What's wrong with rank and file Republicans?

Democrats look at the shenanigans of Republicans at bondage strip clubs and ask
"Why can't decent working people see through these charlatans?"

Answer: the Democratic Party unintentionally alienated them, even though it's the natural home for working stiffs, and the Republican Party sucked them in by morphing the GOP from a political party into a tribe.

And in a tribe you defend your own and attack your tribe's enemies. Right=my tribe; Wrong=your tribe. This is a fundamental human survival trait--far deeper than simple racism.

We Democrats have to understand how we pushed them out. When the previous generation (that of Lyndon Johnson etc.) went for racial justice and equity, they had a chance to create a level playing field. Instead they tilted it from whites towards everyone else. That was affirmative action.

I'm neither affirming nor attacking affirmative action. I understand why the Democratic Party did it--it was a reaction to the total intransigence of the White South to any form of racial equality at all.

And it's also true that acting to impose any form of racial equality at all would have lost us the Southern Democrats.

But it was affirmative action and its ramifications that lost the rest. Things that seem like simple justice to today's Democrats deeply offend the average White working stiff:

* Amnesty for illegal aliens
* Ballots in dozens of languages
* Affirmative action for the sons of Black doctors, but not for the sons of White sharecroppers
* Black and Chicano and Womens studies departments at most universities
* "Press One for directions in Spanish"
* Abortion
* Gun control
* Eliminating Church stuff from public life--from Nativity scenes on courthouse lawns to school prayer

You get the idea.

Mostly Democrats dismiss people's complaints about these things as knuckle-dragging racism/nativism/fundamentalism.

It's tempting to do so. But don't you realize that this is EXACTLY what Karl Rove wants you to do?

Divide and conquer. It's how the bosses destroyed the populist movement of the late 19th century. Distract working stiffs from their real oppressor with emotion-inducing stuff (like Reagan's welfare queens) so they'll hate each other and forget the foe. And then get the foe to appear in public as if he actually cares about his working stiffs. Voila.

Imagine if the Democratic Party had adopted a race-blind rule instead of racial preference. Who's to say racial equity might not be farther along now if it had?

And so now, even today, we have cases like the white firefighters in Rhode Island who followed the rules, and then when the rules gave them the promotion instead of the black firefighters--they changed the rules.

And you wonder why the Republicans were able to pick them up? White working stiffs have seen their earning power stagnate or even go down radically. Laid off workers almost never regain their former earning power. And even those who haven't been laid off haven't seen their earning power rise for 40 years, more or less. Their lives have been hollowed out. Their wives had to go to work. Their dream of home ownership may have vanished.

Of course as a Democrat I know why--the richest .5% of the country took those people's money and put it in their own pockets. But they make sure to stay out of these guys' sight.

Unfortunately the GOP and its patrons have figured out how to do their dirty deeds in the dark. So what the white guy with the stagnant income and uncertain prospects sees is Republicans who talk like him and dress and cut their hair like him (yes, there's race, but it's more the haircut and the conservative look).

There's also the fact that you can't explain default credit swaps to a guy with a high school education. But you can point at people who don't look and talk like you and say "They're taking your job!"

Nor does it help that often that foreign guy is taking your job. Not mine. I'm an educated professional. But if you're a roofer--yeah, the foreign guy is taking your job. It's just the tone-deafness of so many ideological Democrats that makes them not get that.

Obama does get that, and he's making so many concessions to Republicans less to get Congressional votes than to connect with all those independent voters--mainly white guys--who have the sense that both parties have shafted them.

Because it's possible to pursue Democratic Party ideals without making regular mainstream (mostly white) Americans feel like you disdain and dismiss them.

So we all need to emulate Obama and try to get these angry white guys to simmer down and talk sense. They may be wrong about Obamacare and a lot else, but their sense of grievance--well, they came by that honestly. They should have a sense of grievance.

So before you give in to Tea Party provocations, ask yourself "What does Karl Rove want me to do?" and do the other thing instead. OK?