WaPo: Opinion Democrats don't have a working-class problem. America does.

[Dennis Donovan]

WaPo - (archived: https://archive.ph/O5ngv ) Opinion Democrats don’t have a working-class problem. America does.

Extreme income inequality and unchecked corporate power gave rise to FDR’s New Deal — Democrats should be no less ambitious now.



By Dana Milbank
November 29, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EST

It’s that time again. Every election that ends in a Democratic defeat seems to produce the same breathless analysis: Democrats have lost the working class!

In 2004, we heard that “working-class Americans, once the core of the Democratic Party, are voting Republican.”

In 2016, we were told: “Democrats once represented the working class. Not any more.”
And now, inevitably, headlines over the past three weeks have been revealing the same startling discovery all over again:

“Democrats’ working-class exodus sets off reckoning within party.”

“Why Democrats lost their working-class coalition.”

“Is This the End of the White Working-Class Democrat?”

This is getting tedious.

/snip

[snot]

1. Agreed.

Trump's 2016 campaign took off when he started appropriating Bernie's talking points.

At that point, both parties realized they should start at least giving more lip service to working class concerns, but neither party's done enough to reverse the momentum of our huge and ever-expanding income and wealth gaps...

...because that would require deep structural changes to, e.g., restore the proper regulation of financial markets, the media, etc. – i.e., undoing many or most of the changes that took place under Reagan, Clinton, et al.,* which may have looked ok at the time but that have proved to have disastrous consequences.

*E.g., w.r.t. financial markets, the deregulation of S&L's and banks, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the decision not to regulate credit derivatives, the legalization of naked shorts, etc.; the weakening of labor laws; NAFTA and the like; the Telecom Act of 1996, which repealed restrictions on the consolidation of media ownership, etc. etc.

[LearnedHand]

2. Much as I liked the Big Dog

He did a tremendous amount of damage to this country with these changes you listed. I will never forgive him for it.

[snot]

3. Also agreed.

I've actually wondered whether some kind of dim, general awareness of his legacy might have been part of what undermined Hillary's campaigns, lending plausibility to the portrayal of her as aligned with Wall St. over Main St.