The Democrats' Davos ideology won't win back the midwest

The Manchester Guardian ^ | April 27, 2017 | Thomas Frank

[2ndDivisionVet]

The party has harmed millions of their own former constituents. If they change course, they can reverse their losses

The tragedy of the 2016 election is connected closely, at least for me, to the larger tragedy of the industrial midwest. It was in the ruined industrial city of Cleveland that the Republican Party came together in convention last July, and it was the deindustrialized, addiction-harrowed precincts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin that switched sides in November and delivered Donald Trump to the Oval Office.

I am a midwesterner too, and I like to think I share the values and outlook of that part of the country. I have spent many of the last 15 years trying to understand my region’s gradual drift to the political right. And I have spent the last three weeks driving around the deindustrialized midwest, visiting 13 different cities to talk about the appeal of Donald Trump and what ails the Democratic Party. I met labor leaders and progressive politicians; average people and rank-and-file union members; senior citizens and Millennials; sages and cranks.

Along the way I gawked at abandoned factory complexes and at Gothic-style water filtration plants. I visited affluent college towns and crumbling relics of twentieth-century prosperity. I ate pork tenderloins in Iowa and ribeye steaks in Indiana and “fast-casual Italian offal” (as a friend called it) in a bohemian zone of Chicago. I saw countless old fighter planes mounted on pedestals....

[Tac Double Tap]

No federal grant money or loans to all these left wing incubators. That should solve the problem.

[Paradox]

The way I see it, the critical test for our system will come late next year. The billionaire great-maker in the Oval Office has already turned out to be an incompetent buffoon,

Oh really.. LOL, we live in bifurcated world.

[Reverend Wright]

fortunately, the Demonrats won’t listen to this guy.

I predict Franks will be like Pat Caddell in another 10 years.

[reg45]

Is that Davros - the creator of the Daleks?

[dp0622]

wow that was quick :)

Trump might as well step down now.

[Moonman62]

The tragedy of the 2016 election is connected closely,

...

The only tragedy I saw was people like McConnell, McCain, Pelosi and Ryan still in office.

[KarlInOhio]

It wasn’t the “Yokels in the Mist” report I was expecting, but the author still didn’t seem to quite hit the target and then crashed into the wall in the last couple of paragraphs. Even if things went well for the Democrats, as the author fantasized, it would be hard to take the House without significant redistricting and over two thirds of this Senate class are Dems or their “independent” fellow travelers. If the states vote for senators as they voted for president, the swing will be +10 Republicans. The 2018 midterm is has the potential of the Titanic crashing into the Hindenburg for the Dems because of that Senate balance. And the author ignored that completely.

[Verginius Rufus]

I can't claim to be an expert on the Midwest (I spent 5 years of my adult life in the Midwest, but that was quite a while back), but I think that it's not that the Midwest has moved to the right but that the Democratic Party on the national level has moved so far to the left.

2016 wasn't a tragedy but a near-tragedy. Hillary winning would have been a tragedy.

[Billthedrill]

I hope Mr. Frank's ideological blinders aren't pinching him too much. Finding Communist party flyers in a union hall isn't much of an indication of groundswell. And public sector unions are the problem, not the solution.

This isn't difficult. When a guy in a town deteriorating from business flight and lack of employment watches the criminals take over the streets and one candidate is saying "Make America Great Again" and the other is saying "the white working class needs to be punished for its privilege and re-educated about how awful America is", you have a landslide in the making. Condemning the MAGA candidate as a poseur - he isn't - ignores the fact that MAGA just kicked your party's collective ass.