I have been a Democrat my entire life...

[Spider Jerusalem]

164. I think it's to some extent self-deluding...

to presume the Democratic Party ever actually stood for economic equality. There was a point, in the FDR-to-LBJ era, when there was some recognition in parts of the Democratic Party that some measure of redistribution of wealth in the name of economic fairness was a good thing; that there was some role for the government in addressing poverty, lack of rural development, and urban blight; but this was never a national thing even within the Democratic Party as a whole (Southern Democrats remained largely conservative and opposed to both the New Deal and LBJ's Great Society; it was with the help of relatively liberal Northeastern Republicans that those things passed in the first place).

And as noted above, the "New Democrats" of the DLC and their courting of business donors, adoption of neoliberal economics, and acceptance of the Reaganite status quo have more or less completed the shift of the Democratic Party to the economic centre-right. It can be argued that the Democratic Party had to change and adapt to the new political reality in the post-Reagan era in order to remain viable, but there's the question of whether it isn't ultimately a Faustian bargain as it will inevitably end with alienating and disaffecting many of the party's former core supporters (who are basically left with nowhere to turn), not unlike the British Labour Party post-Blair.