A tip o' the hat to Naked Capitalism's Lambert Strether today for including a link to
What Democrats Must Do, by Miami University of Ohio historian and sociologist Josh Mound, on the website Jacobin. Mound drives home the irony that the New Democrats who supported Clinton and sought to defeat Sanders by creating the false narrative of bigoted "Berniebros" are themselves prejudiced in favor of white suburbanite professionals. This is, of course, the transformation of the Democratic Party Thomas Frank details in his book, Listen Liberal.

I greatly fear that most people will not read the article, because it is a very long read -- at least a couple hours. I wish I had come across it earlier and been able to post it for people to wade into on a Sunday morning. It is a very, very important article; identifies all the key turning points in the the history of the Democratic Party and American politics the past four decades; includes many of the original sources cited by Frank, with the added great benefit of providing links to them, and has many sources Frank does not; and is chock full of all the damning quotes you could want, again, with links.

I suppose to public-spirited thing for me to do would me to provide a summary of Mound's article, but that would make it too easy for people to not read the entire article themselves. Hence, a few excerpts, with one observation on my part.

Two truths about the white working class have framed the discussion of American working-class politics for more than fifty years. White workers, as political scientist Elisabeth Jacobs has summarized, are both “substantially more liberal” on economic policy and “marginally more conservative” on cultural issues than more well-off whites. This dynamic left the post–Civil Rights Democratic Party with a choice: move right on race, left on economics, or abandon the working class completely....

Since George McGovern’s landslide loss in the 1972 presidential election, the Democratic Party, under the influence of the neoliberal “New Democrats,” has chosen the final option. Rather than woo white workers with social conservatism or economic populism, the party decided to woo well-off white suburbanites with moderation on both social and economic issues....

Clinton’s strategy of avoiding economic populism had the unintended consequence of dampening the Democratic base’s enthusiasm, driving down support and turnout among both people of color and Millennials.

Tp the next excerpt I append my own observation.

Beginning in the Jacksonian Era and for more than a century after, the Democratic Party was, wholly or partly, a white supremacist institution....

the Great Depression and Roosevelt’s New Deal inaugurated a decades-long process of pulling African Americans away from the party of Lincoln and into the Democratic coalition. The economic progressivism of New Deal Democrats attracted many black voters, as political scientist Eric Schickler has explained, even as Southern Democrats’ continued influence meant that many New Deal programs initially excluded large numbers of African Americans.

Contrary to recent suggestions by liberal pundits, the New Deal didn’t succeed because of Dixiecrat racism. It succeeded in spite of it.

Looking at Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Jim Crow South, and, later, McCarthyism, many American intellectuals began to ask how such “authoritarian” ideologies took root.

They concluded that the answer, as sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset phrased it in an influential 1959 article, lay in the white working class, whose members exhibited “greater suggestibility” and an “inability to take a complex view,” among other character flaws.

David Riesman and Nathan Glazer went even farther: liberal intellectuals, the sociologists argued, now had more in common with Wall Street traders than with workers, especially on issues like “civil rights and civil liberties.”

This post-war analysis by Lipset, Riesman, Glazer, and others, is an important issue which Frank does not address. Mound is to be thanked for including it, but at the same time, Mound should have noted that it is inaccurate to pin the blame for the Nazis entirely on the German working class. Most people understandably have little desire to delve into the history of the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, so I am fortunate to have recently come across a 2011 book by Erik Larson about the U.S. Ambassador to Germany from August 1933 to December 1937, William B. Dodd, aptly titled, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin. Dodd was an outsider to the "Pretty Good Club" of the rich, Ivy League dominated U.S. Foreign Service of the time -- one of the pet peeves by certain State Department careerists was that Dodd did not have a personal fortune and therefore could not properly maintain the trappings of an ambassador -- and was quite prescient in warning about the true nature and intents of Hitler and his party. One of the most important things I learned from the book was the role played at the beginning of Hitler's ascent to power by German nobleman and General Staff officer, and Chancellor in 1932, Franz von Papen. It was Papen who persuaded German President Paul von Hindenburg that Hitler could be easily dominated and controlled by the aristocratic factions Papen and Hidenburg represented, leading directly to Hindenburg stepping aside to be replaced by Hitler. This crucial support of Hitler by ruling German oligarchs confirms the history related by Carroll Quigley in the 1966 book Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. I will further note that both Larson and Quigley mention, but do not focus on, the supporting role of British and American bankers who saw Hitler as the best German political option for maintaining the flow of World War One reparations payments from Germany. It is not surprising that the role of political and financial elites in the rise of nazism would be obscured by placing the blame instead on the working class.

Like Frank, Mound finds the first signs of neoliberalism appearing in Jimmy Carter's administration:

“Government cannot solve our problems, it can’t set our goals, it cannot define our vision,” Carter declared in his 1978 State of the Union address. “Government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities or cure illiteracy or provide energy.”

By contrast, Mound writes,

In a 1972 issue of Dissent dedicated to blue-collar workers, socialist intellectual Michael Harrington dispelled the myth that the working class “no longer exists in America.” Many politicians and commentators, Harrington wrote, had been misled by the relative shift from blue-collar to white-collar work in the US economy. Most of these new white-collar jobs, he argued, were no guarantee of prosperity. Blue-collar or white-collar, this working class was bound together by one common experience: “it does not have enough money.”

