DEMOCRATS: THE SNOOT PARTY.

The most important domestic political development of the 21st century so far is the class-reversal of the Republican and Democratic parties, a trend that began in the 1990s with Bill Clinton and now has reached a state of genuine polarization. Democrats, once the party of poor farmers and working-class “white ethnics,” as we used to call them, have become the party of affluent, educated, metropolitan and suburban professionals — the people who once were critical to the Republican coalition. One notable barometer, the five counties of Southeastern Pennsylvania, for years exemplified a national pattern: Philadelphia was overwhelmingly Democratic, and the four suburban counties around it were overwhelmingly Republican; now, you don’t hit Republican territory until Lancaster County, which is both Amish country and heroin country, with almost 150 overdose deaths in 2020.

As far as today’s Democrats are concerned, voting Republican is just one more pathology that afflicts the toothless hillbillies of their imagination. They are perplexed — or at least pretend to be perplexed — by the fact that there are poor and struggling Americans who do not instinctively turn to welfare-statism as the answer to their problems, who are uneager to sacrifice either their values or their liberties in exchange for a government check. Democrats have responded to this by elevating the needs of the relatively well-off to the top of their agenda, which is why they spend so much time talking about the terrible burden of student loans for young lawyers and underemployed Haverford graduates. You won’t hear them offer anything like a serious solution to the public-education crisis in Los Angeles or Milwaukee — those well-paid teachers are a core part of the Democratic base, and semi-literate high-school dropouts do not vote in large numbers.

Yes.