O Democrats!

Playing to its elite Base the Democratic Party has lost the country.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/upshot/poll-2022-midterms-congress.html?smid=url-share

[T]he confluence of economic problems and resurgent cultural issues has helped turn the emerging class divide in the Democratic coalition into a chasm, as Republicans appear to be making new inroads among nonwhite and working-class voters — perhaps especially Hispanic voters — who remain more concerned about the economy and inflation than abortion rights and guns…Democrats are maintaining the loyalty of a crucial sliver of predominantly liberal and highly educated voters…who are relatively liberal and often insulated by their affluence from economic woes. Just 17 percent of white college-educated Biden voters said an economic issue was the most important one facing the country, less than for any other racial or educational group.

No surprise here. Democratic Party policymakers wrote off working-class voters decades ago.

At first, they didn’t even notice that there was a working class. There were just, as far as they could see, the people with whom they worked and socialized and The Poor. It was only when white working-class voters became ‘Reagan Democrats’ and then the Republican Base that they took notice.

Initially, Democrats were baffled. The Republican Party, as they had learnt during their young Marxist days, was the party of bloated plutocrats. Why was the Proletariat siding with their oppressors rather than joining the Revolution which they, as intellectuals, had started as undergraduates?

Democratic activists soon had it figured out. The Democratic Party supported the interests of The Poor which, as everyone knew, meant people of color. The white working class had abandoned the Democratic party because they were racists. There was no winning them back and, in any case, there was no room for racists in the Democratic Party.

Strategically, therefore, the Democratic Party wrote off the white working-class as a shrinking demographic. Soon, policymakers persuaded themselves, the white working-class would be swamped by Black and Brown people who were the Democratic Party’s most reliable constituency.

The defection of Hispanics was a shock. Reliable Catholic breeders whose numbers were growing, the Democratic Party counted on them. And, Democratic policymakers, viewing all political behavior through the lens of race, assumed that they were genetically locked into the Democratic party.

Politically, however, Hispanics were not a racial group. They were an upwardly mobile, assimilating immigrant group like the Southern and Eastern Europeans who had come to America in the early 20th century. The children of these European immigrants, the white ethnic working class that populated dying rustbelt cities, had joined the Republican Base and later immigrants were, predictably, following suit.

Were Democratic Party operatives clueless or were they playing to their Base—white college-educated Biden voters ‘liberal and insulated by their affluence from economic woes’ of whom only 17 percent thought economic concerns were the most important issues facing the country?

The cluelessness of the 83 percent who just didn’t get it is staggering. Here were people of goodwill who clamored for diversity and had unilaterally gifted immigrants and their descendants with the title ‘Latinx’, who did not understand that for most Americans money and jobs were of more immediate concern than abortion, gun control, same-sex marriage, trans restroom rights, pronouns, micro-aggressions, or any of the other moral luxury items du jour with which they were preoccupied.