Who are the Democrats For?
The Big Picture on Whose Behalf the Dems Are Working
[Go to Not Going Back – Guide to 2024 Presidential Election]
[Go to Biden Admin Accomplishments]
As long as I can remember, Democrats have been accused of only representing special interests. I suppose that is true if by “special interests” you mean “people who need health care”, “people who need jobs”, and “people who breathe air.” If there is one special interest that recent Democrats have favored, it is the working class.
The working class is commonly defined as working people with medium-to-low income and no college degree. They are the people who do the day-to-day work that keeps the nation running. Over time their pay has been stuck because many well-paying manufacturing jobs have been destroyed by cheap imports, automation, and attacks on unionization. White members of this group have been voting for Trump.
Here are some of the main priorities of recent Democratic administrations and how they benefit the working class (click links for sections).
- Obamacare improved one of biggest challenges for workers: health coverage.
- Consumer protection is especially important for people trying to make ends meet.
- Democratic efforts to promote good working class jobs reinvigorated under Biden.
- Most Democratic help for minorities is designed to benefit people of all races.
FDR’s Political Party
There was a time, starting with Reagan being elected in 1980, when it was considered somewhat old-fashioned for Democrats to invoke Franklin Roosevelt or the New Deal. That was for another era, pictured in grainy black and white movie footage of hordes of workers clocking into factories. President Clinton proclaimed that “the era of Big Government is over“, which was an absurd statement in an age of Exxon and Microsoft then and is even more absurd now in an era of Google and Amazon.
Increasingly Democrats have returned to the belief that a big country needs to do big things like modernizing our energy supply and making sure that everyone gets adequate health care. These are not niche concerns of a political elite but the foundations of a strong, proud, and fair nation. Pursuing those goals, the Obama and Biden Administrations have gotten important bills through Congress. While designed to help the nation as a whole, they have brought special benefits to the working class, including people of all races.
This is not to say that recent Democratic administrations haven’t had mistakes and failures. But the message of its successes has not gotten out to enough people. Even if the other party had not coalesced behind a dangerous demagogue, it should be easy for the majority of Americans to vote for Democrats.