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Editors Note: The following piece originally appeared in City Journal. It is reprinted here with permission.

Since early June, when voters in Georgias sixth congressional district rubbed yet more salt in their 2016 election wounds, Democratic pols and sages have been pondering why, as Ohio congressman Tim Ryan put it, our brand is worse than Trump. Thats a low bar, given the presidents nearly subterranean approval ratings, but so far the blue party has mostly been turning to an inside-the-box set of policy and political memes: jobs programs, talk of a mutiny against House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, and better marketing or, in Ryans words, branding of the Democratic message.

Whats missing from this list is the most important and most challenging item of all: solving the liberal deplorable problem. The white working class that hoisted Donald Trump to an unexpected victory may not always admire the man, but they know that he doesnt hate people like me, in the pollsters common formulation. And they have good reason to think that Democrats, particularly coastal and media types, do hate them: Consider Frank Richs snide and oft-cited article, No Sympathy for the Hillbilly. Its possible that white working-class voters would back a party filled with people who see them as racists and misogynists, with bad values and worse taste, because they all want to raise taxes on Goldman Sachs executives, but it seems a risky bet.

So its worth noting that a few prominent liberal writers have been venturing out of the partisan bunker and calling attention to the deplorable issue over the past few months. In late May, for instance, progressive stalwart Michael Tomasky, former editor of Guardian America and now of Democracy, published an article frankly titled Elitism is Liberalisms Biggest Problem in the New Republic. The West Virginia native called the chasm between elite liberals and middle America...liberalisms biggest problem. The issue has nothing to do with policy, Tomasky writes. Its about different sensibilities; bridging the gulf is on us, not them. To most conservatives, Tomaskys depiction of Middle Americans will seem cringingly obvious. The group tends to be churchgoers (Not temple. Church), they dont think and talk politics from morning till night, and, yes, theyre flag-waving patriots. Mother Jones columnist Kevin Drum, an influential though occasionally heterodox liberal, seconded the argument.

A more complex analysis of liberal elitism comes from Joan Williams, a feminist law professor whose best-known previous book is Unbending Gender. In White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America, Williams takes her fellow liberal professionals to the woodshed for their indifference to the hard-knock realities of working-class life and for their blindness to the shortcomings of their own cosmopolitan preferences. Married to the Harvard-educated son of a working-class family, Williams is astute about the wide disparities between liberal and white-working-class notions of the meaning of work, family, community, and country. One of her proposals for solving class cluelessness is a conservative favorite: reviving civics education.

A final recent example of deplorable-dtente comes from Atlantic columnist Peter Beinarts How the Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration. Noting that the unofficial open-borders philosophy of the Democratic party is far more radical than the restrictionist immigration policy it espoused just a few decades ago, the former New Republic editor acknowledges that there is more than nativist bigotry behind white-working-class immigration concerns. He concedes that mass immigration may have worked to the disadvantage of blue-collar America by lowering wages for low-skilled workers and undermining social cohesion. Beinart concludes by dusting off a concept that liberals currently hate: assimilation. Liberals should be celebrating Americas diversity less, and its unity more, he writes.

These writers are engaging in healthy critical self-reflection, but in the course of describing the Democrats class dilemma, the liberal truth-tellers unwittingly show why a solution lies out of reach. They understate Democrats entanglement with the identity-politics Left, a group devoted to a narrative of American iniquity. Identity politics appeals to its core constituents through grievance and resentment, particularly toward white men. Consider some reactions to centrist Democrat John Ossoffs defeat in Georgias sixth district. Maybe instead of trying to convince hateful white people, Dems should convince our base ppl of color, women to turn out, feminist writer and Cosmopolitan political columnist Jill Filipovic tweeted afterward. At some point we have to be willing to say that yes, lots of conservative voters are hateful and willing to embrace bigots. Insightful as she is, even Williams assumes that all criticisms of the immigration status quo can be chalked up to fear of brown people.

No Democrat on the scene today possesses the Lincolnesque political skills to persuade liberal voters to give up their assumptions of white deplorability, endorse assimilation, or back traditional civics education. In the current environment, a Democratic civics curriculum would teach that American institutions are vehicles for the transmission of white supremacy and sexism, hardly a route to social cohesion. As for assimilation, Hispanic and bilingual-education advocacy organizations would threaten a revolt and theyd only be the first to sound the alarm.

Appeasing deplorables may yet prove unnecessary, though. Democrats strategy of awaiting inevitable demographic change in the electorate, combined with the hope that Trump and the Republican Congress will commit major unforced errors, may allow the party to regain control of the country without making any concessions to the large portion of the U.S. population whom they appear to despise.

READ MORE: A Democratic Blind Spot on Culture The Democrats Resistance Temptation Nancy Pelosi, the Face of the Shrinking Democratis Brand

Kay S. Hymowitzis aCity Journalcontributing editor, the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author ofThe New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring a City Back.

