Fully 2 years since The Atlantic published the following article and nearly 3 since Clinton's humiliating defeat, and the party today seems even less connected to our working class ("deplorables"), American symbols & traditions, or even reality.
What’s Wrong With the Democrats?
But liberals’ fears were softened in 2016 by a widely shared belief: that the candidacy of Donald Trump would shatter the Republican Party, at least in the form in which we had long known it. His trail of wreckage would force a painful reckoning with the party’s shortcomings—the narrowness of its coalition, the cloistered cluelessness of its elites, its intramural disagreements about the future of the nation. After a season of Trump’s destruction, the party would lie in rubble.
On November 8, that prophecy was realized, true in every regard, except that it described the Democrats. On Inauguration Day, the party’s power ebbed to its lowest level since the 1920s.
What’s Wrong With the Democrats?
But liberals’ fears were softened in 2016 by a widely shared belief: that the candidacy of Donald Trump would shatter the Republican Party, at least in the form in which we had long known it. His trail of wreckage would force a painful reckoning with the party’s shortcomings—the narrowness of its coalition, the cloistered cluelessness of its elites, its intramural disagreements about the future of the nation. After a season of Trump’s destruction, the party would lie in rubble.
On November 8, that prophecy was realized, true in every regard, except that it described the Democrats. On Inauguration Day, the party’s power ebbed to its lowest level since the 1920s.