There is a Twitter discussion between Josh Marshall and Tom Nichols, which is interesting, mostly for Nichols being eyerollingly obtuse.

“…the capture of the GOP as nothing more than a vessel of ignorant populism…” did not just happen. This is the intended result of Fox and friends, the Tea Party, Rush Limbaugh, Hannity, Breitbart, the whacko Washington Times, etc. aided and abetted by Evangelicals.

— Edward C Weber (@bigskyrad) March 3, 2018

It was also the handiwork of Democrats who decided that working class whites were no longer as important to them as identity politics. You left those folks out there for the taking in 1980, and again in 2016. https://t.co/C40KIn7TEV

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) March 3, 2018

Is it not more accurate to say that African-Americans, Hispanics, city dwellers became over time more critical parts of the Democratic coalition, while non-college educated whites, often outside big cities, less so? There’s people on other side of the equation. Not just a phrase. https://t.co/BzFC9hLz8s

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 3, 2018

Yes. And how, and why, did Democrats let that happen? Democrats are the people who once understood class politics better than anyone else. How did they become beholden to race as the supreme category for sorting voters? Because it’s a big part of How We Got Trump. https://t.co/ppwBc0oVz7

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) March 3, 2018

Too complicated for twitter. But I would race *is* a primary sorter of American life, politics. Always has been. Shifting demographics makes it inevitable one party will be multiracial, one predominantly white. I saw this in a purely descriptive sense. https://t.co/cATDMp4R6h

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 3, 2018

Nichols buys into the whole “Democrats abandoned the White Working Class, in favor of Identity Politics”, while not grasping that Reagan, his idol, was up to his eyeballs in Identity Politics - not just the overtly racist stuff like “Welfare Queens driving Cadillacs”, and “Young bucks buying T-bones with Food Stamps”, but even the ‘Small Government’ stuff, which racist white folks interpret as ‘Black and Brown folks don’t get my tax money!”

So, Reagan’s appeal was overtly racist, and of course attracted the more racist or ‘racism-blind’ of the WWC. But at the same time, it REPELLED black and brown folks who saw it for what it was.

Johnson pushed away whites simply by trying to address inequality, and attracted minorities. Then Nixon went “Law & Order” and push/pulled more. Since then the increasing racism in the Republican party has attracted many or most whites while increasingly repelling minorities.

But Josh brings up a good point, which is that it’s not that blacks and other minorities VOTE for the Democratic Party. They ARE the Democratic Party. Nichols still sees the parties as somehow separate from their electorates, so that he sees the GOP as having been hijacked by Trump, and the Democratic Party ‘beholden to’ minorities.