The Democratic Party has had 12 months to digest the weirdest presidential election in history, and it has dutifully continued to vilify Ralph Nader, ignore Al Gore, and fight any meaningful campaign finance reform. But none of these obsessions will help Democrats dethrone Dubya in 2004 unless they come to grips with the working class.

You remember the working class: hard hats, pickup trucks, country music, domestic beer, tractor pulls. Folks who don’t know Goethe from Gatsby. In the Bush-Gore face-off last year, a clear majority of white working-class Americans gave their vote to Bush—despite Gore’s populist rhetoric and his strong union backing. Why? That question should be haunting Democratic Party leaders.

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It’s not a new question. As Andrew Levison writes in The Nation (May 14, 2001), Democrats have been trying to woo blue-collar workers back into the fold ever since Alabama’s Governor George Wallace mobilized white working-class 'hard hats' in 1968 with his third-party run at the White House. But their attempts have been largely trumped by Republican strategists like Kevin Phillips, Lee Atwater, and, more recently, Karl Rove, who understood better than their Democratic counterparts how to tap into working-class values—particularly distrust of government and disdain for technocrats.

Part of the problem, Levison argues, is that many still view the white working class in terms of stereotypes left over from the ’60s—'the popular image of all workers as deeply reactionary ‘Archie Bunkers,’ ' as he puts it. In fact, workers today are neither as intolerant nor as angry as their classic profile would indicate. Still, there are certain perspectives that bind workers together and inform their political philosophy: work, community, and country.