How Democrats lost lower middle class whites

Victor Davis Hanson asks why have the Democrats lost lower middle class whites:

Their out-of-touch privilege, however, led to agendas — radical green politics, hyper-feminism, transgender advocacy, forced multiculturalism, open borders — that were not principle concerns of the struggling working classes. A techie in Silicon Valley, an actor in Hollywood, a trial lawyer in Washington, or a professor at Yale had the income to afford the steeper taxes and higher housing, energy, and college costs that were the natural dividends of their own political agendas.

High-speed rail, expensive graduate degrees, and European-level gas prices are logical aims for elites. They insist that the planet is cooking, that cities are the sole generators of cultural advancement, and that tony academic stamps are proof of knowledge superior to the kind absorbed through religious instruction or pragmatic experience.

In the short term, liberal elites had little clue how the ramifications of their own unworkable ideology always fell on distant others. Before one can damn fracking, guns, traditional religion, and tract suburbia, one has to have a high income that allows for expensive energy, exorbitant college tuition, and $500-a-square-foot housing. Obamacare, with its higher average deductibles and premiums, is far more of a burden than a bargain for the working class.

The hysteria over Sarah Palin’s gaffes in comparison to the more frequent lapses of Joe Biden was due to cultural bias. Palin was ridiculed as an ill-informed, working-class Alaskan mom. Good ol’ Biden earned a smile as an occasionally too candid East Coast liberal.

Snobbery’s twin is hypocrisy. For a liberal, when the poor waste money on $300 Air Jordans, such spending should not be criticized. But for the middle class to supposedly squander cash on a shotgun or Jet Ski is gauche. If an undocumented immigrant has seven children, it is not declared to be unwise family planning with the same disdain shown a Mormon blue-collar roofer with a comparably large family.

The new bifurcated Democratic party of rich and poor shows a sort of contempt for those who do not share the privileged tastes of the elites and can’t earn their easy sympathy by being dependent on liberal government largesse.

Democrats’ problem is that the working classes are large and know that they no longer fit into what liberalism has become.

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