I am going to start with a quote from Ronald Reagan early in his political career. He said, "I didn't leave the Democrat Party; the Democrat Party left me." In many respects I feel the same way.
In Part One I described the political world at the local level that I grew up in during the '50s and '60s. Back then, the Democrats were the party of the Working Man--the industrial unions were their power base.
The Democrats were also strongly anti-Communist in those days. The Cold War had its beginning under Harry Truman, who became President when Franklin Roosevelt died in office. Even during World War II, though the US was allied with the USSR against Nazi Germany, Communism was beginning to be recognized as a threat; that was why Truman replaced Henry Wallace as Vice President--Wallace was considered too soft on Communism. After the war Communists and their sympathizers were purged from government, from the entertainment industry, and from the labor unions. The fall of China to the Communists and the Korean War that followed also fed this trend.
But the Vietnam War began the change. While there had been some aid to South Vietnam under Republican President Eisenhower, it increased under Democrat Kennedy. And it was massively increased under Lyndon Johnson after Kennedy's assassination. Yet it was during Johnson's term that the Democrat Party embraced the anti-war movement. Seeing he was losing the support of his own party, Johnson gave up the idea of running for a second term of his own. He had served the last year of Kennedy's term, and beaten Republican Barry Goldwater in a landslide in 1964. Under the 22nd Amendment, passed during Truman's term, he was allowed to run one more time because he had served less than two years of Kennedy's term. But Johnson stepped aside, and his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, got the nomination at the party convention in Chicago. But the convention was marred with mass demonstrations in the streets by anti-war activists.
Humphrey lost to Republican Richard Nixon, thanks in part to a third-party challenge by segregationist George Wallace that siphoned off Democrat votes in the Southern states. I was not able to vote in that election; the voting age in the US was lowered from 21 to 18 by the 26th Amendment in 1971. Four years later, Nixon defeated George McGovern in a landslide, only to be forced out of office by the Watergate scandal.
The American people watched as the Democrats, who had been strongly anti-Communist since WWII, were taken over by the anti-war activists and Communist sympathizers. The Democrat-controlled Congress reduced financial aid to South Vietnam, and North Vietnam conquered the country in 1975--with many Dem pols (including a young Joe Biden) opposing letting Vietnamese refugees into the country. The turnabout was noticed by many people. The failures of the later Carter presidency added to the shift.
Despite being brought up as a Democrat, by 1980 I voted for Reagan. While at times over the years I voted for individual Democrats, as the party shifted farther and farther to the left, I stayed put. They left me, and it cost them my votes.
A lot has changed in the American scene in the last fifty years. And one of the biggest changes is the reversal in the bases of the two parties. These days, the top execs at the Fortune 500 companies are not Republicans; they vote Democrat. Many of them are even supporting Democrat-inspired political correctness within their corporations. The small business people (as in your town's local Chamber of Commerce) may still support the Republicans, but the national Chamber of Commerce is perfectly happy with the Democrats now.
The industrial labor unions still exist, but their membership is a shadow of what it once was; the real power of the labor movement today lies in the government employee unions. And in the old industrial unions, the leadership is out of touch with their members. In 2020, the Pittsburgh local of the Pipefitters' Union endorsed Trump; the national union endorsed Biden--and then was shocked when one of his first actions was to cancel the Keystone pipeline, eliminating thousands of union jobs. Do you really think the rank-and-file Pipefitters are happy with the union brass? The union brass may have supported Biden, but many of the local grassroots union members voted for Trump.
These days the Democrat base is primarily the elites: the government employees; the generals and admirals of the military; the Ivy League administrations and faculty, along with their imitators at the lesser universities; the college-educated well-to-do suburbanites, and others near the upper crust. Their coalition also includes most (not all) of the LGBT crowd. But they are losing ground with two grass-roots groups they have long taken for granted--blacks and Hispanics. Historically, many blacks have been liberal on economics but conservative on social issues, and that is starting to affect their political choices. Hispanics are not a monolithic group--there are differences among them because of the various countries they came from--but many of them are opposed to the socialist ideas that the Democrats are increasingly embracing.
The Democrat shift is obviously reflected in Barack Obama's 60th birthday party not long ago: a crowd of upper-crust celebrities, dancing and reveling without masks during what is supposed to be a serious health crisis, waited upon by masked servants, drawn from the lower class.
The real divide today is between what Angelo Codevilla in 2010 called the "Ruling Class"--the government officials (Democrats and many of the Republicans), the academic elites, the business moguls (both traditional and Silicon Valley), the national media brass (both news and entertainment) and their sycophants and wannabes--and the mass of the American people. Not all of the people have figured it out. But the changes are getting more obvious, and the number of people catching on seems to be rising.
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