THAT DOCKED TAIL IS ATTEMPTING TO WAG A VERY HEAVY DOG.

So did I characterize, last week, a Pew disaggregation of political affiliations in these United States.  "But in the same way that there is something absurd about a continent governed by an island, there is something absurd about a polity being governed by a vanguard."

Let's add to that absurdity.  The vanguard is turning off people who might be disposed to agree with them on some things.

What [political consultant Danny] Barefoot found is that while the women agreed with Democrats on policy, they just didn’t connect with them. When asked which party had better policy proposals, the group members overwhelmingly said Democrats. But when asked which party had cultural values closer to theirs, they cited Republicans.

In Virginia, the Democrats gave suburban voters all sorts of reasons to not want a Donk anywhere near a school.  Note how the class divide manifests itself.

The anger they felt at Democrats for the commonwealth’s Covid-19 school closure policy became further evidence of a cultural gap between these working people and Democratic elites, who broadly supported prolonged school closures while enjoying the opportunity to work remotely. Those with means decamped.

Yes, Republican operatives and friendly talkers helped, and yet, the views of the voters aligned more with the criticisms those operatives and talkers offered.

It was the purest expression of the way Republicans have driven the fight over schools and then capitalized on it. The fear of public schools indoctrinating our children has been a GOP theme for its base voters for decades, but in the wake of Trump’s rise, the party watched in horror as suburban voters recoiled from Republicans into the arms of Democrats. Casting about for an issue that could win some of them back — recall that this is a game of margins, not absolutes — the party landed on schools. Around the country, the conservative media apparatus, unrivaled by Democrats, gave air cover to the schooling issue — handing local activists language to use, a story to tell, and the resources and platform to tell it.

You have to keep reading the article, but eventually you see how docked the tail is, and how big the dog.

Properly understanding how different voting blocs understand the terms of the debate, however, unlocks the contradiction: The culture war is not a proxy for race, it’s a proxy for class. The Democratic problem with working-class voters goes far beyond white people.

Now, for the portion of the Republican base heavily predisposed to racial prejudice, the culture war and issues like critical race theory easily work as dog whistles calling them to the polls. But for many voters, and not just white ones, critical race theory is in a basket with other cultural microaggressions directed at working people by the elites they see as running the Democratic Party. Take, for instance, one of the women in Barefoot’s focus groups. When asked if Democrats share their cultural values, she said, “They fight for the right things and I usually vote for them but they believe some crazy things. Sometimes I feel like if I don’t know the right words for things they think I am a bigot.”

It's not the education mom who needs to be re-educated, it's the faculty lounge rhetoric that needs to go.  Otherwise, the Democrats risk alienating more of what used to be their coalition.

Cultural traditionalists, according to [political strategist Andrew] Levison, also think of government as often wasteful and inefficient and of politicians as corrupt and bought off — but they don’t think government is inherently evil and can be convinced that it can do good things. Meanwhile, they think Democrats are a party that “primarily represents social groups like educated liberals and racial or ethnic minorities while having little interest, understanding, or concern for ordinary white working people like themselves.”

Levison’s distinction between these cultural traditionalists and what he calls the extremists, except for that last part, can plausibly apply to many, many Black and Latino working-class people as well. And even that last part — that Democrats don’t have much interest or concern for ordinary white working people, specifically — is not really a value judgment, it’s a widespread interpretation of Democratic messaging that is not uniquely held by white voters.

What the opposing parties, whether Republican or of some other stripe, are not yet doing is improving their pitch to those voters.  "A major new survey from Jacobin, YouGov, and the Center for Working-Class Politics points to another way that cultural chasm can be bridged: with candidates who focus on [traditional Democratic] economic issues but don’t talk like juniors at Oberlin."