Again, this advice has nothing to do with the rights or wrongs of individual peacock issues and more with a general sense that the elites are fiddling while Rome burns. For the first time since records have been kept, U.S. life expectancy went down during the Obama years, led by a disturbing rise in suicides and opiate addiction among discouraged unemployed in flyover country. A Democratic Party that fails to address that while it screws around with bathroom-law boycotts is willfully consigning itself to irrelevance.

Many of Trump’s “pro-working-class” policies are objectively terrible; a new wave of trade protectionism is, for example, bound to have dire long-term consequences. But that doesn’t matter, in a political competitive sense, until you Democrats have something to answer him with.

Right now, you have nothing. You have less than nothing, because your instinctive solution repels the Trump plurality. They don’t want welfare, they want jobs and dignity and a modicum of respect. (And, just as a reminder, not to be dismissed as retrograde racists and sexists.)