by Jesse
“Back in 1941, Franklin Roosevelt set down his understanding of American political history, in which there were two schools of political belief.
‘The liberal party believed in the wisdom and efficacy of the will of the great majority of the people, as distinguished from the judgement of a small minority of either education or wealth.’
What Roosevelt could not foresee was a party system in which the divide fell not between the few and the many, but between the small minority of education and the small minority of wealth. Enlightened technocrats on one side, and resentful billionaires on the other. Get that great majority back together, and they would be unstoppable.”
Thomas Frank
In order to change and regain their party’s historical mandate, the Democrats have to abandon their patterns of behaviour adopted and set down in the 1990’s.
They may have to get rid of their consultants, and most importantly their methods of fund raising almost exclusively among the professional moneyed class with which they closely identify.
And above all, they must take Hillary Clinton and her class of big money politicians aside, and bid them good luck and goodbye.
They must embrace genuine change, instead of attempting to imitate reform by continually softening their image with professionally applied makeup, and a cynically thin veneer of identity politics and tribalism.
This is how they have managed to avoid discussing this vast inequality of ours, and addressing, with practical solutions rather reframing the questions with diversionary rhetoric, the slow demise of the long ignored working poor and middle class, which is their traditional base, and their party majority.