One Country, Two Nations— Rod Dreher

The bottom line is that we have become a nation of haves and have-nots. Of people who are falling behind economically, and people who are moving ahead. The Democratic Party represents the economic winners; the Republican Party, the economic losers. This graphic shows how much things have changed in a decade. The Democratic districts got richer, and the Republican districts got poorer….

The final slide says:

Why does this matter?

“When folks have less in common with one another, it’s hard to expect that they’re going to see the problem the same way,” said Roger Johnson, president of the National Farmers Union, “let alone recognize that a problem exists.”

Different narratives as stories we tell ourselves in different contexts (subcultures), which are also influenced by the media to which we are exposed — think Fox versus MSNBC, for example.

Anyway, the WSJ piece makes it clear that economically, the Democrats are the party of the rich and the rising middle classes, and the Republicans are the party of the working class and the downwardly mobile middle classes. Of course race plays into this too, though that isn’t measured by the WSJ piece. We can say, then, that the Democrats represent the economic winners and racial minorities, while the Republicans represent the economic losers and whites.

Prediction:

Anyway, the WSJ charts show why the Republican Party is going to become more populist — there will be no restoration of the pre-Trump GOP; watch Sen. Josh Hawley rise — and the Democratic Party is going to become more bourgeois. Of course both parties will have their own outliers, but that’s going to be the mainstream of the parties.

Reversal of the "good old days" when the GOP was the party of business and the Democratic Party was the party of labor, with the "people of color" being Lincoln Republicans. How the worm turns.

The American Conservative
One Country, Two Nations
Rod Dreher