Would you agree that the Democratic party has abandoned its traditional constituency, the working class?

No.

No, but it has lost a lot of “white trash” voters to Trump. (not to the GOP, to Trump).

This really parallels every so-called centre left party in every developed country you can think of.

I think a signficiant answer lies in the Investment Theory of Party Competition developed by the political scientist, Thomas Ferguson.

The basic premise being: ”. . . political parties are best analyzed as blocs of investors who coalesce to advance candidates representing their interests.” Chomsky calls the Democrats and Republicans two wings of the business party. He is correct.

Rich people. businesses, corporations, and all their assorted lobbyists, can afford to buy influence and fund campaigns for the sort of politicians they like, while ordinary people cannot.

What politicians then do is try to sell a message to the public, that the interests of businesses, the rich, etc, are actually the interests of their constituents and good for them.

To pull this off requires a lot of propaganda, which is where the media comes to play (also owned by the very same people who buy influence with political parties and politicians).

The thing is, it works, so you’ll find a lot of people internalising the interests of rich political donors and billionaire owned media companies as if they’re their own “working class” interests.

And then they vote in their millions, and feel curiously disappointed when they don’t get the hope and change they were expecting from Obama, or that Granpa Joe isn’t actually doing much of anything differently to Trump, and yet never quite put their finger on why they have that disappointment. But because the propaganda is so effective, and the cognitive dissonance difficult, they’ll vote for the next corporate lackey a few years later, deluding themselves that this time will be different.

No.

Yes. Both parties are beholden to corporate interests. There is no “working class party” in the U.S. Both parties appeal to the working class in different ways (they have to), but they do not ultimately serve the interests of the working class.

Yes.

No

If it’s true that a woman has to go to work shortly after having a baby, then no.

Edit: then yes oops lol.

No.

I think Democrats for Bernie who were fanatical about it pushed that narrative and tried to make it look like Hillary didn’t speak to or care about the working class, which is ridiculous in my opinion and hurt the Democrats overall.

Biden is doing things for the working class and he identifies with the working class.

Trump seized on targeting the working class as his “market” and he was brilliant at it. Some of them are voting against their own interests and don’t event know it.

As far as money, all too many politicians are intertwined with corporations on both sides of the political spectrum. I think it’s both greed and that it is how the system works, so to get things done they feel they need to.

Edit: making merit into something bad is too extreme. Merit is what made us different from countries with royalty and caste systems, and was something Americans were proud of, it is part of the American dream.

No – I think the working class has abandoned the Democratic Party.

@janbb Why would working people abandon the party historically dedicated to supporting their issues?

They don’t pay attention or make the connection @HP.

@HP A lot of working class people line up with some of what the Republican Party talks about like pro-life and against gay marriage, many of them are religious. When Trump was saying things that sounded good to them for their jobs and taxes they bought into it (some of them) and voted for Trump, but they left him when they saw some of the crazy that Trump was doing, and went back for Joe Biden.

The swing states, like MI, OH, even PA, the unions are traditionally strong and prevalent, and Democrats were the party of labor, but those states also have a lot of Catholics who will vote in an “unaffiliated” political mindset. That’s how it seems to me anyway.

PLUS, Bernie said he was a Democratic Socialist, which plays right into the hands of the Republicans. You can’t win Florida and say the word Socialist. Cable TV tried to EXPLAIN why being a socialist is ok. That’s crazy talk when your audience is Cubans and Venezuelans.

Almost all of my Republican friends in Michigan voted for Biden. It’s my libertarian friends in the Midwest who stayed with Trump. In the South the Republicans stuck with Trump, but the South isn’t unionized and race also plays into how people identify politically down there. I’m guessing union leaders usually helped to support Democrats running for office, I’m not sure how that has been going lately.

One of the biggest problems when Trump ran the first time was Democrats not voting because they were upset about Bernie. We had jellies here and many people around the country who didn’t vote for Hillary in protest because they wanted Bernie, and many Bernie people were all over Facebook helping the Republicans by being vehemently against and loathing Hillary. I found it quite upsetting actually.

Of course they have. The middle class nearly disappeared when Obama was POTUS. And the party has moved even more to the radical left since then. They don’t care about the working class. Oh, they say they do and they claim to, but none of their policies actually do support the working man.

“radical left”

LOL

@seawulf575 The “radical left”, which hasn’t really existed in the USA as a significant political force since the 1920s, is by definition for the “working man”.

