Democrats for over a century were associated with the American middle class.
Working-class voters once believed that Democratic-inspired intervention into the economy – minimum-wage laws, overtime pay, Social Security, Medicare, workers’ compensation – protected their interests better than unfettered free-market capitalism.
Republicans often had trouble selling the argument that an unleashed economy and new technology would relegate poverty to a relative, not absolute, condition – something like suffering with a cheap outdated iPhone 4 while the better-off afforded an iPhone 6. Why, then, have Democrats lost the working class – especially white, lower-middle-class voters?
There are several obvious reasons.
For one, high-profile progressives are largely rich, and their relatively small numbers live in a gentrified cocoon. Politicians, academics, media personalities, celebrities and other Democratically aligned professionals had just the sort of academic brands or technological, linguistic, cultural and service skills that were well-compensated during the transition to globalism.
Their out-of-touch privilege, however, led to agendas – radical green politics, hyper-feminism, transgender advocacy, forced multiculturalism, open borders – that were not principal concerns of the struggling working classes. A techie in Silicon Valley, an actor in Hollywood, a trial lawyer in Washington or a professor at Yale had the income to afford the steeper taxes and higher housing, energy and college costs that were the natural dividends of their own political agendas.
High-speed rail, expensive graduate degrees and European-level gas prices are logical aims for elites....
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