Brain
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I took a lot out because the article is very long. Anyway, the article was very informative explaining what happened to the Democratic Party and why. It's unfortunate he tells us the labor movement is over and is never coming back to be a strong as it was. I hope he's wrong about that because I think it can be reversed with the right plan. And he doesn't propose a solution what to do to make politicians more responsible to ordinary Americans.
Also, the article doesn't account for the recent Republican blunder on Medicare which will reverse Democratic fortunes. However, even if it's true Democrats will do better because of Medicare it's not enough. The Democratic party needs to be more responsive to ordinary people and to do that unions need to rise up to their previous position of prominence.
The article doesn't suggest solutions so I would try startng another party and call it the progressive party of America (PPA) and maybe it would be a good idea to merge it with the Green party. Bernie Sanders would be a good leader and maybe Dennis Kucinich and other progressive Democrats could be persuaded to defect. It appears Democrats in the senate can't be relied upon anymore.
Maybe it would be a good idea to start a Tea Party from the left but it hasn't been effective to change the Republican establishment.
Mother Jones / By Kevin Drum
Why the Democratic Party Has Abandoned the Middle Class in Favor of the Rich
If politicians care almost exclusively about the concerns of the rich, it makes sense that over the past decades they've enacted policies that have ended up benefiting the rich.
In 2008, a liberal Democrat was elected president. Landslide votes gave Democrats huge congressional majorities and Americans were ready for serious change. But two years later, Wall Street is back to earning record profits, and conservatives are triumphant. To understand why this happened you have to understand Income inequality has grown dramatically since the mid-'70s—far more in the US than in most advanced countries. Second, American politicians don't care much about voters with moderate incomes. Over the past decades politicians enacted policies that have ended up benefiting the rich. How did we get here? The story of how this happened is the key to understanding why the Obama era lasted less than two years. About a year ago, the Pew Research Center looked at the sources reporters used for stories on the economy. Well: "Representatives of organized labor unions," Pew found, "were sources in a mere 2% of all the economy stories studied."
It wasn't always this way. As historian Kim Phillips-Fein puts it, "The strength of unions in postwar America had a profound impact on all people who worked for a living, even those who did not belong to a union themselves." It was unions that made the American economy work for the middle class, and it was their later decline that turned the economy upside-down and made it into a playground for the business and financial classes. American unions had plenty of problems but it wasn't until the rise of the New Left in the '60s that these problems began to metastasize. Organized labor requires government support to thrive—things like the right to organize workplaces, rules that prevent retaliation against union leaders, and requirements that management negotiate in good faith—and in America, that support traditionally came from the Democratic Party. The relationship was symbiotic: Unions provided money and ground game campaign organization, and in return Democrats supported economic policies like minimum-wage laws and expanded health care that helped not just union members per se—since they'd already won good wages and benefits at the bargaining table—but the interests of the working and middle classes writ large.
But despite its roots in organized labor, the New Left wasn't much interested in all this. By the end of the '60s, the feeling was entirely mutual. New Left activists derided union bosses as just another tired bunch of white, establishment Cold War fossils, and as a result, the rupture of the Democratic Party that started in Chicago in 1968 became irrevocable in Miami Beach four years later. It seemed impossible that this motley collection of shaggy kids, newly assertive women, and goo-goo academics could ever figure out how to wield real political power, the bosses simply weren't ready when it turned out they had miscalculated badly. Thus George Meany's surprise when he got his first look at the New York delegation at the 1972 Democratic convention. "What kind of delegation is this?" he sneered. "They've got six open fags and only three AFL-CIO people on that delegation!" New rules put in place in 1968 led to the nomination of George McGovern in 1972 and despite McGovern's sterling pro-labor credentials the AFL-CIO refused to endorse him. The labor bosses were enraged that the hippies had thwarted the nomination of labor favorite Hubert Humphrey. Democrats won a landslide victory in the 1974 midterm election. But the newly minted members of Congress, among them former McGovern campaign manager Gary Hart, weren't especially loyal to big labor. They'd seen how labor had treated McGovern, despite his lifetime of support for their issues. The results were catastrophic. In other words, it's not that the working class has abandoned Democrats. It's just the opposite: The Democratic Party has largely abandoned the working class. In the past, blue-collar workers largely took their cues on economic policy from meetings in union halls, and in turn, labor leaders gave them a voice in Washington. This matters, because politicians don't respond to the concerns of voters, they respond to the organized muscle of institutions that represent them. With labor in decline, both parties now respond strongly to the interests of the rich—whose institutional representation is deep and energetic—and barely at all to the interests of the working and middle classes.
Kevin Drum is a political blogger for Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. Get Kevin Drum's RSS feed.
http://www.alternet.org/rights/151108/why_the_democratic_party_has_abandoned_the_middle_class_in_favor_of_the_rich?page=entire
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The article doesn't suggest solutions so I would try st... - 
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