Being on the left means your interests are with the working class. Being on the right by definition is to do with justifying economic and social hierarchy and inequality, and preserving class privilege.

Both parties are right-wing.

@Kropotkin I agree. But isn’t it fascinating how things have shifted. In the past, as times got tougher, there would be push from the folks on the ground to redress the imbalance. Today with the standard of living markedly slipping, the further to the right the folks migrate in the wastelands. In places now that would wither to dust without social security checks, residents rush to embrace the very candidates vowing to shut off the taps.

We have 1 party in this country. The differences you see are pro wrestling theater and the media are like the wrestling announcers pretending the fight is real. The only real threat to the status quo is from the progressive left, and both parties (with the help of their donors) will muster all resources to crush it. It’s the only thing the Democrats are good at accomplishing.

Top marginal tax rate under Republican Eisenhower: was 90% on income over $4 million (in 2017 dollars). Bernie Sanders’ tax plan was 52% on income over $10 million dollars which is slightly higher than the rate under Reagan’s first term. Bernie is labeled as the embodiment of Mao/Marx/Stalin and yet his tax policy was radically more conservative than under Republicans in the decades preceding Reagan. Really think about the implications there: Bernie’s proposed top marginal tax rate was very close to Reagan’s first term top marginal rate.

Everyone’s been gaslit about left and right. This country has drifted so far right that we’ve created a welfare program for billionaires as they’re evicting the working class from their homes. You’ve got the extremist right wing who are absolutely intoxicated on stupidity, and you have people who believe themselves to the “moderate centrists” on the spectrum (like the “lefties” on “The View.”), who in actuality would be radical right extremists if you transported them back 50 years with the same fiscal policy views—which is the thing that ultimately determines power.

@gorillapaws I remember when Phil Donahue said, “it doesn’t matter who you vote for.” He was saying both major party representatives were the same. His wife came out publicly saying her husband was wrong and ridiculous and of course it matters.

You’re reminding me of Phil. The Democratic Party might not be left enough for you, but it’s not the same as Republican Party. The leadership and influencers of the Republican Party, whether the average person who identifies with the party knows it or not, is trying to:

-Dismantle public schools
-Make abortion completely illegal
-Use government funds for religious entities
-Are against gay marriage
-Against gay parent adoption
-Want people to believe new immigrants are innately different than “real” Americans who are already here, and even their children are somehow born bad
-And the Republican leadership entertains and encourages Libertarians who are anarchists, and some of the Libertarians are literal, admitted, nationalists and white supremacists hoping to achieve Hitler’s final solution. How many Republicans don’t even understand why Nationalism is terrifying? A shit ton from what I can tell. That’s just some of the problems.

You are over-focusing on the fiscal, even though I agree we need a big fix on fiscal matters, because being economically unequal is a huge part of freedom and equality.

If you want to move the needle towards the left you can’t help support Republicans, and when you go after the Democratic candidate in the final two person race, you do just that.

The problem with the progressive left is they are too radical on everything. Meaning, they don’t pick and choose one or two things that actually could be changed, they ramble on about too many desires they have that the public isn’t in step with or is afraid of. They aren’t systematic enough in their plan. The US has a huge national deficit, they can argue to change taxation just on that alone! They don’t need to talk about everyone getting things for free. Once we have a kitty of money we can decide where to spend it. They need to show a real desire to cut wasteful costs in government, to reduce the costs of education and healthcare not just pay for it, most of America wants to hear that. Go after the gouging and what I’m now calling soft collusion (I made that up) where corporations might not be actually discussing setting prices, but they basically do in the end in some industries.

The working class is full of people who believe work ethic is important, they take pride in working to support themselves and their family, and they are not looking for free handouts, they are looking to be treated with dignity and respect.

@JLeslie “You are over-focusing on the fiscal, even though I agree we need a big fix on fiscal matters, because being economically unequal is a huge part of freedom and equality.”

EVERYTHING comes down to fiscal policy, because fiscal policy is about who has power (billionaires) and who doesn’t (everyone else) . All of those wedge issues are top of mind BECAUSE fiscal policy has allowed our country’s discourse to be determined by a handful of corporations. There are political think-tanks that dream up the next manufactured controversy for everyone to be outraged precisely to distract the national conversation away from how insane the wealth inequality has become. Nobody cared about an advanced legal theory about systemic racism being taught in law school and nowhere else until they manufactured the CRT mania and put it on blast. The result is that the super wealthy are worth more their counterparts during the Guilded Age highest ever in American history. But they’ll make sure the media doesn’t talk about those stories, and instead focuses on CRT, Dr. Seuss, trans people in bathrooms, abortion, or whatever other controversial wedge issue they manufacture in the think-tanks they own and blast out in the media empires they control to distract from such things.

