MATTHEW CONTINETTI: How Class Realignment Broke the Democrats.
I live in the bubble. Always have, even if I have come to disagree with what my college professors would call the “hegemonic discourse” of postmodern liberalism, and to gag at the vanity and solipsism of many of my fellow residents. But never, especially after the 2016 campaign, would I mistake the confines of the bubble for the whole of reality. That is the mistake Hillary Clinton made when she decided that she could win the presidency without the support of a white working class mangled by economic stagnation, family breakdown, and drug addiction. And it is the same mistake the Democrats at the Obama Foundation and on Capitol Hill are making now, in real time, as they wrap themselves in the illusions that growing minority populations will carry them ineluctably to power, and that identity politics is somehow an electoral winner.
As racially and sexually diverse as the crowd at the Obama Foundation summit may have been, everyone at the breakout session on “Who Narrates the World?” had, I’d wager, the following in common: a college or postgraduate degree, the mark of distinction and privilege and wealth in our society today. Yet most Americans do not possess such credentials, and live very different existences from those who do. Recently I asked an elections expert to describe the modern analogue to the “Dayton Housewife,” the prototypical swing voter of the late ’60s and ’70s behind the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. My friend told me the median voter is a believing Catholic woman with children who works part time, attends Mass sporadically, dropped out of college, lives in a household earning between $50,000 and $65,000 a year, votes in general election years, and resides in the Columbus exurbs.
Do you suppose that our hypothetical Westerville mom would write on a chalkboard that she hopes her son will be rescued from “toxic masculinity”? Or cares in the slightest about José Andres? She probably voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 because he talked a good game, has a nice family, and sympathized with the challenges of working people. But then Obama’s second term brought no real improvement in her prospects, and a lot of ancillary cultural and social upheaval besides.
I’d argue that the “cultural and social upheaval” was far from ancillary, but instead was the deciding factor in making enough Obama-to-Trump voters to tip the election. The Democrats could get away with disdaining or even hating white and/or male voters for so long before they went somewhere else.
