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Comment by morelisp | Hacker News Reader

> At some point over the past ten or fifteen years, the Democrats switched their focus

Clinton was elected on explicit Third Way positions nearly 30 years ago. If you think something changed in the past 10-15, you're falling for GOP propaganda. What you're noticing is the democrats finding a new base a decade after losing their working class supporters, through a combination of Third Way politics, the Republican Southern Strategy. The GOP saw this coming and stoked / capitulated to increasing racist elements of the party during Obama's presidency. This is the only major change in the past decade.

(Well, the democrats aren't really that smart - it's not so much they're finding a new base as they're left with the ones the new GOP ideology intentionally excludes. As a party, they are doing a terrible job mobilizing this!)

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I think Southern racism has very little to do with the Republican shift in the Midwest. We've had heavy hispanic immigration for twenty years and they've all been fairly well integrated.

I would guess what actually happened to the older people I know is that they grew up in union jobs at factories that got sent to Mexico after NAFTA went through.

Unions lean heavy Democrat. When the union fails you, I think that leads fairly directly to losing faith in the Democratic party.

Further, the insistence by many within the party that the only reason someone would want to leave the Democratic party is that they're racists really doesn't do them any favors.

> If you think something changed in the past 10-15, you're falling for GOP propaganda.

You think that Democrats have not moved in the past 10-15 years? You think that the idea that they have is merely Republican propaganda? I think you haven't been paying attention.

Or maybe you were paying too much attention. 15 years ago, AOC wasn't even old enough to vote. Were there Democrats in the House who held the same positions 15 years ago? Perhaps so. They didn't have the press attention that AOC gets, though. So they may have been there, but in the eyes of the public they weren't "the position" of the Democrats. Instead, they were fringe.

Now AOC gets as much press coverage as Nancy Pelosi (maybe more, before impeachment). To the average person, AOC and people like her now represent the Democratic Party. That's a massive shift, at least in perceptions, if not in actual position.

And I think the actual position has shifted, too. There are considerably more of the farther-left people like AOC, both in congress and running for president. The median Democratic officeholder position has shifted left. (Or so I strongly suspect. I assert it without statistical evidence.)

I'm trying to understand how you see Republican positions changing over time as well. From the perspective of policy or cultural issues. If I grant your point about how the last 15 years has seen a resurgent left, something that I'm stoked about, could you explain a little about how you've seen the republicans change over 10 to 20 years?

Republicans just lowered taxes for the working class and increased it for the management class. How is that typical capitalist right wing? It was basically tailor made to hurt the coastal elites since only there do a significant number earn enough to get the extra taxes.

Honestly? I see Republicans unable to explain their own positions, perhaps because they don't understand it themselves. I see them stumbling around, too often not operating on principle or thought, and sometimes stumbling into saying things that manage to win an election.

It's unfair to say that that's all Republicans. But it's some of them, and it fits the one that collects all the press at the moment...

Your entire post is about AOC, who has spent less than two years in office. My statement was about the (non-)events in the democratic party 25-30 and 10-15 years ago. The "AOC as a bogeyman" talking points are a transparent attempt to derail the discussion along the lines the GOP wants.

I agree we've seen a shift in the democratic party - not yet in its leadership - in the past 2-4 years (beginning with Sanders, its first major electoral effects in the 2018 midterms). What does that have to do with what happened 10-15 years ago?

What did happen 10-15 years ago is Obama's election. Obama's politics do not place him in the left of the democratic party, and in some areas he's firmly in the right part.

So what's the objection to what happened 10-15 years ago, but not 30 years ago? To put it more bluntly - What's the biggest difference between Obama and Bill Clinton? One hint: it's not any political policy.

And why, if the objection is supposed to be about support for the working class, is what's happening in the past 2-4 not good? The return to labor rights as a central plank of the party should be drawing people back if that's the reason they left, but apparently it's not.

True, the topic of AOC runs through my post, but that's not what it's about. It's about the change in the position of the average/median Democratic politician.

And I'd say the change has happened at least somewhat in the Democratic leadership - in many of the presidential candidates, even if not in the House and Senate leadership.

And I'd argue that this change was going on before, but you didn't see it, because of Obama. He, in one person, was the face of the Democratic party, and that hid what was going on underneath. As you say, Obama was not on the left, and because he was the public symbol of the party, it was easy to not see the left growing.

Was Obama to the left of Clinton? I could accept "no" as the answer. But was the median Democratic politician during Obama to the left of the median Democratic politician during Clinton? To me, it appears that the answer is "yes".

I don't think that abandoning the working class is something that just happened in the last 2-4 years. I could even argue that it happened under Clinton, but he had the political savvy to hide it. It was probably there, and growing, under Obama. It became glaringly apparent under Hillary, when she had no interest in even talking about the working class, and Trump did. That's what changed in the last 2-4 (let's call it 3) years - Trump stole what the Democrats thought was "their" issue, so solidly "theirs" that it didn't even need to be mentioned.

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