Just a couple minor-ish nitpicks on what was generally a pretty great post, Sawx:
And to disguise their milquetoast “solutions” to the problems, they've decided to distract the base with feel-good social justice causes in order to give the base some sort of a token (usually to attract the middle-class voter). I've expanded my thoughts on this enough, but it boils down to the slogan of the Ronald Reagan era that's been popularized by Paul Ryan's philosophy - “I've got mine.” Gun control is okay because white middle class suburbia (where IIRC you're from) has theirs if they vote Democratic. Not having a public option is fine, because middle class suburbia has theirs. Never mind that Susan Collins could very potentially be the 51st vote for Mitch McConnell to take the Senate, she hates guns and drugs, so she's better than that horrible libertine Bellows. Instead of repudiating the new American culture of greed and selfishness, we've embraced it as soon as Clinton took power, and the moderate wing will even support Republicans if it means giving them theirs.
I don't think it's quite fair to say that the social justice stuff is a distraction from the bread-and-butter, or that it's necessarily meant just to attract comfortable middle-class folks. I mean, sometimes it is used like that, yes (cough cough f**king Cuomo cough). But more often than not it
is bread-and-butter stuff for the disadvantaged. Support for gun control, for instance, doesn't just come from soccer moms afraid of newsworthy sprees- it also comes from inner city folks for whom guns are an everyday threat to life and limb. To the extent that the news media plays up the sprees to grab the attention of scared soccer moms who wouldn't care otherwise (and ignores when black kids get shot), that sucks, but I don't think it's
quite fair to just pin that on the party.
The saddest thing about the Obama presidency is that populism can work. The inner city would definitely vote for something that would get them out of the slums, and we can hold the minority coalition if we raise the wage and pass meaningful immigration reform. We can make people vote for us if we say that the Hobby Lobby (rightfully so) will actually lead to more abortions because people won't actually get pregnant, and we can defend a woman's right to choose by saying that the government shouldn't force you into having a baby on their terms. We can make the Republicans pay by calling them out on their bullsh*t: that they're only for big government when it helps out mega-corporations, and that they're only for a balanced budget unless those goddamned Moozlums are bothering the world or big business is in trouble and needs a tax cut. We can do all those things, but we just talk about them when the base is paying attention more. Coincidence? The stats say otherwise. When the working class has more confidence in Democrats to do something, they'll vote for them.
I'm not 100 percent sure the arrow of causation is actually working in that direction; today's parties are intensely poll-driven outfits and I think it's at least plausible that their rhetoric in any one campaign is partially a reaction to the sort of support they get from various demographics rather than the other way around. Also, I actually don't recall 2006 being particularly heavy on populist/redistributionist rhetoric. That election was more than anything about opposition to the Iraq War, and a lot of fairly milquetoast Dems won in conservative areas with moderate-to-conservative platforms otherwise.
Really it's probably most accurate to say that it's a complicated, symbiotic relationship and the Dems do have a responsibility to lean on the Overton Window more than they're doing... but I'm also not convinced that rhetoric will be able to change an entire national climate by itself.
...
One last thing, which is mostly just my idiosyncratic urbanist hobbyhorse talking shop rather than any challenge to your main idea here. When you say:
The inner city would definitely vote for something that would get them out of the slums
I get that you're trying to address residential segregation, lack of opportunity, systemic racism, etc., and those are all things that we
deeply need to fix, but I'd like to suggest a possible change in tactics that learns from experience and achieves the same goals in a more sustainable manner. Namely, saying that we should aspire to get everyone "out of the slums" smacks to me of the midcentury mistakes that ravaged our built and natural environment, and made things even worse for the folks stuck behind. A lot of the areas that get labeled as "slums" have a tremendous amount of housing stock, much of which was actually better-built than subdivisions of the past sixty years; they often have tight-knit communities; good "bones" of infrastructure, transit links, etc.
The better solution is to avoid the hollowing-out and metastatization that we see in places like Detroit where one's meal ticket
is a matter of just crossing 8 Mile and leaving the core to rot in the most wasteful manner possible; where a city built for 2 million is reverting to prairie while its outskirts run on what's basically just a Ponzi scheme of disposable development.
Instead, we should work to transform these "slums" into positive places that are pleasant to live in and afford opportunity for all their residents. Yes, some people will want to go out and get a half-acre lot in the burbs, that's fine- we should likewise be pushing those burbs to take on more diversity, both in terms of race and income. Break down the barriers in both directions; strengthen and preserve and rebuild the infrastructure we have, y'know?
That was
quite the tangential pontification, forgive me.