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Can Democrats Make Nice with the 'Deplorables'? - National Review

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi discusses Democratic efforts to force Republicans to vote to defend President Trump at a July 14, 2017, news conference with, from left, Democratic Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman, Hank Johnson and Bill Pascrell.(Photo: Herb Jackson, USA TODAY Network)

House Democrats said Friday they are planning to use a series of parliamentary maneuvers this summer to force Republicans to vote to defend President Trump on an array of controversies.

With some openly talking of impeaching the president, Democrats on key committees joined Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to announce they would sponsor"resolutions of inquiry" seekinginformation about any business orcampaign connections to Russia, data about any enrichment his family or business receivefrom the government, and Trump's personal tax returns.

The resolutions would enable a member to force a vote in committee or potentially on the House floor. But it would take a major shift in Republican stances for the effort to produce anything other than a political fodder that could be used by Democrats in next year's midterm elections.

That's because Republicans overwhelmingly haveresponded to revelations about Trump's administration or campaign by voicing confidence in ongoing investigations by the House and Senate intelligence committees and Robert Mueller, the former FBI director serving as a special counsel atthe Justice Department.

At a news conference, Pelosi called Republicans complicit in covering up scandals in the six-month-oldadministrationand indicated she did not expect the resolutions to succeed in uncovering the information said they were seeking.

"We will expose House Republicans' inaction, with their willful, shameful enabling," Pelosi said. "They have become enablers of the violation of our Constitution, that attack on the integrity of our elections, the security of our country. The integrity of our democracy is at stake. House Republicans will have to answer for their actions."

Rep. Bill Pascrell of New Jersey used a resolution of inquiry in Marchwhen he tried to force the Ways and Means Committee to invoke its power under a 1924 law to require the IRS to turn over Trump's tax returns. It was defeated in a party-line vote.

Pascrell said Friday said he would introduce another resolution seeking the same disclosure, and he noted that the Watergate investigation during President Richard Nixon's administration took 26 months.

In an interview, he rejected a suggestion the effort was a political stunt.

"I resent that anybody wouldeven consider it to be a stunt," Pascrell said. He said his original letter on Feb. 1to Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady, R-Texas, suggested there be a bipartisan request for Trump's taxes, in part to ensure that the president did not have a personal stake in changes to the tax code that are under consideration.

"I went out of my way for a very specific reasons which I've outlined to get the support of the chairman, that we do this together," Pascrell said. "I said to him, and I'll say it again, it's going to come out sooner or later, for better or worse. So why aren't we cooperating to do this?"

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House Democrats scheme to force Republicans to vote to defend Trump - USA TODAY

A Democratic lawmaker wants to force the White House to put their spokespeople, such as Sarah Huckabee Sanders, in front of news cameras twice a week.

Maybe this is what J.P. Morgan & Chase CEO Jamie Dimon had in mind when he trashed Washington for doing stupid shit: A Democratic lawmaker has proposed a bill that would force the White House to hold at least two media briefings a week open to live cameras.

Rep Jim Himes, a Democrat from Connecticut, said his Free Press Act is needed to thwart the Trump administrations overtly hostile attitude toward the press since the early days of the presidential campaign.

The White House had held fewer news briefings lately, in some cases disallowing cameras. President Trump has engaged in a running skirmish with mainstream media outlets, repeatedly calling them fake news.

Himes bill, of course, stands a snowballs chance in hell of becoming law. The Republican-controlled Congress is certain to ignore the bill. Nor would the White House sign it into law.

The only way the bill would stand a remote chance is if Democrats seized large majorities in both branches of Congress large enough to override a presidential veto. Thats virtually impossible.

In the Senate, for example, Democrats would have to win 67 seats, a number they havent achieved since 1962. Right now they hold just 48 seats and face high odds of winning back the chamber in 2018.

Even in the all-but-impossible scenario that Democrats seized commanding congressional majorities, theres a little thing called the separation of powers. The White House would be all but certain to ignore Congress, saying the legislative branch cannot tell the executive branch what to do.

Good luck getting the Supreme Court to side with Congress in a hypothetical showdown with the president. Even now the Supreme Court doesnt allow cameras to cover its own daily business.

On Friday, Dimon, the powerful Wall Street banker, lambasted Washington for holding back the economy.

Since the Great Recession, which is now 8 years old, weve been growing at 1.5% to 2% in spite of stupidity and political gridlock because the American business sector is powerful and strong, he said. What Im saying is it would be much stronger growth had we made intelligent decisions and were there not gridlock.

Read: J.P. Morgans Dimon says bad policies are hurting the average American

The Himes bill probably wouldnt qualify as smart policy in Dimons view of things.

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Democrat wants to force White House to broadcast press briefings - MarketWatch

As Republicans in the Senate stumble and fumble with their long-promised but never seriously planned repeal of Obamacare, the Trump administration is starting to leak its plans for what counts as ambitious immigration reform.

And its not all bad. The bill that the White House has in mind is based on the RAISE Act, introduced by Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue earlier this year. The giant headline measure is that the bill would cut in half the number of legal immigrants. The detail buried in paragraph 18 of most reports on it is that the bill will do this only after a decade of slowly lowering it to that level.

