But, Democrats might say, we are working on this! Harris is taking back all of her unpopular stuff. We’re now tough(er) on the border—at least in commercials and in our platform (love the land acknowledgement!). We’re going to bring prices down with our anti-price-gouging plan! We’re trying on our patriotism hat again! And how about what Barack Obama said! ...

In truth, most of what Democrats are doing and saying today amounts to, as befits their status as a Brahmin left party, a kind of Brahmin populism. It combines a mild-mannered and scattershot populism—a far cry from Bernie Sanders’ class-oriented populism of 2016—with an underlying commitment to a very wide array of social justice and “equity” issues that the working class detests.

The more-or-less plausible goal is to reconstitute the Biden coalition of 2020. They may or may not make it. But they shouldn’t kid themselves on the underlying weakness of their coalition.