The new Democratic coalition has more wealthy suburbanites in it then before, but you'd have know nothing about American politics to believe that poorer and working class people aren't essential pillars of the party. For one, do you really think the party's black voters, who are chronically cursed with economic and social malaises, will forgive a Thatcherite agenda from the party? What about the party's huge base of young people living in rather precarious economic situations? And so on.
People have a very short term memory. They seem to be under the impression that the old Blue Dogs were uniformly Non Partisan League style vulgar populists who said politically incorrect things but fought against the elites, when in fact they were largely corporate shills, owned by Wall Street and special interests. The "new Dems" - the likes of, say, Spanberger or Slotkin - are not ideal, but if anything they are to the left of where centrist Dems used to be. In fact, the most explicitly right wing Democrat on economic grounds is Jeff Van Drew, who is not remotely from the school of Dems that people like hofoid are most scared of.
Great post, a significant part of the problem I have with the most ardent of left-wing activists is that their activism is more centered around anti-establishmentism than it is about progressivism. The narrative about how the Democrats have all of the sudden been captured by special interests and become Repubilcan-lite corporate neoliberals is one that requires a hefty dose of historical revisionism and selection bias, it's a classic narrative of past purity being tainted. The cultural divide that's been on full display recently between college-educated white metroplitans and non-college educated white non-metropolitans plays into this as well. You're considered to automatically possess more "authenticity" by the grassroots if you come from a blue-collar background than if you're from an upper-middle class cosmopolitan milieu.
