It’s no longer your father’s party
The Bill Clinton campaign of 1992 was the last gasp of the old Democratic Party. It’s no longer your father’s party. But back then, it still was. It was still the party of “Give’em-Hell Harry,” of old Harry S. Truman.
Though in its last throes, it was still the party of the lunch-bucket, blue-collar, working-stiff guy and gal who jeered at the fancypants, stuffed-shirt, emptysuit, Big Business-suck-up Babbitts of the Republican Party.
Bill Clinton himself was, actually, a new Democrat, an effete, wonkish fellow, a draft-dodger with ties to Georgetown, Oxford and Yale Law but who was marketed to voters as a regular-guy “Bubba,” a commoner of the party’s old school.
That was the work of Clinton’s savvy strategist, Jim Carville — “It’s the economy, stupid.” He’s a fish out of water in today’s Democratic Party.
That party today is no assemblage of union factory workers. It’s an elite conclave of government, school-bureaucracy and university employees, augmented by “social justice warriors” and socialist demagogues culled from the ranks of the entertainment industry’s nouveau riche — not to mention a scattering of Sturmabteilung (Brown Shirts) “Antifa” riffraff.
The one-time party of Harry Truman now battles for rest-room choice for the transgendered but not for school choice for African American parents in dysfunctional public school districts, where partyaligned teacher unions maintain the rigid, plantation-level status quo.
What would old Harry Truman have had to say today of the window-smashing, police-taunting, antiTrump rabble-rousers tearing through the streets as they chant, “No borders, no wall, no USA at all!”?
Meanwhile, especially over the last three decades or so, the industries that once sustained the lunchbucket, working-stiff cohort of the Democratic Party have largely evaporated. (Total number of GM employees working today at the massive old Fisher Body plant outside of Trenton: zero. Total number of GM employees today in China: 60,000.)
The former members of this one-time Democratic cohort, or their children, are still around, however. They’re eking out livings as checkout clerks and such at the big-box stores, if they’re lucky. You can find not a few of these survivors of the globalized economy at those rambunctious Trump rallies packing auditoriums in towns and cities across America.
Today’s Democrats don’t as a rule have calloused hands from manual toil. Many have, instead, university degrees and other conferments of status, civil service entitlements, for example. They’re pretty much like the Republican cohort they once lampooned. They’re elitist too, though in a different way. They have education, which is to say, superior knowledge. They know what’s best for you.
Or to put it another way — they’re absolutely sure that you are too ignorant to grasp what’s in your own economic interest. (A one-time hotcakes bestseller among liberals — “What’s the Matter With Kansas,” by U. of Chicago PhD. Thomas Frank — propounded this very thesis with snide fervor.)
Virtue-signaling Democratic elites today sneeringly classify the Trumpeters as a collection of KnowNothings, Plug Uglies and Yahoos. Putting down such sophistication-lacking losers, Barack Obama told an audience of San Francisco elites in 2008: “They get bitter, they cling to their guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or antitrade sentiment as a way to explain their frustration.” This was privilege speaking — the privileged Obama of the fancy private academy, Punahou School, of Columbia U. and of Harvard Law.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton added: “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables… racist, sexist, xenophobic, Islamophobic ….” This also was privilege speaking — the privileged Clinton of the white Chicago suburbs, of Wellesley and Yale Law.
More recently, the rabidly anti-Trump Peter Strzok sneered at Trump supporters as “ignorant hillbillies” who give off an odor of “the local Wallmart.” Again, privilege speaking — the privilege of an upper-level FBI bureaucrat.
Then there was New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. “We are not,” he declared, “going to make America great again. It was never that great.” Once more, privilege speaking — the privilege of a cosseted brat who grew up in a gubernatorial mansion.
Do you begin to detect a pattern emerging here?
The party’s supercilious leadership forgets that the irredeemable booboisie of Trump supporters was once disposed to vote Democratic and to do so by huge margins.
No mas. As often as not you can identify this demographic today by their bright red MAGA hats. They may not be fully conversant with the esoterica of tariff economics, but they are observant enough to know who’s looking down on them — no longer just the hidebound, establishment, Wall Street Step ‘n’ Fetchits of the GOP but the snotty new vanguard of the today’s Democratic Party as well.
Meanwhile, the party’s populous rhetoric against wealth grows ever more strident by the day, even as the party increasingly taps into this very wealth to fund its existence.
In recent decades the Democratic Party has taken to suckling from the same financial-industry teat that the GOP does. Consider:
Since 1990, a half dozen top financial players — Soros Fund Management, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, American Bankers Association and Bank of America — donated $183 million to Democrats, $121 million to Republicans. (Nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.)
Croesus-rich Gov. Jon Corzine of wall-to-wall Democratic New Jersey and the state’s current governor, Phil Murphy trace their fabulously wealthy lineages to time served in the upper strata of the Goldman Sachs Wall Street capitalist empire.
While firebrands Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria OcasioCortez apply flame-thrower rhetoric to targets of their ire for accumulating wealth, such fantabulously rich plutocrats as Tom Steyer and Geroge Soros go right on pumping tens of millions of dollars into the Democratic Party’s coffers. Hedge funds and equity funds — money-making schemes that top the Democratic Party’s speechifying demonology list — help keep the party’s propaganda apparatus humming right along.
Perhaps, in the party’s defense, it can be said that it is only seeing that vice pays tribute to virtue — and leave it at that, without noting that a philosopher once suggested this as the very definition of hypocrisy.