Well it HAD lain dormant for an entire 19 minutes when I posted.
This subject is actually generating some pretty good commentary on the net right now. Noam Scheiber believes that an economic populist agenda would win over more working class white voters. He believes that the Democrats are concentrating too much on social equality, as in gays should be allowed to marry, women should receive equal pay, undocumented Latinos should be fully integrated into society, etc. Not that Democrats should be against those things, but right now there’s the appearance that they are all about helping this or that group without any overarching message that applies to ALL Americans.
I’m skeptical about economic populism though because the Democratic version of it basically amounts to tax and spend, which has been rejected by the white working class ever since the 1980s. If there’s a version of economic populism Democrats can embrace that doesn’t involve taking more of our money to “help” us, then they might be on to something.
But I do agree that Democrats need a message that resonates with everyone. The one the Republicans have always pushed, “Small government, family values, a strong America on the world stage” in theory is something no American would oppose, so when the messaging works it works like a charm. The Democrats have never really had that kind of message. Back in 2004, they’d have self-serving excuses like, “Our agenda can’t fit on a bumper sticker”, but the real problem is that the Democratic Party since the Great Society has always been made up of disparate groups with vastly different wants, many of them conflicting, and which often risk breaking out into open conflict that is ameliorated only by the fact that if they do wage political war against each other it plays into the right’s hands.
It isn’t just in the United States, of course.
Look at the “socialist” parties of Europe. Does anybody really believe that coal miners and factory workers are the primary concern of the British Labour party? Ha! The party’s very NAME tells us that it’s supposed to be representing blue-collar Britons,the working class. In reality, today’s Labour leadership is far more interested in the welfare of gays, feminists and immigrants than of the people who first brought them to power nearly a century ago. If anything, Labour’s leaders look down on the white working class in Britain, just as many of the leading lights in the Democratic Party today now sneer at the yahoos and rednecks of the white working class.