It has been noted so often that it qualifies as a cliche, but this particular cliche, we would argue, is true: Today's Republican Party has been remarkably successful at building support from working-class Americans by loudly hammering at inflammatory culture-war issues — racial school curriculum, transgender care, "woke"-ness — even as it quietly pursues an economic agenda that betrays those very workers.

Less commonly noted but also true is that Democrats have bumbled their way onto the losing side of that equation. By any objective measure, Democratic economic policies are far more helpful to working Americans than Republican policies. Yet today's Democrats have managed to drive away their traditional base of blue-collar supporters by signaling at every turn that they don't respect them culturally.

Today — Labor Day — is a good time to talk about how our policies and politics got so out of alignment when it comes to America's working people.

A time traveler from the first half of the 20th century would find much about today's political landscape to be deeply puzzling, perhaps most of all as it relates to the working-class vote.

Acknowledging up front that this has never been the monolithic thing the term suggests (tomes have been written on what, exactly, "working class" means), there's no question that the blue-collar base that bolstered Democrats from Franklin Roosevelt's time through the 1980s has largely migrated to the GOP today.

By one narrow definition — voter income levels — Democrats have arguably become the party of the rich. Republicans now hold well over half the U.S. House seats in districts where the median income is below the national average, while Democrats hold almost two-thirds of the seats where median income is above that level.

This is the proverbial coastal elites versus working-class Middle America. The fact that the GOP now has a solid hold on the latter is a seismic shift in our politics.

Democrats' electoral losses in the Rust Belt, where they once dominated on the strength of pro-labor-rights voters, is especially stark, while Republicans have almost completely commandeered rural areas that used to be up for grabs. As political analyst Bruce Mehlman told Axios earlier this year: "Republicans were the party of the country club, and they're increasingly the party of country."

Political parties do shift over time in their platforms, policies and philosophies. The GOP was once the civil-rights party, after all, back when Democrats were the Jim Crow party.

But what makes the Democrats' losses among working-class Americans today so notable is that there's no clear correlation to policy changes. Democrats today still are (as they have been for generations) the party of labor rights.

Republicans, meanwhile, have been largely successful in gutting America's once-vibrant labor movement with its union-busting "right to work" legislation around the country.

Then there is the GOP's stubborn opposition to minimum-wage increases. Don't forget which party it was in Missouri that used its legislative majority to reverse a St. Louis minimum-wage hike a few years ago — forcing down some of the lowest-paid workers' wages, literally overnight — before the state's voters finally stepped in to overrule them.

Consider, more broadly, what has happened to wages nationally in the past half century, in comparison to what has happened to the compensation of those workers' bosses.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, CEO pay between 1978 and 2018 grew by more than 940%, while their workers' wages grew by less than 12%. Put another way: Average CEO pay in 1965 was roughly 20 times that of their factory-floor employees; today, the ratio approaches 300:1.

This is nothing less than a second Gilded Age, with wealth concentrated in a few hands and a political system that keeps it that way. Yet in the face of those numbers, the biggest Republican fiscal obsession of the past few years was the party's massive 2017 tax cut package, which primarily benefited corporations and their investors, threw peanuts to regular Americans and will ultimately add close to $2 trillion to the federal deficit, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Democrats, meanwhile, are still the party of affordable health care, the party of protecting Social Security and Medicare, and the party of making the rich pay their fair share of taxes. All of that should naturally appeal to working people who struggle to make ends meet. And all of it has come under attack in recent years by congressional and legislative Republicans.

"How is it possible that Republicans are representing the majority of people who struggle?" Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, recently asked, voicing the frustration of many Democrats. "How is that possible?"

The answer may have less to do with economic policy than with Democrats' maddening habit of insulting the very people their policies are designed to help.

From Barack Obama's hot mic criticism of "bitter" voters who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them," to Hillary Clinton's infamous "basket of deplorables" description of Donald Trump's supporters, Democrats have this way of confirming the worst stereotypes about their party's cultural elitism.

At the same time, too many Democratic politicians fail to play to the party's strengths — especially its genuine support for working and struggling Americans — and instead play into the Republicans' hands by prioritizing cultural issues that middle America finds irrelevant or worse.

From focusing on silly gender-pronoun debates to tolerating that bit of political malpractice known as the "defund the police" movement, too many Democrats just can't seem to keep their eyes on the ball.

Even the often-heard Democratic complaint about workers "voting against their own interests" is, itself, a paternalistic and insulting construct. The fact is, projecting cultural respect to workers is in their interest. Today's Republicans have figured that out (in their language, if not their policies). Today's Democrats have somehow forgotten it.

So on this Labor Day, this is the grim choice for America's workers: a Republican Party that talks the talk, a Democratic Party that walks the walk, but no party that can manage to do both. That doesn't require lectures to workers about who they should support but rather fundamental changes in the way both parties approach the people who keep America working.

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