Can Democrats Make Nice with the ‘Deplorables’?

Since early June, when voters in Georgia’s sixth congressional district rubbed yet more salt in their 2016 election wounds, Democratic pols and sages have been pondering why, as Ohio congressman Tim Ryan put it, “our brand is worse than Trump.” That’s a low bar, given the president’s nearly subterranean approval ratings, but so far the blue party has mostly been turning to an inside-the-box set of policy and political memes: jobs programs, talk of a mutiny against House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, and better marketing — or, in Ryan’s words, “branding” — of the Democratic message.

What’s missing from this list is the most important — and most challenging — item of all: solving the liberal “deplorable” problem. The white working class that hoisted Donald Trump to an unexpected victory may not always admire the man, but they know that he doesn’t hate “people like me,” in the pollsters’ common formulation. And they have good reason to think that Democrats, particularly coastal and media types, do hate them: Consider Frank Rich’s snide and oft-cited article, “No Sympathy for the Hillbilly.” It’s possible that white working-class voters would back a party filled with people who see them as racists and misogynists, with bad values and worse taste, because they all want to raise taxes on Goldman Sachs executives, but it seems a risky bet.

Anything's possible, of course, but I'd be very surprised if anything of the sort happened anytime soon. The Dems are far too deeply invested in class enemies to be able to turn on a dime and incorporate them - us - into a constituency that has been taught to hate from preschool to postgraduate. The tragedy of the party, indeed, the country as a whole, of the early 21st century is that a figure such as Barack Hussein 0bama mitht have managed it had he chosen to. It wasn't in the man, and his administration chose instead to embrace the sort of class and race hatred that has so cost their party, and continues to do so. A figure such as Hillary Clinton might have as well, and she made the same devil's bargain and it cost her the election.

How does one "make nice" with a working-class population that has been told that the candidate is glad they're out of jobs and hopes to make it worse? Offering some pie-in-the-sky retraining aspiration months later wasn't going to walk it back, in fact, only validated the conviction they developed that she was lying her sorry wrinkled ass off. In any case, the rent's due on Wednesday, not in the middle of her upcoming administration when unicorns will graze in the repurposed coal mines.

Celebrating diversity didn't have to become making relentless war on the norm as it has. Nor does any move to "rebrand" consist of anything more than finding a pose that fools the unwashed into voting for someone who will merrily turn around and continue the class war against them once in office. The fact that the majority of this class doesn't have college degrees doesn't mean they're stupid. And they do know their "proper" interests, which center around jobs. "Working" class, get it? A threat to those is an existential threat to the family which is their principal focus. A "Girls Rule!" President who thinks social progress revolves around cross-dressers in the women's crapper is rightfully regarded as an alien species, which is exactly how she regards them.

What could accomplish this ideological sea change in the Democrat party? A leader with a truly inclusive attitude, a staff that works toward that end, donors who support it, and an educational establishment that has banished the hatred against everything that has truly made the country. That isn't going to swing in the course of a single election. It might in the course of a generation.

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