How the Democratic Party Failed By Repudiating Their Legacy as 'The Party of the People'

As the Democrats and their acolytes in the media pivot towards hysteria against 'the others' to explain their failures, let us not forget what has happened over the past thirty years, culminating in the stunning election of 2016.

This is a relatively short video, and heart of it starts around minute twenty after a discussion of the history, motives, and rationales by which the Democrats took the final steps in repudiating the legacy of The New Deal to embrace neo-liberalism.

The Democratic leadership consciously chose to identify with people they considered to be more like themselves, an elitist professional class. In a very real sense they followed the money and the prestige, and the Clintons were their leaders. The personal economic rewards that they reaped from this are very well documented.

The party covered their credentialism and 'ruling class' aspirations by covering it with a program of identity politics courting, with words more than substantial economic action, minorities with emotional appeals to ethnic identity, and occasionally fear-mongering. The Republicans played the witting foils in this, choosing to continue to embrace big money, but with a different twist towards oligarchy, covering their own greed with equally emotional appeals to 'traditional values.' In this they began to resemble corporate competitors ruled by a similar profit motive but with different branding.

The result has been an historical increase in income disparity, and a shift in power towards a policy bias that favors private war profits, global economic power agendas, and the shifting of almost all income growth to the financial class who continually abuse justice with virtual impunity.

You may wish to start the video around the twenty minute mark to hear how things progressed in the 1990's. If you have the time you can listen to the entire video to hear more of the history of how this change began in the 1970's.