“How the Democrats lost the working-class vote”, ran the headline on the New York Times’s front page on 6 January. According to the Times, the Democrats’ estrangement from the working class was decades in the making. The party’s enthusiastic embrace of trade and globalization led to the closure of factories across industrial America, eliminating jobs that had been a prime source of stability, identity and prestige.
While many Democrats attributed Trump’s success to the left’s embrace of “woke” language and causes like transgender rights, the Times observed, the economic seeds of his victories “were sown long ago”. A longtime AFL-CIO official was quoted as saying that “one of the things that has been frustrating about the narrative ‘the Democrats are losing the working class’ is that people are noticing it half a century after it happened”.
