A letter to a Civil War historian about the causes of the election debacle

I sent the letter below to a leading historian of the Civil War era.

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Trump’s victory may be shocking, but it is not surprising. His election is the disastrous result of the Democratic Party’s long and very deliberate rejection of any programmatic orientation toward the working class, which Hillary Clinton infamously dismissed as “a basket of deplorables” and recently called Biden “trash.”

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Focused on fading identity politics – that is, the politics of more or less prosperous segments of the middle class seeking a more favorable distribution of wealth among the top 10 percent – ​​the Democratic Party convinced itself that it had an alternative had found for politics that prioritized class. This intellectual decline was furthered and justified in the academy by the various forms of anti- and pseudo-Marxist philosophies (Frankfurt School and Postmodernism) embraced by a generation of ex-radical students in the aftermath of 1968.