Victor Davis Hanson‘s latest column at National Review Online attempts to help explain why Democrats fared so poorly nationally in the last election.
In our vast nation of 320 million people, there are still millions of mostly middle-class voters, along with the proverbial white working class, who are ignored by Democrats. They feel desperately squeezed by the higher taxes necessary to fulfill the dreams of progressive elites. And they feel they are not on the receiving end of government entitlements the way the underclass is, while being a regular target of cheap progressive rhetoric, from “clingers” to “stupid.”
But more importantly, the middle class resents wealthy progressives who lecture them about their supposed illiberality although they do not experience in their own lives the consequences of their ideology, whether that involves unchecked illegal immigration or job-killing regulations. Those who live in gated communities or mansions with heavy security talk down to those who don’t about their Neanderthal gun-owning. Wind and solar power seems to be supported by those who do not commute long distances in second-hand cars and who have enough money to care little about gas prices. If foreign nationals were swarming into the U.S. illegally from Europe to find jobs as journalists, government workers, and lawyers, the progressive elites might worry about their own employment and be less utopian about open borders.
There is also a psychological component to the 2014 backlash vote. Progressives seem to be tone deaf to the effects of their loud rhetoric on others.
When President Obama promised to all but end the use of coal and to send electric rates soaring, would his own friends and associates be affected? What if a candidate from an Appalachian state had argued there that were too many lawyers like Obama and that it was well past time to stop all state and federal subsidies to universities that keep turning out redundant subsidized graduates? Or if he had argued that affirmative action should be based on class rather than racial considerations?
