I suspect Bernie Sanders would agree with my conclusion that the Democratic Party needs to be more sensitive to red culture. However, we would reach that conclusion from different lines of reasoning, and in this case, the journey is the destination.
Sanders’ program isn’t really socialist, but he sees the world in old-fashioned Marxist terms, and to him, what we call “identity politics” is really false consciousness driven by cunning and unscrupulous capitalists. To me, American politics is primarily “identity politics,” and anyone who ignores that point is a fool. Sanders himself implicitly conceded my point by changing his approach during the primaries because to do otherwise was to commit electoral suicide.
The world does not run on economic class alone. People are more complex than that, and the wounds of the past can take a long, long time to heal. And so, instead of blowing off cultural issues, I think the Democratic Party simply needs to embrace a form of diversity that clearly includes the values of white working people, as well as minorities. There is plenty of room for white in the national mosaic; it just isn’t the whole story, or even the default.