DK VERY IMPORTANT PASSAGE

"The reasons, in my opinion, go back about half a century, and particularly to two bad decisions by the last New Dealer to occupy the White House, Lyndon Johnson.  The first, most catastrophic decision was the Vietnam War, which alienated the Boomer left from Johnson and to some extent from politics, and threw away the enormous Congressional majorities he had secured in 1964.  But the second was the redefinition of poverty as a minority problem, not a national one.  Ironically, the first target of Johnson's War on Poverty in 1964 was Appalachia, then as now the poorest region of the nation, and at that time, a Democratic stronghold.  But the problems of Appalachia have only gotten worse over the last 50 years, and it has become a Republican stronghold, now firmly in the pocket of Donald Trump.  The white southern working class has also abandoned the Democratic Party, convinced that Democrats care only about blacks, immigrants, women, and homosexuals.  Both Trump and Sanders voters know that their lot has been getting worse, and that neither major party seems to care very much about it.  Sadly, they are right.

"Since the mid-1970s, when the first prominent "new Democrat," Gary Hart, specifically repudiated the New Deal's approach to problems, the Democratic Party has increasingly been dominated by a wealthy establishment that focuses largely on social issues--women's rights, gay rights, and affirmative action--and cooperates with most of the most powerful economic interests in our society, led by Wall Street.  Going with the flow, Bill Clinton in the 1990s appointed Treasury secretaries from the big investment banks, repealed Glass-Steagall, and allowed the orgy of private borrowing that eventually led to the 2008 crash to begin.  Going with the flow,. as Thomas Piketty's book showed two years ago, means promoting increasing economic inequality. Such inequality is the natural result of the operation of the capitalist system and only government intervention can stop it.  Clinton went with the flow in other ways as well.  His crime bill was a key step towards mass incarceration, and his welfare bill left many Americans defenseless.  Urban poverty, as a new book about evictions has shown, has become much worse.   Meanwhile, the leadership of the black community, it seems, had focused on creating a black establishment, especially in politics.  The gerrymandered black districts that were created in most major urban areas became rotten boroughs, firmly under the control of perpetual incumbents, who remained a power within the Democratic Party but do not seem to have been able to do much for their constituents.  Both Bill and Hillary Clinton, obviously, have invested a great deal of time cultivating that establishment, and it has paid off.  Although younger black people have turned against their parents had flocked to Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton has nonetheless built up a large delegate lead with the help of black votes, especially in the South.  But most of those votes will be useless in the general election, where Democrats have no chance in the Deep South."