Trump Country

Let’s talk about the cities, those warrens of cosmopolitans who failed to see the red wave until it washed them away. For nearly half a century, Democrats have worked to position themselves as America’s metropolitan party. After the Dems fractured over civil rights and Vietnam, leaders came away touting the New Politics, a platform for college-educated idealists worried more about quality of life than class warfare. The 1980s brought the Atari Democrats, a faction of market-friendly liberals interested in tech. Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, as chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council in the early 1990s, sought to build the platform for suburban moderates. Jesse Jackson disparagingly referred to the DLC as “Democrats for the Leisure Class,” and he wasn’t wrong. The party seduced and depended on wealthy suburbanites, and on yuppies streaming back to the inner city. It worked, for a while. It didn’t work in 2016.