Watch what they watch, hear what they hear Brian Beutler wrote an excellent piece about the Democratic Party and the working class that you should read in its entirety. I think his analysis of the dysfunctional relationship is spot on. But the piece is called “Democrats PLEASE Try To Fix This Problem — If they ignore the media environment in their 2024 post-mortems, it will be the first major error of the second Trump era” and this is why: There may be much for liberals to learn walking in the shoes of working class or rural midwesterners, but few Democratic officials would find the experience shocking. They know, at least on an intellectual level, all the ways working class life can be a slog. The talking points they write don’t misdescribe the struggle. The policies they enact aren’t unrelated to the challenges Americans face: Insulin and hearing-aid costs, insurance premiums, wages, roads, worker leverage, etc. What I think would make a lot of these elites go bug-eyed would be to spend a day shadowing working-class or rural midwesterners purely to understand the kind of information they absorb, intentionally and passively, from their earliest moments to when they shut off their televisions, phones, or computers at night. I believe they’d be disturbed. I believe they’d be so alarmed that they’d convene the most powerful people in the party and declare an emergency. I hope they try an experiment like that. And then I hope they act. Because my experience over the…