Where did all the Reagan Democrats go?



(retrocampaigns.com photo)

Whiledisgruntled liberal Democrats and libertarian Republicans have converged on several issues of late – drones, NSA surveillance, intervention in Syria – Pat Buchanan has resurrected an issue that brought the right and left together back in the days of Ross Perot: NAFTA and U.S. trade policies.
In a piece written for Human Events and targeted at fellow Republicans, Buchanan provides this headline: “Why the Reagan Democrats departed.”

Where did the Reagan Democrats go? Many certainly died off. Some became solid Republicans. Others eventually emerged as disgruntled non-voters who have little faith in anything or anyone related to Washington or politics.

Here’s Buchanan sounding like he’s ready to join Occupy Wall Street:

“For a generation, when forced to choose between Middle America and corporate America, on NAFTA, most-favored nation for China, and free trade, the GOP establishment opted to go with the Fortune 500. “… Consider who has benefited most from Republican-backed globalization. Was it not corporate executives and transnational companies liberated from the land of their birth and the call of patriotism?
“Under the rules of globalization, U.S. corporations could, without penalty or opprobrium, shut their factories, lay off their U.S. workers, erect new plants in Asia, produce their goods there, and bring them back free of any tariff to sell to consumers and kill the U.S. companies that elected to stay loyal to the U.S.A. They then used the profits from abandoning America to raise executive salaries to seven and eight figures.”

Buchanan then picks up the mantle of the Reagan Democrats, pointing out reasons why they would have abandoned the GOP.

“Real wages of U.S. workers have not risen for 40 years. One in three U.S. manufacturing jobs vanished between 2000 and 2010. The nation that used to produce 96 percent of all it consumed depends now on foreigners for the clothes and shoes we wear, the TV sets we watch, the radios we listen to, the computers we use, the cars we drive.”