Asking as someone from the other side of the planet.
From the things I saw about the US election, the Dems were the side with plans for the economy - minimum wage adjustments, unions, taxing the rich, etc. The Republicans didn’t seem to have any concrete plans. At least, this is what I saw.
I don’t doubt Bernie Sanders though - he seems like a straight truth teller. But what am I missing?
It’s not just the US, it’s been happening for years in other countries like the UK as well.
Traditionally there has been one party that is for working people and another for capital and the owner class.
The right has been getting further and further into far right authoritarianism. That posed a problem for the Dems going back to the Clinton Presidency: do they stick with being the party of working people or do they try to have their cake and eat it by tacking to the center and assuming that the working class will continue to vote for them no matter what?
It largely worked for a time and gave Obama two terms but ever since then they have been susceptible to criticism that they’re out of touch, elitists, entitled, and that they look down their nose at working people whilst still assuming that they will get their vote, which opened the door to Republicans.
You can’t serve two masters for very long, you can’t be the party of working people while being run by upper middle class graduates. You can’t claim to care about the people with the least while cozying up to CEOs and megadonors. Sooner or later it all falls apart, as it did with Hillary Clinton’s run, where working people disliked her elitism and she didn’t have enough support from elsewhere to make up the shortfall. That should’ve been a warning. Instead they doubled down.
The problem in the US is that there are only two viable parties. The Dems won’t go back to being the party of working people because they wouldn’t know how to do that even if they wanted to. What happens when the Trump Presidency turns out to be a disaster?