Abstract: Disappearance of class interest as an organizing category in favor of “race” and gender, hence focus on “white male supremacy” and demonizing Republicans; forgetting that Progressives were class conscious Republicans/Mugwumps co-opting radical movements, leaving themselves in charge. The outcome: Big Government programs designed to take the edge off of capitalism (i.e., the money power).
The most stunning development in the recent Democratic Party soul-searching in the wake of the unforeseen victory of political newcomer Trump over the progressive stalwart Hillary Clinton has been the disappearance of class interest as a salient consideration in the formulation of conflict. Thus we see, more and more, the emergence of “white supremacy” in the argot of (pseudo-liberals). One would never guess that the political party of “the working man” was all at sea over how to proceed. A predilection for aristocratic control (corporatist liberalism) will do that to you. https://clarespark.com/2009/09/19/populism-progressivism-and-corporatist-liberalism-in-the-nation-1919/. (“Class,” like gender, is an objective category that should not be discarded, no matter how pro-free market, we might be. See https://clarespark.com/2011/03/26/race-class-and-gender/.)
Readers of this blog will remember that the Popular Front politics of the New Deal are to blame for the literal erasure of class interest even though New Leftists focused on the Gilded Age as the heyday of labor and farmer unrest. https://clarespark.com/2015/04/17/the-ongoing-appeal-of-the-leftist-dominated-popular-front-against-fascism/.
But the civil rights movement changed all that, for the martyrs du jour were not “racist” white male workers, but rather Southern blacks (and later women) who had been in motion for decades (as it turns out). It was only the Old Left who made the connection between race and class, emphasizing imperialism in the West. And feminists (before they were co-opted by “liberals”) had also focused on “internal colonialism.”
It became unfashionable to recall that progressivism came out of the “Mugwump” strain in the Republican Party, let alone such prior famous figures as pro-black Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mugwumps.
If we believe in “progress” we had better sign up for the party that implicitly co-opted“ the common man,” with collectivist Big Government programs even as FDR criticized “economic royalists” to his Right.
The “Left,” like the moderate Republicans, is populated by elitist Big Government social democrats these days.
The Clare Spark Blog 
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