The Party of Snobbish Elites

A gentrified cocoon of progressive privilege has cost Democrats the middle class.

Democrats for over a century were associated with the American middle class.

Working-class voters once believed that Democratic-inspired intervention into the economy — minimum-wage laws, overtime pay, Social Security, Medicare, workers’ compensation — protected their interests better than unfettered free-market capitalism.

Republicans often had trouble selling the argument that an unleashed economy and new technology would relegate poverty to a relative, not absolute, condition — something like suffering with a cheap, outdated iPhone 4 while the better-off could afford an iPhone 6.

More