Then, of course, came Bill Clinton, and the entire noxious DLC horde:

“[W]hat you earn depends on what you learn,” Clinton and his vice presidential nominee, Al Gore, proclaimed in their campaign book. The solution to stagnant incomes, they argued, wasn’t robust government intervention, but creating “the best educated, best-trained workforce in the world.” They had little use for unions and eagerly supported “free trade” agreements. “We believe in free enterprise and the power of market forces,” they wrote.

But Clinton added a crucial element: a rightward turn on race. Years later, DLC acolytes would deny and downplay the role of racism in Clinton’s 1992 campaign. But its centrality to Clinton and the New Democrats was undeniable. As Franklin Foer admitted in a sympathetic account, “More than any issue, race defined the rise of the New Democrats in the 1980s.”

Clinton didn’t just take black voters for granted. He pointedly used African Americans as a foil to demonstrate that Democrats had abandoned racial liberalism. He snubbed Jesse Jackson, denounced Sister Soulah, executed Ricky Ray Rector, and adopted punitive, racialized stances on welfare and criminal justice.

Despite New Democrats’ conviction that they could tack right on racial issues without losing African-American voters, the 1992 Democratic primaries saw “the smallest black voter turnout for a presidential primary in a decade.” In many key states, Clinton won less than half the number of African-American votes that Jesse Jackson had received during his losing campaign four years earlier....
“Few issues in American life have produced a class schism like NAFTA,” Hart Research’s Guy Molyneux observed in early 1994. “People in blue-collar households, with moderate incomes, and without a college degree were all strongly opposed to the treaty. On the other side were those earning over $50,000 and four year college graduates.” In a prescient aside, Molyneux warned that blue-collar workers would hold Democrats accountable in the decades to come if it became clear that trade had cost them their jobs....

“What makes the soccer moms so key this time is that they are voting Republican for Congress and Democratic for President,” Democratic pollster Celinda Lake explained. Clinton’s strategy, in other words, revolved around courting voters that would help him secure reelection, but wouldn’t provide him with the Democratic congressional majority necessary (if insufficient) to enact progressive policies....

New Democrats, one report noted, could “hardly hide their glee” that the Democrats failed to retake the House, because it meant that Clinton would have cover to reach across the aisle and make a deal on entitlement programs.

“The grand bargain sketched here . . . would convert Social Security from an entitlement based on the false promise that everyone can consume more than they produce to a system that promotes savings, investment, and greater economic self-reliance,” Will Marshall, the then-president of the DLC-affiliated Progressive Policy Institute, wrote. “And it would embody a new approach to governing based on a key New Democrat insight: That in the Information Age, government’s role is not to take care of us, but to give us the tools we need to take care of ourselves and each other.”

In late 1997, Clinton met secretly with House GOP leader Newt Gingrich and Ways and Means chair Bill Archer to hammer out a plan to partially privatize Social Security. “I’m prepared to take the political heat to provide political cover for the Republicans,” Clinton assured Archer. The outlines of the deal included a hike in the retirement age and the diversion of a portion of payroll tax dollars into private accounts.

In exchange for dismantling the greatest Democratic policy achievement of the twentieth century, virtually all Clinton wanted was a promise that the GOP wouldn’t try to use the projected budget surplus for tax cuts.

The result, Mound notes, is that voting turnout in 1996 was the lowest since 1924, with less than half of eligible Americans casting a ballot.

The DLC's position on rising income inequality (and, therefore, the emergence of a new oligarchy that would destroy the nation's standing as a republic):

Inequality, economists at the DLC’s think tank insisted, had been overblown by their left critics and would “begin shrinking” soon. The only answer to inequality, they concluded, was a continued fidelity to “fiscal discipline, global competition, flexible labor markets, transparent capital markets, deregulated businesses, rapid communications, and limited government interference in markets.”

Mound points out the the 2000 Bush victory engineered by Karl Rove was the polar opposite of the
DLC's cherished centrism:

...rather than encourage Bush and GOP candidates to tack to the center, he applied insights from a 2001 article by conservative pundit Michael Barone, who argued that America was essentially a 50-50 country, with few truly persuadable voters. Following Barone’s thesis, Rove focused on turning out the Republican base, not only by having Bush play to dedicated GOP voters, but also by ensuring anti–gay marriage referenda would appear on the ballot in key states.

Did Democratic Party leaders learn from this bruising defeat? Did they abandon their worship of "bipartisanship" and "attracting the moderate voter"? Did they note how the Republicans had succeeded by appealing shamelessly to their base, and adopt a reinvigorated attempt to repeal to the traditional working class base of the Democratic Party?

Mound's review of the Obama administration is quite accurate, and will undoubtedly anger many Democrats who continue to cling to an idealized image of Obama. I think Mound's explanation of why Obama's stimulus was a political disaster is the best I've read yet. It sets the stage for what happened next.

When his approval rating declined in 2009, Obama attributed it to his failure to achieve bipartisan consensus, not the economy’s continued sluggishness....

Obama took a page out of the DLC playbook and turned his attention to budget-cutting, creating what would become known as the “Simpson-Bowles” commission — little more than a platform for efforts to cut taxes for the well-off and slash Social Security....

In reality, the federal budget deficit ranked far behind jobs and the general state of the economy in Americans’ minds in both 2010 and 2011. But — in keeping with the New Democrats’ fixation on the views of Wall Street insiders and well-off whites — the Obama administration elevated the deficit and investor “confidence” to its top priority.

The discussion of the 2016 Clinton campaign and loss includes a rich supply of details and links that completely disprove the elites' preferred horror story of white working class voters indulging their bigotry at the ballot box.