David Brooks explains how the Democrats slowly went off the rails in his latest New York Times column. On the Times’ Website, It’s hidden behind the self-defeating TimesSelect firewall, but the whole text can be found on the New London, CT Day (found with about five minutes worth of Googling). Growing up about 20 minutes south of Judge Alito’s hometown of Trenton New Jersey, there’s much here I can relate to:
If he’d been born a little earlier, Sam Alito would probably have been a Democrat. In the 1950s, the middle-class and lower-middle-class whites in places like Trenton, N.J., where Alito grew up, were the heart and soul of the Democratic Party.
But by the late 1960s, cultural politics replaced New Deal politics, and liberal Democrats did their best to repel Northern white ethnic voters. Big-city liberals launched crusades against police brutality, portraying working-class cops as thuggish storm troopers for the establishment. In the media, educated liberals portrayed urban ethnics as uncultured, uneducated Archie Bunkers.
The liberals were doves; the ethnics were hawks. The liberals had
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