The Democratic Party was once considered the home of working people. That changed as mainstream liberals of the 1960s such as Hubert Humphrey, John and Bobby Kennedy, and AFL-CIO leader George Meany were replaced by radicals and their ideological offspring.
A key moment in that transition came during Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign. Before a group of wealthy supporters in California, Obama spoke condescendingly of people in small towns in Pennsylvania and the Midwest where “the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. . . . And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
In 2011, Thomas Edsall wrote in the New York Times:
(P)reparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.
All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment—professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists—and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic.
After the 2014 election, in which 64 percent of “white” voters without college degrees favored Republicans, political analyst Ronald Brownstein said of such voters: “You’re talking about people who are deeply alienated from American life, both culturally and economically.”
Soon, those “alienated” people had a candidate. In August 2015, the British newsmagazine The Economist called Donald Trump’s base “relatively uneducated supporters who don’t have much disposable income, are relatively unlikely to volunteer on his behalf, and who may not even show up at the polls on primary day.”
Henry Olsen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (and a regular contributor to American Greatness) wrote in National Review:
Thanks to Donald Trump, American elites are finally paying attention to blue-collar, white America. They do not like what they see.
Racist. Bigoted. Irrational. Angry. How many times have you read or heard one or more of these words used to describe Trump’s followers? Whether they are the academic, media, and entertainment elites of the Left or the political and business elites of the Right, America’s self-appointed best and brightest uniformly view the passions unleashed by Trump as the modern-day equivalent of a medieval peasants’ revolt. And, like their medieval forebears, they mean to crush it.
Angelo Codevilla, professor emeritus at Boston University, noted that “America is now ruled by a uniformly educated class of persons that occupies the commanding heights of the bureaucracy, of the judiciary, education, the media, and of large corporations, and that wields political power through the Democratic Party. Its control of access to prestige, power, privilege, and wealth exerts a gravitational pull that has made the Republican Party’s elites into its satellites.”
Indeed, rabidly anti-Trump Republicans shared Democrats’ disdain for Trump supporters. Kevin Williamson of National Review wrote, “The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.”
From there, it was a short walk to Hillary’s Clinton’s description of half of Trump supporters as “deplorables.”
What you’re seeing now, played out every night on the news, is class warfare.
America’s privileged elites refuse to accept Trump as president and support any effort, no matter how absurd, to bring him down. (Impeach him! He’s a Russian spy!)
Trump may be a New York billionaire, but to the elites, he’s a man of Queens—the Queens of working-class history and Archie Bunker stereotype—rather than a sophisticated Manhattanite, who would be fit for the presidency.
Worse, he is a stand-in for his supporters. Too many of them are the kind of folks who work on farms or in factories or on construction projects. Too many are the sort who take showers after they get home from work rather than before they leave for work.
It’s a pattern repeated throughout history: Members of one group—say, the British aristocracy, or the Bourbon planter class in the South—come to dominate members of another group—the peasantry, or poor African-Americans and white farmers. In the minds of the elites, the advantages they experience must be the result of their innate superiority; they are more moral, more sophisticated, more intelligent than the lower classes. They’re just better.
On Inauguration Day, President Trump said, “January 20, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.” But you can’t give power to “the people . . . the forgotten men and women” without taking it from those who have it. Members of the elite will fight for what’s theirs, because, they believe, what’s theirs is theirs by right.
For them, that means the 2016 election must be nullified, by any means necessary.
Very nice piece. It’s pretty clear the left was so excited with Obama, as he perfectly melded the two wings of that coalition, being both a minority and a highly educated former law professor. It’s also clear he, his supporters, and the entire Democratic Party had little interest or concern for the white working class, rural Americans, Christian Americans, gun-owning Americans, blue collar Americans, and the like. The thought they were a deplorable minority that would be taken out of commission by immigration policy and the rise of their more educated sorts into the multicultural elite. They were wrong.
The voters Democrats decided they didn’t need gave the victory margin to Trump.
Really good news is that Democrats are doubling down on ignoring and mocking those same voters.
Big assumption that jug ears was educated. He got Negro credentials but I don’t think he got the smarts. Nothing he said or did demonstrates any high level intelligence…just good staffers and handlers and even their level of competence sucked. Note Obamacare, Iran Deal, Shovel ready…and so on.
“and a highly educated former law professor”
One of the greatest myth’s perpetrated on the American citizenry. Smart? No, but shrewd, devious and deceitful, absolutely.
Affirmative action teaching assistant. There, corrected it for you.
