The phenomenon of Democrats belittling, mocking, smearing, and otherwise denigrating the white working class is not new. It goes back to the 1980s and the Democrats portraying Ronald Reagan as a bomb thrower and his supporters as ignorant hillbillies.
This was the “New Left” and their radical Marxist-socialist acolytes. The “old” Democrats, like “The Happy Warrior” Hubert Humphrey and Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, were pro-defense, pro-capitalism, and pro-America. They respected working-class Americans because many of them were union members and Democrats were perceived as friendlier toward organized labor.
That’s not true today. By Reagan’s 1980 election, the white working class had begun to gravitate toward Republicans. While the Democratic Party had historically relied on this demographic as a cornerstone of the New Deal coalition, 1980 marked a significant shift toward the Republican Party. Ronald Reagan secured approximately 54% to 56% of the white working-class vote, giving rise to the term “Reagan Democrats.”
Trump has done even better, securing two-thirds of white working-class voters in his coalition. It’s been a critical loss for Democrats largely because, unlike other demographics, such as blacks and Hispanics who vote Democratic, the white working-class voters turn out for elections. It’s been a political earthquake that the Democrats have spent the last decade trying to reverse.
Democrats are getting so desperate in those efforts, as Victor Davis Hanson points out in American Greatness, that they’re providing comic relief instead of serious opposition to Trump and the Republicans.
On the one hand, Democrats claim they will field candidates who can at least playact as good ol’ boy farmers and salt-of-the-earth welders.
The 2024 Democratic vice presidential candidate, Humpty Dumpty lookalike Tim Walz, talked incessantly about driving a pickup truck. He assured us he could change its oil and tried to portray himself as a genuine hunter. Yet these claims often came across as inauthentic, strained, and condescending; the more Walz tried to present himself as a man of the people, the more he appeared buffoonish.
The 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, Pete Buttigieg, became a caricature of the sanctimonious, credentialed technocrat—self-righteously and arrogantly projecting expertise without much humility or even a shred of the common touch. As transportation secretary, Buttigieg used to pontificate about racist freeway clover leaves, rather than addressing the more immediate problems posed by the gridlocked and decrepit condition of the nation’s highways.
Now, as the 2028 election looms, Buttigieg has followed Democratic central casting and undergone a complete reboot, reemerging with a beard, a trucker cap, and a flannel shirt.
Perhaps the Democrats don’t believe the internet is forever, and that images and recordings of them making wildly radical statements and sneering at white working-class voters are forgotten because they don’t want to remember them.
The “Great Radical Hope” in 2028 could very well be Texas Democratic nominee for senator, Presbyterian minister James Talarico. Last week, I wrote of a serious conversation among professional Democrats about 2028 and how the party would do well choosing a straight, white, Christian man for the presidency. It almost certainly won’t happen, but the fact that it was under discussion at all shows just how much danger the Democrats themselves feel they’re in.
Talerico, like Obama, masks his radicalism in language that white working-class voters find appealing. Strip away the soothing words and a flaming liberal emerges.
He talks nonstop like a left-winger, but with the voice of an evangelical Bible thumper. Talarico just won the Texas Democratic Senate primary over radical, racialist bomb thrower Jasmine Crockett. Surely, his handlers believe, he will do the impossible and flip the good old boys of Texas to the new Democratic agenda?
He may yet, but the Harvard-educated Talarico’s Christianity seems more like Latin American left-wing “liberation theology” than Texas-style evangelicalism. Talarico certainly has a long history of radical elite social media commentary, and he urges Texans not to demonize trans people and illegal aliens but instead go after “billionaires and their puppet politicians.”
Perhaps such class warfare is seen as a good start for the Left’s new, supposedly working-man’s radical populist. But it turns out Pastor Talarico is actually to the left of radical left Democrats. In the past, he had pandered to the very wing of the party that had lost its elections, with offerings like “God is non-binary” or notions that Christians have divine guidance to let transgender males play in women’s sports.
“God is non-binary”? Like Beto O’Rourke (“the new JFK”) and other Democrats whom the media anointed to topple the Republican stranglehold on high office, Talarico is going to crash and burn unless he mixes a potion in the state’s water that makes voters forget he ever said anything like that.
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