Democracy reform: Do you have a plan for that?

In the fall of 2003, Howard Dean said he wanted to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in the back windows of their pickup trucks. It was clumsy but not dishonest. He meant that his party had written off a whole category of American voter and wanted to change that. He was attacked at once, mostly by his own side, and walked it back within forty-eight hours. The lesson his party drew was not that the outreach had been badly phrased; It was that the outreach itself was impermissible, that to pursue the rural white working class voter was to be complicit with everything he was presumed to represent. Dean was the last major Democrat to try, and the consequences have accumulated in the shape of the electoral map.

Edgar Allan Poe understood something the party still does not. "The Cask of Amontillado" opens with a line that ought to hang in every campaign office: the thousand injuries of Fortunato the narrator had borne as best he could, but when Fortunato ventured upon insult, he vowed revenge. Injuries can be borne as long as the injured man believes his tormentors still regard his suffering as real. The insult is different. It reframes the injuries as deserved, telling the sufferer he is the kind of person who deserves to suffer. Poe's narrator does not recalculate his interests; he takes his revenge at great cost to himself. That is not irrational but human, and it is the most precise framework we have for what has happened to rural white working-class voters over the last twenty years.