Always appreciate a second pair of eyes and a correction that is both accurate and meaningful.
i am fascinated by the contrast of intelligence to shrewdness. Obama certainly appears to be a prime example. Princess Diana was another.
I would never ascribe shrewdness to Princess Di. She was not that bight and was easy to manipulate. Obama was/is at least bright enough, but in a sociopathic way.
I don’t believe Barack was anything more than an adjacent prof – lots of status, little money, no track to tenure. He did not have the academic chops to be a University of Chicago prof.
It is so odd that no heavy hitters in the Dem party noted that as they moved left, they’d have to find a way to keep on supporting their traditional base. Good thing, though. And good thing Trump had the insight that this huge group were being abandoned. His instincts and all are so fine.
Great, thought provoking piece.
Not really odd. Just selfish, ignorant, power hungry and anti-traditional-America. What do you expect of two whole generations of people who were never taught the principles of western civilization and the development of the US Constitution.
People who will now reap the whirlwind.
Yep and it shows with the kids from Parkland. Loud, pompous, self centered and ill informed. Perfect little demorats.
I must note that the Rats do not have any heavy hitters. Just lots of academics and so called journalists with poor credentials. Along with millions of bureaucrats.
Jayne, the Democratic Party hates its traditional base, despises them. The whole idea today is for the left in each Western nation to replace its citizens, to replace them with “migrants” who will owe them fealty. The more hostile migrants are to America’s traditions and values, the better, that is the commonality between the Islamists and the left.
It is not class warfare. It is anti-Christian warfare. The enemy of the Jews has always been Christ and the focus of the Christ haters will always be to maximize the harm to white Christians. It is the way of the Jews. The Jews have too, too much hate for Christ, Christians and Christianity. And the Jews want every last remnant of Christ, Christians and Christianity dead and destroyed.
Try some Xanax, or a gun.
Stand still for a second okay.
Up your oxygen feed, you’re seriously hypoxic.
Moschiach is coming. BAHA
Jesus was a Jew. The Christian church began as a Jewish sect. You’re an idiot.
During my childhood (before the cultural revolution of 1968), what are now called ‘the deplorables’ were known as ‘the salt of the earth’. How times change.
nice read
I keep thinking, how can they possibly KEEP going on this way? Doesn’t the loser have to subside eventually? But the left is like the loser who goes away and comes back with weaponry. It’s rather worrying.
Don’t be afraid of them. At heart, they’re cowards. And historically and economically ignorant cowards as well.
Cowards can be tremendously dangerous when they get together in groups or get backed up by the state in some way or another.
But I’m a woman. We may be hardwired to be cowards ourselves.
You’re correct, cowards often attack in groups and try to outnumber opponents 2-3 to 1. They’re still cowards at heart.
cowards? They have shown the moral and physical courage and fortitude to hold onto their beliefs and kick our asses. It is our side that is full of cowards.
The antifa is a disgrace to the powers which tolerate them. Berkeley comes to mind.
The Trump wing deplorables will never know the tastes of the delectable wagyu beef and arugula
Political parties change. Once they find out that moving further left isn’t working Democrats will move right. It may take a few more election cycles but they’ll do it. Bill Clinton moved his entire party right after 12 years of GOP presidents and got eight years for himself. Remember The era of big government is over?
Two terms without ever getting 50 percent of the vote in a three way race. He wasn’t called Slick Willie for nothin’.
370 in ’92; bumped it up to 379 in ’96. No POTUS candidate since has turned in EC numbers that high. No matter what else, Bill Clinton knew how to win. If his wife would have listened to his advice we’d currently be saying Madam President. Thank all that’s holy that she isn’t nearly as bright as him.
The attempt to nullify the 2016 election WILL elicit a Second Amendment response. I hope our “elites” think very carefully about this.
This tracks quite well with Jim Webb’s “Born Fighting,” a history of the Scots-Irish in America. His book, and especially its conclusions, sounds like a prediction of Trump even though it was published in 2004.
I have mentioned the Scots-Irish many times in relation to Trump’s election. They were the key and the elite, the coastal class has always hated them. Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fisher also makes good reading.
Excuse me but those of us from Norwegian descent also contributed.
Good essay.
I’d consider it better for the country if the Democrats marched off into electoral irrelevance if not oblivion and Republicans splintered into two new parties (with some renegade Dems scooting toward the center) that might actually have substantive debates over policy.
“They need…real change, which means that they need U-Haul.”
But it would be hard to pull a U-Haul all the way to China. Or to Tijuana, for that matter. Easier to bring the factories back here.
you know who you need to get rid of