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Full Version: Where Are The "Hardhat Democrats"?
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Where are the mostly Catholic Northeastern and Rust Belt Democrats who are supposed to step in and rescue the party from the Age-of-Aquarius, pass-the-bean-sprouts, God-is-dead New Left?

It's not as if there aren't enough of them: Joe Manchin, Bob Casey, Joe Sestak, Roy Cooper, Doug Jones, John Bel Edwards, Max Rose (who stole Staten Island's House seat from the Republicans), Conor Lamb, Dan Lipinski, I could go on and on.

Sooner or later, if they get pushed too far, they are going to bolt the Democrats and form a third party - and that will lead to any one of a number of outcomes, most of them bad.
(08-09-2019, 05:58 PM)Anthony Wrote: [ -> ]Where are the mostly Catholic Northeastern and Rust Belt Democrats who are supposed to step in and rescue the party from the Age-of-Aquarius, pass-the-bean-sprouts, God-is-dead New Left?

Most of those are gone, and the Age-of-Aquarius, pass-the-bean-sprouts, God-is-dead New Left is drastically shrunken by now and culturally irrelevant. Many of their children took advantage of their parents' solid incomes to join the middle class through formal education. They did not really want to do construction work or work on an assembly line if they had the opportunity to earn as much for far less physical effort.

Quote:It's not as if there aren't enough of them: Joe Manchin, Bob Casey, Joe Sestak, Roy Cooper, Doug Jones, John Bel Edwards, Max Rose (who stole Staten Island's House seat from the Republicans), Conor Lamb, Dan Lipinski, I could go on and on.

First, Italian-Americans and Slavic-Americans largely made the American middle class in post-WWII America. The kids of the hard-hat types often became something that their parents were not by educational and economic category.

Quote:Sooner or later, if they get pushed too far, they are going to bolt the Democrats and form a third party - and that will lead to any one of a number of outcomes, most of them bad.

Blacks and Hispanics were starting to take over in the well-paid, but soul-numbing work of construction and assembly-line work about as the industrial part of the economy faltered, along with its need for people of slight learning but strong bodies and strong work ethic.