COMMENTARY | A recent piece in the New York Times suggests the Democratic Party is preparing to toss working class whites, who have been part of the winning coalition for the Democrats since Franklin Roosevelt, under the bus.
The new coalition for the Democratic Party will consist of educated elites that will include "professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists" and poorer voters, primarily blacks and Hispanics. Working class whites have long be alienated from the Democrats since the phenomenon of the "Reagan Democrats," who switched to the Republican Party in the 1980s. Democrats lost this demographic group by 30 percent and more in the 2010 midterms.
The educated elites will be bought off with the support of rights to self expression, abortion, gay marriage and a leftward tilt on the environment and defense policy. The less affluent minorities will be bought off by new social spending and government assistance.
While the Democrats hope to hold their losses among working American whites down, one wonders how that could be accomplished if the sense grows that working people have been abandoned. Someone has to pay for all of that social spending that will benefit the poor, after all. Working whites also remain skeptical of government sanctioned hedonism, environmental regulations that stifle jobs, and cuts in defense spending that invite aggression from America's enemies.
Rush Limbaugh, the radio talk show host never slow to pick up on a political trend, suggested the Democrats are saying, on his Monday, broadcast, "If you work, we don't want you."
In a way, the new Democratic election strategy is a reaction to the tea party movement, which has risen from discontented working and middle class people who feel that their government has become too big and too intrusive. Instead of listening to the complaints of the tea party and adjusting their agenda to attract tea party voters, the Democrats have done the equivalent of extending them the middle finger. Instead they have embraced the Occupy Wall Street crowd, which is crying out for government handouts and entitlements.
This is a dangerous strategy. The tea party, consisting as it does of people who work and make the country run, are more numerous and more organized than the constituencies the Democrats are embracing. Thus the Democratic Party might have considered itself to permanent minority status.
