Strange Death of the New Democrats

Tech Central Station ^ | 1/27/05 | Orrin C. Judd

[brothersjudddotcom]

The Strange Death That No One Cares About (Orrin C. Judd, 1/27/05, Tech Central Station)

There was a death in Washington recently that received far less attention than it deserved: the New Democrat philosophy of Bill Clinton is dead. This is a truly extraordinary development; one that should not be allowed to pass so quietly.

[Sam the Sham]

This article comes from a libertarian site so naturally it gets it totally wrong. Liberatians flatly reject the importance of cultural issues.

During the go-go 90s it was easy to sell the New Democrat line on NAFTA, outsoursing, free trade, winking at illegal immigration but cultural left positions on gay marriage and abortion. It was the tech boom. Couldn't all those displaced blue collar workers learn Perl and Visual Basic and HTML ? The New Democrat philosophy was to totally disdain the interests and values of blue collar Democrats and only care about Starbucks upscale liberals.

The New Democrat era ended in March 2001 when Y2K passed without incident and the dot com tech stock boom crashed. White collar professionals who had made a lot of money in the 90's saw that they could be replaced just the same way auto workers were 20 years ago. Between outsourcing, illegal immigration, the misery of the rust belt, H1B's the public was now concluding that free trade at all costs, cost more than it was worth.