Seymour Hersch July 19, 2023 READ

SEYMOUR HERSH: How did we get to the political fault line that gave us a Donald Trump? When did it all start?

THOMAS FRANK: I sometimes feel like it’s the story of my life, because it all began shortly after I was born in 1965, during the Vietnam era. Within a few years came the beginning of the culture wars and the eclipsing of the old liberal consensus. It’s important to remember two facts about it all: First, that every single battle in the culture wars has been presented to us over the years as a kind of substitute class war, as an uprising of ordinary people with their humble values, against the highbrow elite.

The other fact is that, at the same time the Republicans were perfecting the culture-war formula, the Democrats were announcing that they no longer wanted to be the party of blue-collar workers. They said this more or less openly in the early 1970s. They envisioned a more idealistic, more noble constituency out there in the form of the young people then coming off the college campuses plus the enlightened white-collar elite. In other words, the Democrats were abandoning the old working-class agenda at the same moment that the Nixon Republicans were figuring out how to reach out to those voters.