A New Year’s resolution for Democrats

OPINION:

Democrats’ New Year’s resolution should be to stop targeting America’s working class.

Despite their rhetoric about standing for the little guy, Democrats’ reality is one of sticking it to the little guy. This has been especially true over the last three years, when the Biden administration has allowed them to do so like never before.

With the possible exception of President John F. Kennedy’s Camelot, Democrats cling to no vestige of their mythology more tenaciously than their image of championing the working class. Its modern version stretches back to William Jennings Bryan and his Cross of Gold speech that stampeded him to the Democrats’ presidential nomination in the 1896 election and the embrace of the Populist Party’s platform.

Forgotten is that Bryan and the Democrats were beaten. Forgotten even more is the reality behind Democrats’ mythology: Their party was so beaten down that they had no choice but to accept all comers — like the Populists — in the forlorn hope of breaking Republicans’ stranglehold on federal power.

Rather than a choice, it was a necessity that birthed Democrats’ embrace of the little guy. Ever since, Democrats have romanticized its origins until they themselves, and the establishment media along with them, no longer remember — or at least acknowledge.

But no better reminder exists of Democrats’ real intentions for the little guy than the choices they make when they actually have power.

Today’s Democratic Party is the party of the elites. They revel in it and in their separation from the little guy.

The nation’s richest are far more to the left than the rest of America. The establishment media is their megaphone, blathering the bromides of Democrats and the left. Ditto the entertainment industry.

The Democrats’ top politicians are career ones, and Democrats roundly reject those who seek to represent America without such a pedigree. And America’s supposedly top (though really most privileged) college campuses are no more than a training ground for the elitism that fully flowers in the Democratic Party.

Unleashed over the last three years, Democrats’ elitism has taken unabashed aim at the rest of America. In their crosshairs, no one suffers like the working class. They suffer most because they are the least able to escape Democrats’ programs.

And the working class has suffered particularly over the last three years when the Biden administration has embodied Democrats’ worst elitist tendencies: pursuing these policies at the national level and turning a blind eye to them at the local level.

Democrats’ radical environmentalism includes appliances in working-class homes, the fossil fuels they use, and the cars the working class will soon be required to buy and drive. All come at a higher cost that the working class can least afford. For many of the working class, they come at the cost of their jobs.

Democrats’ “defund the police” policies have stripped away the safety of many of America’s biggest cities, leaving citizens defenseless against career criminals who are either not apprehended or not prosecuted when they are caught. Of course, no one is left more defenseless than the working class, who are most dependent on police for protection.

The working class, too, are most dependent on the public schools that Democrats left closed for so long at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and fought alongside their teachers union allies to keep closed.

When in operation, Democrats have pursued a curriculum of indoctrination over education. From critical race theory to social justice, they have helped lower public school performance. The working class, who have no choice but these schools — and a lack of choice that Democrats staunchly desire for the children of working-class people — again pay the price in fewer opportunities for their children.

The Biden administration’s rampant spending, deficits and debt have similarly afflicted the working class worst. Helping fuel historic inflation, it also triggered a surge in interest rates. Trapped between the squeeze on what they bought and what they borrowed, the least able to pay suffered most: America’s working class.

President Biden’s open-border policy and its resulting illegal immigration influx have also hit America’s working class hardest. They are the ones from whom services will first be diverted, whose schools will be crowded, and whose jobs will be threatened; in return, they will be left with the bill for the costs.

In none of these cases, or in the many more not named, will it be elite Democrats who suffer. They can afford the higher costs that come with their virtue signaling.

They can afford the private security necessitated by cuts in law enforcement funding.

They can and do send their children to private schools that stay open and still perform.

And theirs are not the neighborhoods affected, nor theirs the jobs jeopardized, by Mr. Biden’s open borders.

Democrats like to imagine that theirs is the party of the downtrodden, but the reality is that it is now the party of trodding upon. While all Americans suffer from the Democrats’ policies — the middle class, the wealthy, and even the elites themselves — the working class, who can least escape and least afford them, suffer most.

So, for the new year and the sake of America’s working class, Democrats should resolve to practice what they preach instead of preaching in lieu of practice.

• J.T. Young was a professional staffer in the House and Senate from 1987 to 2000, served in the Department of Treasury and Office of Management and Budget from 2001 to 2004, and was director of government relations for a Fortune 20 company from 2004 to 2023.