Greider: The trouble started when the party abandoned its working-class base.
This is from the December 1-8 2014 edition of The Nation. William Greider has strong words for the Democrats.
I fully realize there are many reasons, much speculation about why we lost so badly. But there is a reason at the heart of it all. Greider spares no words.
He mentions how President Obama and the Democrats kept telling us brighten up, the economy is getting better. Things are looking up. It may be true to economists, but I think it may be correct as Greider surmises....to assume the average person isn't feeling all that hopeful yet.
How the Democratic Party Lost Its Soul
A party truly connected to the people would never have dared to make such a claim. In the real world of voters, human experience trumps macroeconomics and the slowly declining official unemployment rate. An official at the AFL-CIO culled the following insights from what voters said about themselves on Election Day: 54 percent suffered a decline in household income during the past year. Sixty-three percent feel the economy is fundamentally unfair. Fifty-five percent agree strongly (and another 25 percent agree somewhat) that both political parties are too focused on helping Wall Street and not enough on helping ordinary people.
Instead of addressing this reality and proposing remedies, the Democrats ran on a cowardly, uninspiring platform: the Republicans are worse than we are. Undoubtedly, that’s true—but so what? The president and his party have no credible solutions to offer. To get serious about inequality and the deteriorating middle class, Democrats would have to undo a lot of the damage their own party has done to the economy over the past thirty years.
Long ago, the party abandoned its working-class base (of all colors) and steadily distanced itself from the unglamorous conditions that matter most in people’s lives. Traditional party bulwarks like organized labor and racial minorities became second-string players in the hierarchy that influences party policy. But the Dems didn’t just lose touch with the people they claimed to speak for; they betrayed core constituencies and adopted pro-business, pro-finance policies that actively injure working people.
The shift away from the people was embraced most dramatically when Bill Clinton’s New Democrats came to power in the 1990s. Clinton double-crossed labor with NAFTA and subsequent trade agreements, which encouraged the great migration of manufacturing jobs to low-wage economies. Clinton’s bank deregulation shifted the economic rewards to finance and set the stage for the calamity that struck in 2008. Wall Street won; working people lost. Clinton presided over the financialization of the Democratic Party. Obama merely inherited his playbook and has governed accordingly, often with the same policy-makers.
“The people,” of course, are still present in the party, but they’re treated mainly as data for election strategies. The voters themselves resemble the supernumeraries in a grand opera: they appear on stage at election time, always lavishly praised by the pols. But they are given no lines to speak or songs to sing.
Greider was one of those who loudly called attention to the efforts recently by both parties to cut benefits of Social Security while proclaiming they were making it safer.
Social Security: Bipartisan Fervor to Whack the Old Folks
In appalling consensus has developed among Washington elites: they tell themselves cutting Social Security is a slam-dunk. If the two parties will hold hands and act together, they reason, voters can’t blame either one. When Washington players talk up “bipartisan compromise,” it usually means the people are about to get screwed.
It’s part of the new austerity—American-style. We’ll all have to learn to live with less, we’re told, in order to reduce America’s swollen federal deficits. So we’ll whack Social Security benefits, dump school teachers and other state employees, and suppress wages by accepting high unemployment.
Yes, indeed, Greider is right. In the words of one of the founders of one centrist Dem think tank that was superceded by another similar centrist Dem think tank....that is EXACTLY what they intended to do.
Raising money to lessen reliance on the traditional interest groups of the party.
Yes, I quote this guy often.
"Simon Rosenberg, the former field director for the DLC who directs the New Democrat Network, a spin-off political action committee, says, "We're trying to raise money to help them lessen their reliance on traditional interest groups in the Democratic Party. In that way," he adds, "they are ideologically freed, frankly, from taking positions that make it difficult for Democrats to win."
It was done deliberately, and now it is time to reverse course. Their way has not worked out too well during the last two midterms.
= new reply since forum marked as read
had on the election. 
You are one of the most incisive and thoughtful among DUers and I am flattered. It's just a matter of putting the pieces together, and I give a hearty 
to DUers woo me with science and Octafish, both priceless members of this community, for sharpening my abilities to do so. I have long been an enthusiastic amateur historian and the parallels are becoming very frightening. Orwell only got the half of it.
which is why I recycled it in that thread.
Will try again tomorrow. I think it's actually pretty good. 
Thanks for the laugh.
Pottsylvania. Or was it Fredonia? 
it was Kardashhiastan wasn't it?
I am so over that after the blow-out on election day. So many have me on ignore. I was gone a year, came back and found 15 (maybe 16) had me on ignore and I had not even been here. 
corporate mouthpieces shaping the winners and losers. MSM shapes public opinion, ahead of the races and during the races, they even shape opinion after the races when polls don't match counts...it's one big con. No shadowy overlords, in your face overlords.
He shared tweets between Bill Clinton and G. W. Bush.
Really. Gee, how cute. 
They're buddies in their little club.
I held by nose when I voted for Clinton. So tired of fake Dems.
Disgusted.
AND all of your essential posts regarding the ongoing destruction of our system of public education. (Have you noticed that there have been fewer posts lauding Democrats du Jour? Or, has there been a mass migration to groups that vehemently support our current administration? One wonders...)
This resonates for me:
Traditional party bulwarks like organized labor and racial minorities became second-string players in the hierarchy that influences party policy. But the Dems didn’t just lose touch with the people they claimed to speak for; they betrayed core constituencies and adopted pro-business, pro-finance policies that actively injure working people.
I am so poor at present that I must pursue a medical bankruptcy. My former boss (now retired) tried to shame me about this ("...in MY day, you paid $5 or $10 a month until your debt was gone "
He's a Republican, as I'm sure you gathered. 
Burns me to no end! 
