This: Dems went from being party of the people to

[Hortensis]

19. Agree. I'm a Democrat and this opportunistic polemic

bears no resemblance to me or any of the many Democrats I've known over the years. No doubt if you search some upscale urban restaurants you'll find some people it does, but they do not define the party.

Rich's imagining of a party in which many millions of working people have no interest in the problems of working people is facile and stupid.

It also bizarrely ignores the reality that America would have elected a Democratic president and almost certainly Senate majority if it were not for massive corruption of the election by right-wing voter suppression, months of filling the media with political lies pushed by money-corrupted media (including the AP and NY Times, as well as cable news), outright treason by the Director of the FBI, and massive interference by the Kremlin, very much including a blizzard of political lies on social media by right-wing and Russian operatives in the last few weeks.

But his views do show clearly the sort of people he searched out to validate his notions.

Trump was elected by a right wing whose brains were pickled by manipulators taking advantage of their tremendous weaknesses--above all the lack of an intrinsic intellectual grounding for a conservative ideology. Their overriding current "ideology" isn't anti-free trade, as Thomas would have it--it's as usual the mindless anti-Democrat passion they've been trained in ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union left them needing another enemy to fear and hate.

The scary reality is that today's conservatives would be dutifully for free trade tomorrow if Democrats opposed it and their leaders told them to support it. Fake news just allowed them to justify to themselves voting for their party's candidate even though it required abandoning intellect, morality, basic standards of decency, and even the precepts of their religions.