Tuesday, August 01, 2017

A Nation of Sleepwalkers?

"No portion of the PMC has been more blinded by its righteous self-image than the Democratic Party establishment, which failed to foresee a devastating loss in last year’s election. In their abandonment of the working class, Democrats validated the old saying that Republicans fear their base while Democrats despise theirs. 'For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania,' Senator Chuck Schumer boasted last summer, 'we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia—and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.' Hillary Clinton went on to trade campaigning in Wisconsin for an appearance on Broad City, an interview in Lenny Letter, and a shout-out to Hamilton in her speech at the Democratic National Convention.
"Clinton's was a campaign tailor-made for and by the aspirational class, which is why its members, notably those settled on prestigious media perches, were blindsided when the so-called 'blue wall' crumbled last November. When Tyler Cowen dreams of restoring America to some prior state of innovative glory, his book can sound like an extended riff on Donald Trump's now-infamous campaign slogan. But it was the Democrats' pitiful rejoinder to Trump that could serve as a mantra for the complacent class: 'America is already great.'"

J. C. Pan at the New Republic ponders Tyler Cowen's The Complacent Class and Elizabeth Currid-Halkett's The Sum of Small Things.

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