Kamala Harris Nod Tells Blue-Collar Workers Democrats Are Done With Them

In the presidential election of 2016, voters in each of the major parties were dissatisfied with their faction’s presidential nominee in such large numbers that we witnessed a massive shift in the two-party system. The nomination of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris means the 2020 election will further entrench those changes. Indeed, Biden’s nomination is less consequential: in his dotage, he is merely a screen onto which every faction of the Democratic Party may project its vision.

In choosing Harris as his running mate, however, Biden signals that the ascendance of Wall Street Democrats over working-class factions is nearly complete. A candidate beloved of Hollywood and Big Business, Harris puts a rainbow flag over a government boot and calls it progress. Her nomination as president-in-waiting means the future of the Democratic Party will be hashed out in corporate boardrooms, not church basements and union halls.
Shifting Coalitions

The Republican Party began with a good claim on the workingman’s loyalties. Fighting for free labor and high tariffs meant that the GOP of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries stood for American jobs. The Great Depression changed that perception. America’s version of that tragic era began with a Republican in the White House and meant that a Democrat, Franklin D. Roosevelt, could rhetorically unite his party as the new savior of working Americans.