Remembering What it Means to be a Democrat [View all]

By Joel Connelly
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My introduction to Democrats, as a boy, came in reading the Machinist Union’s newspaper that my dad brought home from the shipyard in Bellingham. It championed medical care for the aged under Social Security, and fervently opposed right-to-work laws.

The local Democratic Party bought radio time just before the noon news. The down-home drawl of Sen. Estes Kefauver, a Yale-educated lawyer (“Ah pity the poor family farmer!”) would be followed by local lawyer Marshall Forest: “Vote Democratic, the party for you, not just the few.”

After a tectonic shift in American politics, the Dems are now the party of upper middle class educated elites, while less educated blue-collar voters are a pillar of the Republicans’ MAGA movement.

Hardly a day goes by without a Democrats-in-Trouble piece in The New York Times. It’s an unceasing theme for four successive nightly Fox News pundits as they promote ersatz populism. They don’t just kill time: They torture it.

https://www.postalley.org/2025/08/11/remembering-what-it-means-to-be-a-democrat/