…let us pause to contemplate what appears to be the epic dimwittedness on the other side of the battlefield–the years of folly that have allowed the Democrats to wander blithely into the same old snare again and again. The laissez-faire system has just finished giving us a convincing demonstration of its viciousness, but the party of Franklin Roosevelt can't get out in front of the resulting anger. Working-class Massachusetts and even Appalachia are turning away from it in disgust, but the party of the political scientists doesn't seem to have noticed.
The answer to the riddle is as plain as the caviar on a lobbyist's spoon. Democrats don't speak to angry, working-class people because a lot of them can't speak to angry, working-class people. They don't know how. Many of the party's resident geniuses gave up on that constituency long ago, preferring instead to remodel their organization as the vanguard of enlightened professionals and the shrine of purest globaloney. They worked hard to convince Wall Street that new-style Democrats could be trusted. They accepted, for the most part, the deregulatory agenda of the Reagan administration; in fact, in some fields–banking, telecommunications, free trade–they went farther than Ronald Reagan dared. (h/t Jon Taplin at TPM Cafe)
I've said it often enough before, but I'll say it again: The Dems have allowed themselves to become broadly perceived by blue collars as no longer representing their interests, and the Dems are forcing them into the arms of the populist right by default. The Dems have become the province of culturally left Whigs and corporate Whigs, and neither speaks blue-collarese. It doesn't matter that their policies are more worker friendly than those of the GOP. It's a question of 'ethos', and where people feel at home, and which party makes them feel that way.
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