We wouldn’t be distracted by such nonsense if we had fiscal policy that prevented such destabilizing concentrations of wealth. Nobody would care about immigration if they weren’t struggling to make ends meet. There wouldn’t be the massive deficits if we reversed our fiscal policies to how they were when there actually were 2 parties.

“The working class is full of people who believe work ethic is important, they take pride in working to support themselves and their family, and they are not looking for free handouts…”

Is having a “free” fire department a “handout” or an investment in the public good? Is having “free” libraries a “handout” or an investment in the public good? Is public education a “handout” or an investment in the public good? These things aren’t free. They’re paid for by everyone with their taxes. Having a Medicare-for-all type of healthcare isn’t “free,” we’re all paying in, but it’s cheaper and less wasteful than the mess we have today. Having tuition-free community colleges, trade schools, public universities etc. isn’t a “handout.” It’s an investment in the people (one with an excellent ROI- every $1 invested via the GI bill generated an estimated $6.90 in returns for the taxpayer).

The vast majority of American support progressive fiscal policies, but neither party is going to allow them to happen.

@gorillapaws I agree everything comes down to fiscal, as I said above we can’t have equality without better fiscal equality, but I’m just talking about how the people in the center and a lot of working class probably think, and their fears and whether you want to reach them to move the country in the direction of more equality.

@JLeslie Pretty much everything you’ve claimed might as well have come out of the mouth of some billionaire owned, millionaire liberal political pundit on CNN or MSNBC.

The “centre”, which is just an arbitrary label based on the seating position of liberals in the French National Assembly, and not actual moderation or middle ground between extremes, or where “most people lie”, is a specific ideology that has historically been backed by educated elites, and not the working class.

“The US has a huge national deficit”

I’ve explained in another recent thread, and in older posts, how this is not a problem at all. Thinking it’s an issue is part of the deceit, because it makes people think good things, and public goods and services, are scarce, and difficult to finance, and that for-profit private companies have to be used to provide anything, which end up costing everyone a lot more.

“The working class is full of people who believe work ethic is important, they take pride in working to support themselves and their family, and they are not looking for free handouts, they are looking to be treated with dignity and respect.”

I mean, this is just outright propagandistic framing. Oh, working people are so proud and dignified, we couldn’t possibly do them any favours ever. Want something? Work for it! Can’t afford it? Work harder! Out of work? You underserving parasite.

Meanwhile the super rich get collossal subsidies and handouts all the time—from both parties.

@Kropotkin Do you want to deal with the reality of the American intellect and popular mindset or not? How are you going to persuade people of you don’t really communicate in a way that means something to them?

As far as the deficit, Reagan thought it was no problem also, so you have that in common with him. Republicans backed that idea during the Reagan years, now they obsess about it being a bad thing.

If the American public is basically united in believing having a large deficit is bad, why not use that to sell raising taxes? You want to raise taxes right?

@JLeslie I’m not a politician running for office, so I’ve absolutely no need to strategise some way of persuading and communicating to people. It also doesn’t matter what I want. What I actually want won’t happen anyway.

I’m here on an obscure Q&A forum just replying to you. If I were a politician running for office, I’d probably try to be honest and explain how it really is, but that’s completely moot.

Republicans do generally get a free pass on the supposed issue of budget deficits and national debts. It’s only a “bad thing” when they’re not in government in order to browbeat Democrats into budget cuts (except the military, which gets anything it wants). And Democrats are happy to oblige because they get to “prove” how credible they are on the economy.

It’s really just theatre. They’re playing off each other, and are fundamentally aligned on how the economy should be run, and whom it should serve—because their financial backers are more or less the same.

And I completely agree that the problem could be reframed in some advantageous way, so a slightly dishonest but productive way would be to argue for higher taxes on the rich and corporations—like Bernie Sanders had done.

With a handful of exceptions, no mainstream liberal politician will want to do that, because they’re not actually representing your interests, and don’t want to raise taxes on the rich. Instead they’ll just spend less on nice things that would help people, or allow some bullshit demands made by the Republicans in the name of bipartisanship.

^^fair enough regarding you’re not a politician or a political strategist.