Everything feels different this time. In November 2016, there were protests; today, mostly silence. In November 2016, there was a lot of talk about resistance; today, people are talking about stepping away from politics. In November 2016, people clamored for news; today, folks are logging off. In November 2016, there was shock. It has been replaced by numbness. But best to take the words of Joni Mitchell to heart, that “something’s lost but something’s gained, by living every day.”

The warning signs were hiding in plain sight, even at the Democrats’ ecstatic four-day August convention in Chicago that felt more like a warehouse rave than a political confab—a vibe-shift that sent delegates back home convinced that their nominee Kamala Harris was about to vanquish Donald Trump from American political life for good.

But in an election year in which there was fury from the middle class over how much it costs to get by in today’s America, some observers—especially in the party’s left flank—were appalled at the barely hidden embrace of big money. Across the Windy City, in rented venues like the House of Blues, lobbyists for industries like crypto or PACs funded by firms like Cigna or AT&T threw posh late-night private parties for Democratic insiders after the TV lights were turned off.

The current Democratic brand is toxic—especially with working-class voters who have no idea what the party stands for. It’s past time to cast out the money-changers and stop pandering to millionaires and billionaires who may be pro-abortion rights or support the LBGTQ community, but who mainly just want to keep America’s unequal economic status quo.

But one pivotal moment inside the United Center even horrified the seen-it-all investigative journalist and former Sen. Bernie Sanders speechwriter David Sirota, who noted that a line from Illinois governor and Hilton hotel heir J.B. Pritzker—“Take it from an actual billionaire, Trump is rich in only one thing, stupidity”—caused “raucous applause from an audience overjoyed to have found its newest billionaire idol.”

Sirota and others who heard it knew instinctively that this was not a winning message for the party that once dominated American politics in the mid-20th century by turning out the working class, and Tuesday’s results proved them right. In the flaming wreckage of an election in which Trump won a return ticket to the White House by winning the popular vote for the first time in three tries, while his fellow Republicans were capturing control of Congress, both pundits and Democratic insiders have spent the last week fighting over who to blame.

For these wounded elites, prime suspects include everything from President Joe Biden’s insistence on running and staying in the race until July, to Harris’ failure to reach young men by not going on testosterone-laden shows like Joe Rogan’s podcast, to the party’s collective inability to feel consumers’ pain over the post-COVID spike in prices. But you don’t need to be a rocket scientist or even a political scientist to argue that the biggest blunder was not attacking the billionaire class because Harris was too busy begging for their campaign checks.

If there is one thing that gets working-class Americans across the familiar fault lines of political ideology or race or ethnicity to agree, it’s that the super rich have too much wealth and power and don’t pay their fair share. In March, a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll of voters in the seven key swing states found some 69% of voters—including 58% of Republicans and 66% of independents—supported higher taxes on billionaires. That populist fervor is hardly surprising in a nation where the top 10% controls 60% of all wealth, while the bottom half struggles with just 6%.

But while the Harris campaign did pay lip service to raising taxes on the super wealthy, it didn’t give voters the red meat of a........

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