Ruy Teixeira explains “How the Democrats Became the Party of the Ruling Class.” Excerpt:

The Democratic Party, he argues, has abandoned its traditional working-class base and become a party of college-educated elites. For decades, the party has been hemorrhaging white working-class voters. But in recent election cycles, it has suffered big losses among Latinos without a college education, and has started to slide with non-college-educated Asian and even black Americans as well. The Republicans have capitalized on that loss by embracing these exiled voters, creating an inverted political dynamic that has left those of us old enough to remember the traditional pro-worker, anti-war left with our heads spinning . . .

The city-dwelling, college-educated, professional-class demographic that serves as both the political base of the Democratic Party and the ideological core of the left constitutes America’s new ruling class. As such, its interests, values, and worldview are as one with the institutions that form our country’s political, cultural, and corporate establishments — including government agencies, NGOs, universities, and the industries of cultural production. Unsurprisingly, these power centers benefit from mass censorship of those who dissent from their orthodoxies, from the contrivance of new disciplinary tools to wield against the working class, and from the endless invocation of emergencies to justify radical exercises of state power, such as Covid-19 and the ostensible menace of Vladimir Putin.