It’s a combination of:
- Political consultants whose grasp of reality for normal people and the problems they face is nonexistent
- Donors, who add to that lack of understanding an explicitly hostile attitude to anything left-wing if it will cost them or their clients money
- The politicians themselves, who rarely if ever interact with anyone outside of these three groups
There are some exceptions, of course, but they’re rare. DC is really an incredibly strange and sociopathic place on a human cultural level.
This is why I don’t understand the attitude that the way to progress is to keep punishing the Democrats until they figure it out on their own. The ones who haven’t figured it out, which is most of them, aren’t going to figure it out, any more than Google is going to realize that ruining search was a bad idea and they need to start making products people like again. It’s just not in their DNA to think that way.