Usually when one side in politics loses big, its defenders will deny that the people rejected their ideas.
Republicans said so in 2008 and partisans of the Democrats began saying so even before the election of 2010.
Here is Michael Lind, writing in Salon (November 2). He notes that the Democrats have joined other center-left parties in Germany, Italy, France, and Britain in electoral banishment.
The reason, he argues, is that all these parties “abandoned their traditional working-class constituents in order to woo bankers and professionals.” Instead of pushing for more social benefits and a higher minimum wage, they have embraced the market and refocused their progressivism on “non-economic causes like renewable energy, mass transit, the new urbanism, gay marriage, identity politics and promotion of amnesty for illegal immigrants.”
The Democrats have hardly given up on social benefits — see Obama’s health-insurance law — but they did go for renewable energy, gay marriage, etc., as Lind says. They do have pals on Wall Street — and more of them perhaps than they traditionally had (though even FDR had his Bernard Baruch). But imagine if the Democrats had defined themselves exclusively as a pro-union, lunch-bucket Hubert-Humphrey-and-Walter-Mondale party. They would have been even deeper in the woods than they already are.
The gist of Lind’s argument is that the Democrats are losing because they don’t have the courage and wisdom to agree with Michael Lind. That argument allows Lind to make the further claim that the people do agree with him. And some do. I know them — and they are feeling politically very lonely.
