Where Have All the Democrats Gone?
The Democratic Party has had its greatest success when it sought to represent the common man and woman against the rich and powerful, the people against the elite, and the plebeians against the patricians. Over the last thirty years, the Democrats have continued to claim to represent the average citizen. In his 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton championed the forgotten middle class and promised to put people first. Barack Obama pledged that the voices of ordinary citizens would speak louder than multimillion-dollar donations. Hillary Clinton in her 2016 campaign promised to make the economy work for everyday Americans. And Joe Biden promised in 2020 to represent the people and framed the election as being between Park Avenue and Scranton.
For all this, over the last decades, Democrats have steadily lost the allegiance of everyday Americans the working- and middle-class voters that were at the core of the older New Deal coalition. Initially, most of these lost voters were white, but in the last elections, Democrats have also begun to lose support among Latino and Asian working-class voters.
How did this happen? There is an original reason, for which the Democrats were hardly to blame. Democrats were the principal supporters of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 measures that went a long way toward ending racial segregation and Jim Crow, but that angered many southern whites and, to a lesser extent, some whites in the North.
Fills me with horror, mostly. This account. But still worth reading.