Should-Read: The Republican Party somehow, over the last sixty years, lost its status as the party of people for whom the market economy and creative destruction were working and were going to work. It became the party of those who thought they had something to lose—plutocrats and their feckless heirs who fear being creatively destroyed, or fear they may be asked if they want jalapeños on their pizza, or fear they will be outcompeted in the market by hungry people from Chiapas who have already traveled hundreds and hundreds of miles to try to build a better life: Michael Tomasky: Republicans Have Lost Touch With Blue America: "Blue America... is the America that produces the vast majority of our innovators and thinkers and scientists and creative people...
...This is the America that creates most of the nation’s wealth. Hillary Clinton... won only 15 percent of the country’s 3,100-odd counties, but the 472 counties she did win account for 64 percent of GDP. This is the America that invents and designs and engineers; the America where there already really is so much winning.
Republicans don’t know this America. They don’t represent it....
Republicans know the Americans they represent: rural people and (especially) uber-rich donors. They give rhetoric about religion and values to the rural folk and trillions of dollars to the rich. They don’t know about the awesome dynamism of blue America. Indeed they seek to punish it. To wit, those obscene provisions in the House version of the tax bill that would tax people out of pursuing graduate degrees, which constitute nothing but a petty jab at a class of people whose values they don’t like. So it’s actually the Republicans who are out of touch—with the most productive people and elements in this society. Of course, they’ll never pay any political price for it, because we’re a bunch of elitists, you see, not like those “real” Americans. Well, take us out of the economy and see how real we are. These blue Americans make the economy work, and we want a government that will make it work for everyone—urban poor and rural people alike—and not the ones at the top the Republicans keep helping over and over...
