Is it your contention we havent...because if so I wonder if you have ignored Democratic Politics the last 20 years. Sorry but they made their choice it is not our job to placate them and hope that changes anything. We did that, and history shows it goes nowhere.
Think of the programs put in place to help those people...think about who implemented them. When the mines are no longer safe or economically viable we make sure they have unemployment, health care and offer training for new jobs at no cost. When monopolies destroy their business we fight to protect them. When unionbusting happens or the unions go on strike it is us who walk the lines and fight for their rights to a phucking living wage. It doesn't change anything because their grievance has nothing to do with opportunity and everything to do with the fact that they don't like that their voice doesn't carry the weight that it used to. They would rather go broke than accept the fact that they live by the grace of the people they cannot even pretend not to despise whether it is Dems, Jews, Somalis, Latinos, Blacks, Gays, Women or people too young to know who the phuck Grover Nordquist is. They are never going to like us, because there is an entire infrastructure built to make sure they don't. As long as the Boomers are a thing, this will be the problem. Gen X is very different and Millennials have no interest in that kind of hatred.
Do you not remember early 2017 when all we did was wonder "why did these people turn their backs on us"? When every media outlet and big mouthed Dem was trying to understand asking the very questions you just posed? Hell we did it here! We all had those discussions until the Midterms in 2018 and what we learned was, we didn't do anything to cause this. The GOP gave license to people who were usually inward about their biases to speak openly about them. That is why every group saw discrimination against them rise...why White People marched in towns saying things that would have gotten them beat just a year earlier. This is not some new phenomenon, just like cops killing Black People it was always happening, now it is just out in the open forcing us to reckon with it.
To subscribe to your theory is to believe that prior to the rise of Hitler Antisemitism in Germany was not all that big of an issue when in reality most people will tell you Antisemitism of the time is what truly allowed for the rise of Hitler...he just gave them a way to couch it in German Nationalism so they could say it loud and proud.
I know you don't want to believe it, I never did either. I wanted to believe if we just did the right things, if we talked with empathy to the "disaffected voter" that they would see the error in their ways and come back home. They didn't in 2020 (we needed an historic Dem GOTV to outflank them...barely) and they won't now or ever again...not as long as we believe that everyone has a right to prosper. Most of my life the Dems have winked and nudged that crap...pretending to care about everyone else while making sure the White...errr...right people got the largest portion of every pie. The second they let a N!&&#r be President that was the end of that crap... then a woman...CYA! Now its both...its over!
