Democrats are too old.

[meadowlander]

66. This gets to the point. It's not an age thing. It's a "soul of the party" thing.

When I was young in the late 70s/early 80s, the Democrats were unabashedly the party of the young, the working class, minorities, the counter-culture. It was cool to be a Democrat while the Republicans were greedy out-of-touch old fogies and God-bothering hypocrites.

Then in the 90s with the Clintons, the party shifted significantly more towards the middle to try to appeal to economic conservatives and to solicit more campaign contributions from corporations. And it worked for a while because it convinced the majority of people that the Democratic party was a safe pair of hands that wasn't going to do anything too crazy to crash the economy.

And all the party leaders now are of that generation. And don't want to admit that that approach isn't going to work anymore if Trump is eating into our base among blue collar workers and non-college educated voters. So they don't want to give up power because they are afraid that the next generation of leadership will swing the party back towards its traditional values (or even further to the left) which may mean more difficulty fundraising and appealing to middle of the road voters.

But what is the point of fundraising if you have no message or core values - if you can't just say plainly "the rich need to pay more taxes to support social programs that create the work force and social conditions that enabled them to get rich in the first place".

Everyone knows that's the truth but many core elements of the Democratic party are losing faith in the party's willingness or ability to fight for those values. And they see that personified in octogenarian party leadership and its reluctance to fight fascism full-throatedly for fear of scaring off the donors.