As Donald Trump leads a full-scale war against the Republican establishment and elites, particularly through his attack on both their military and their trade policies, the Democratic Party is also in a predicament of its own.
Both parties right now face a great crisis of ideology as well as a great opportunity for reinvention, and whichever party first reinvents itself successfully will begin winning elections the way the Democrats did in the 1932-1968 era.
If neither does, our nation faces a massive crisis provoked by the loss of democratic representation of the majority of the American electorate.
The root cause of this crisis is the fact is that neither party today does much of anything for the bottom 90% of Americans.
A recent study out of Princeton, for example, pointed out that the likelihood of legislation passing that represents the interest of that bottom 90% was equivalent, statistically, to white noise.
So why is that?
Well, it’s complicated...
But on the Democratic side of things it has a lot to do with changes in party structure and demographics that began in the 1970s.
Thomas Frank’s new book Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? argues that starting with the McGovern Commission of 1972 - which largely excommunicated Labor from having a large role in Democratic Party decision-making - the Democratic Party largely abandoned the American working and middle class – the bottom 90%.
It instead began to embrace -- and now fully embraces -- the “professional class” – i.e. the top 10% economically.
As Frank told me on my program recently, the doctor who delivered me in the 1950s was almost certainly a Republican (then the party of the professional class), but today would almost certainly be a Democrat.
In the 1950s and 1960s virtually the entire professional class (the top 10%) was Republican; today it’s virtually all Democratic.
This has had a direct effect on the policy priorities of the Democratic Party, which was formerly the “party of the people.”
In the late 1980s, the DLC Democrats (today’s Third Way or Clinton Democrats) jumped on board with the professional class and its supposedly “complex” solutions to our nation’s problems.
They consciously moved away from labor and the working class and towards an elitist embrace of the banksters, the emerging “geniuses” of Silicon Valley, and the college-educated at all levels.