The biggest and most welcome change is that the proposal would begin to shift American immigration policy away from family-based chain migration and toward a merit-based system, with increased numbers of green cards available for qualified workers. Trumps proposal would also discourage sanctuary-city policies. Idlove to discuss this bill on the merits, but this isnt the first or last time Trump will make us talk about a policy that is never likely to become law. This White House has never had a strong influence on Capitol Hill, and its sway is weakening almost every day. Republicans in the Senate are struggling to deliver on a seven-year promise to repeal Obamacare, and they made no such promise on passing restrictionist legislation. Trumps insurgent-style campaign meant that many Republican lawmakers felt no particular loyalty to Trumps signature policy ideas or issues. And every day that the president is making headline headaches with his tweets, or with new revelations about his campaigns connection to the Russians, the passage of a bill like this becomes an even more remote possibility.

The Trump administration was always going to have a hard time selling a bill that reduced overall rates of immigration into America. Consider where Republican lawmakers were on comprehensive reform in 2013. Many Republican senators voted for a bill that would have tripled the rate of legal immigration into the U.S. in perpetuity. Although it was advertised as an enforcement first policy, the CBO estimated that the proposed 2013 measures would reduce the rate of illegal immigration into America by just 25 percent over the next two decades. The only consequence of failing to secure the border in the 2013 bill was the eventual creation of a committee of bureaucrats to make more recommendations. This was the political reality before Trump and since his election weve seen a major legal, media, and political blowback against Trumps temporary travel ban.

Someday people will look back on this time of mass immigration into America, from the 1970s to now, and wonder how it was that the language of humanitarianism was so easily and cheaply deployed to subordinate the very concepts of political community, democratic checks, and even the rule of law itself to the demands of employers. They will find perverse the way that progressives and unscrupulous employers worked in tandem to create a class of millions of legally vulnerable people who are unable to stand up to employers and afraid to call the police when they are abused. The truth is that American policymakers valued low-wage labor more than they valued any of our professed political values.

But that reckoning will not begin any time soon. The fact of Trumps election has moved the political center back toward sanity on immigration issues and away from open borders. But the fact of Trumps character means we are not substantially closer to getting sensible immigration reform passed. He is wasting political capital almost every day.

And there may be long-term damage as well. Even restrictionists like me have to admit that Trump has been ugly and demagogic on this issue. He has criticized judges for their ethnicity; hes tarred millions of immigrants as felons. Because he commands the loyalty of the Republican base, he has made the Republican style of partisanship more like his own on this issue. This is setting the sober work of policy-making behind.

Western Europe and the United States are both slowly coming to understand that the psychological and financial costs of migration are falling and emigration to the West is becoming a more attractive option to more people across the world. Trumps election was an acknowledgement of this reality. But his administration is currently an obstacle in the way of doing something intelligent about it.

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review.

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Trump's Admirable but Unlikely Goals on Immigration - National Review

According to the latest numbers, North Texas housing prices are up 8 percent over last year. That sounds like great news for home builders. Yet,Phil Crone of the Dallas Builders Association went to the nations capital last month to make a desperate plea for immigration reform.

In our Friday Conversation, Crone talked about the link between immigration policy and soaring house prices with Rick Holter.

Listen to the KERA Friday Conversation.

Interview Highlights: Phil Crone

On the link between housing and immigration: The two of them are linked because its basic supply and demand. You are seeing about 100,000 jobs moving here. I always tell people homes are where the jobs sleeps at night. And when you see that kind of demand, the corresponding demand comes for your workforce, and a lot of our workforce comes from areas outside of the U.S., in Mexico in particular. We need those folks. Theyre essential to get the job done in the residential construction industry.

Were about 18,000 to 20,000 workers short in D-FW area, and I would argue that makes the shortage as bad here as anywhere in the country right now. The biggest thing driving the increased pricing is the lack of labor. We did a survey of our members, and on average, they said that the labor shortage alone is adding about $4,000 and about two months to every project.

"We're about 18,000 to 20,000 workers short in D-FW area."

On his trip to Washington and potential solutions: Talking to some of the area representatives and members of Congress from the Dallas area, they understand it, and they were certainly vocal in the meetings that we had about the undue distractions and inability to get the job done. And this is one of the jobs they would like to do if Congress could kind of coalesce around an idea that makes sense. And for our industry, that idea would be a guest worker program that takes into account the demand thats here.

Hopefully, there can be some programs that are set up to incentivize these folks maybe to get licenses and maybe get on the path to becoming a citizen here. Its certainly not an amnesty program that were talking about, but there should be a pathway for some of the people who are coming here and finding some good opportunities and really contributing to our economy and would all be people who wed love to have stay here.

Phil Crone is the executive office of the Dallas Builders Association.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

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Dallas Builders Are Pushing For Immigration Reform. Why? They Need More Workers. - KERA News