It's a false description of the electoral and political failure of the Democratic Party. In the beginning, the false narrative was described in The Atlantic:

Thomas Edsall and Mary Edsall similarly warned in the pages of The Atlantic that the South was key, and it was lost because the liberal orthodoxy was too tied to race, and out of touch with white working-class voters.

A review of Bill Clinton's attack on Welfare and Social Security and:

The Social Security Act, let’s recall, was intended to protect the income of working-class American families. Yes, it was an entitlement, and proudly so. Social Security was first denied to most black Americans, but then extended. Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was a core part of Social Security.

Clinton’s view that single mothers should be written out of the act—for that is what the end of “welfare as we know it” meant—was not viewed as an attack on working people. But it was. Black women, who have historically had the largest labor force participation rate among all racial groups, and who work more hours than any racial group among women, were stigmatized as being made lazy because they finally had access to that part of the Social Security Act which had initially been denied them when it was passed.

The Reagan Revolution:

What Reagan achieved in the 1980s was the illusion that by letting the floor fall, the middle could be protected. Unfortunately, too many white workers still have a view of the economy fed by the Reagan framework of government’s role. The unabated concentration of income will make after-tax methods of redistribution more vital so that Americans can have access to housing, education, and health.

The Affordable Care Act, a market-based approach to health access, is one example where the fix is inadequate to rising income inequality, and made worse because it naïvely assumed that states would expand public access to address the gap in affordability.

How do Democrats recover from their failure?

Democrats need to spend more time developing a frame to combat inequality. They need to do a better job of explaining that income inequality is a threat to economic growth. They need to be spending time helping Americans take the blinders off and see that workers, of all races, are being given the shaft by a system where corporate greed has become an elite “entitlement.” They need to pull the Band-Aid off a false sense there is some white privilege that can spare some workers the wrath of America’s war on working people.

They must fess up to their quiet, and sometimes vocal, support of an agenda that attacked America’s workers. They need to stop believing the problem confronting American workers is that they are uneducated or unskilled. They need to stop defining the white working class as the less-educated. Those are the perennial excuses meted out to black workers.

http://prospect.org/article/why-white-worker-theme-harmful

So I looked up the original Atlantic article and the "liberal" Edsall sounds like a Reagan Democrat. The conclusion was spot on of where we are today:

Over the past twenty-five years liberalism has avoided confronting, and learning from, the experience of voter rejection, as institutional power and a sequence of extraneous events--ranging from Watergate to the 1981-1982 recession--have worked to prop up the national Democratic Party. For the current cycle to reach closure, and for there to be a breakthrough in stagnant partisan competition, the Democratic Party may have either to suffer a full-scale domestic defeat, including (to deal in the extremes of possibility) loss of control of the Senate and the House, or at the very least to go through the kind of nadir--intraparty conflict, challenge to ideological orthodoxy, in short, a form of civil war--experienced by the Republican Party and the right in the 1960s.

The original strength of Democratic liberalism was its capacity to build majorities out of minorities--a strength that comes only from a real understanding of what it means to be out of power, from direct engagement in the struggle to build a majority, and from an understanding of what is worth fighting for in this struggle.

Recapturing the ability to build a winning alliance requires learning the full meaning of defeat, and developing a conscious awareness of precisely what the electorate will support politically, what it will not, and when--if ever--something more important is at stake.

https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/politics/race/edsall.htm

[Edit to add an article about Republican problems from Vanity Fair]

Of all the aggrieved elites disoriented by Trump, none face a trickier calculation than the dark artists of the right, whose conspiratorial powers have always been oversold. Trump wouldn’t be president today if political operatives had a scintilla of the pull imagined by the commander-in-chief. It is true, however, that they don’t like the president all that much.

But Trump has a very loyal base, so what's their advice?:

"Your heart tells you that he’s bad for the country. Your head looks at polling data among Republican primary voters and sees how popular he is,” said one Republican strategist who, like most of the nearly two dozen I interviewed for this story, requested anonymity in order to speak candidly and protect their clients. “It would be malpractice not to advise clients to attach themselves to that popularity."

Looking forward:

It's a confounding predicament for Washington elites whose power is threatened by their piety. Politics, and therefore political consulting, are in the throes of disruption at the hands of an interloper with little respect for the party apparatus and political ecosystem that made his ascent possible. For the Republican strategists on the front lines, Trumpism presents a stark choice as they look toward another epoch-shaping election in 2018.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/08/how-the-swamp-sold-its-soul-to-d...

We can only hope that both parties self destruct before they destroy planet Earth and/or Western Civilization.