No. of Recommendations: 7
I think the Democratic Party lost connection to voters forty years ago when the working class and unions were abandoned to the whims of globalization and the free rein of finance capitalism.
I agree Democrats certainly have lost the working class. The question is why.
A big faction of the party - what I'll call the "economic left" - wants to believe that the party lost the working class because of things like globalization and finance capitalism. Because that's the easy answer, for them. They want to change the party's approach to globalism and finance capitalism. So if those are the reasons the working class doesn't like Democrats much anymore, it's not medicine for them to swallow. It's sweet and delicious.
But if the Democrats lost the working class for other reasons, it's much harder. If the working class moved to the Republicans because of the Democrats' positions on climate change, or immigration, or crime, or a host of other cultural signifiers, then you can't get them back by just switching to a pro-tariff anti-finance posture. You have to make some hard changes that will impose pain on the coalition.
So where you land on what the Democrats should do going forward depends a lot on what you think is the reason the Democrats have lost working-class voters. Obviously, the Jacobin wing of the party strongly believes in class consciousness - that the working class voters think of themselves as having a working class identity, and therefore will act politically based on that identity. If that's what caused them to leave the Democrats, then changing positions on a class basis can bring them back. But if that's not what caused them to leave - if the working class left the Democratic party because they generally have more conservative cultural viewpoints on issues like religion, immigration, guns, crime, gender, environmental issues, and the like - then that's a recipe for failure.
