant groups: minorities, young people, college-educated elites and single women, all done without so much as a Dear John letter.

The Republicans inherited them, but most of their strategists running messaging and campaigns had no idea what to do with them, at least on the national level.

And then there is the press covering the voter who will decide the next president: Few if any of them come from places like Weirton or Youngstown, Ohio, so they have little understanding of their worldview. Things that give people from here purpose, such as living close to extended family, are not as valuable to someone who has been transient for most of a career.

In short, we are heading once again into an election where very few people in Washington truly understand how remarkably devastating this mill closure is. Instead, it is a wire story at best, soon forgotten if measured at all. They truly do not understand how much the loss of the dignity of work has changed American politics. That this tone-deafness is still happening 14 years after Barack Obama was given notice in the 2010 midterm elections and eight years after Donald Trump won the presidency is pretty staggering.

The Democrats once attracted these voters, but they've moved on to the social justice crowd and don't appear to want to anymore.

It.  Wasn't.  The.  Trade.  Agreements.  Neither the trade wars nor the trade agreements nor talk of industrial policy nor picking winners can undo what emergence and creative destruction have brought about.  Nor should we expect Politics to accomplish much.  What, exactly, have Democrats done for the social justice crowd or the allegedly ascendant in the past quarter century?