What Happened to the Democrats?

What happened to the party of the working class? When did the Democratic party become a party that neglects the poor? When did politicians stop fighting for economic equality and abandon the economically disadvantaged? When did fundraising take precedence over all other political activity?

In reading books such as Listen, Liberal by Thomas Frank, White Trash by Nancy Isenberg, and Dream Hoarders by Richard V. Reeves (in order to make sense of why Hillary and the Democratic Party lost the election), I was faced with the uncomfortable reality that we all have become part of a system that overwhelmingly favors certain classes of people over others. I have tried to impress on my fellow Democrats that Hillary lost not only because of Russian interference and the blunder of James Comey and the poor way that the campaign was run, but also because the Democratic party has really lost its way.

Listen, Liberal by Frank was a wake-up call because, in it, he details how, over the last forty years, the Democratic Party — starting with the Carter administration's open hostility to unions — has turned their backs on unions and the middle and working classes and the poor to curry favor with wealthy (and purportedly “liberal”) billionaire CEOs largely from technology and financial companies. We — what Frank describes as “the professional class” sitting below the corporate executive class — have supported this new political alignment through our votes and campaign contributions, and not voicing vociferously enough our opposition.

What was so important and so eye-opening was how Frank spells out the way that the Democrats have given up so many parts of the working class's American dream for the past several decades, starting with Carter and continuing through subsequent Democratic administrations.

Frank chronicles how, time and again, the Clinton and Obama administrations, using language to promote the “inevitability” of “entrepreneurial technological innovation and progress,” ultimately