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new technology would relegate poverty to a relative, not absolute, condition — something like suffering with a cheap, outdated iPhone 4 while the better-off afforded an iPhone 6.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. They insist that the planet is cooking, that cities are the sole generators of cultural advancement and that tony academic stamps are proof of knowledge superior to the kind absorbed through religious instruction or pragmatic experience. In the short term, liberal elites had little clue how the ramifications of their unworkable ideology always fell on distant others. Before one can damn fracking, guns, traditional religion and tract suburbia, one has to have a high income that allows for expensive energy, exorbitant college tuition and $500-a-square-foot housing. ObamaCare, with its higher average deductibles and premiums, is far more of a burden than a bargain for the working class. Race proved a second Democratic Waterloo. The constant push for identity politics, open borders, expanded federal entitlements and inflated government was based on the idea that an increasingly non-white America would soon swallow up the old European majority and ensure a new Democratic century. But class is always a more telling divide than race. In contemporary, straitjacketed Democratic orthodoxy, there is no concession to the idea that a white male mechanic could face more economic difficulty than a Latina journalist, African-American federal employee or Asian dentist. Lockstep obedience to the mantras of diversity, affirmative action and preferential hiring does not allow that race can be increasingly divorced from class. Read More At Investors Business Daily: news.investors/ibd-editorials-perspective/010715-733671-democrats-no-longer-party-of-working-class-americans.htm#ixzz3OCBhwISq Follow us: @IBDinvestors on Twitter | InvestorsBusinessDaily on Facebook
Posted on: Thu, 08 Jan 2015 03:06:51 +0000
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