When the Democratic Party has been successful, it has often represented an optimistic, forward-looking view of America that embraced the future. Think of Franklin D. Roosevelt reassuring Americans in the depths of the Depression that they had nothing to fear but fear itself. Or John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier spirit as America aimed for the moon. The chorus of Bill Clinton’s campaign song was “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow.” Barack Obama was unfailingly cool, promising a pluralistic new era of hope and change.

But somewhere in the past decade, Democrats seem to have lost that sensibility, and I wonder whether that has cost them politically.

Consider how in this election, it was Trump who was embraced by technologists such as Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen. Trump went to a cryptocurrency conference and received a series of standing ovations. He celebrated risk-taking and spoke the language of disruption and radical reform.

And perhaps as a result, he saw a large shift in support from young men, especially Hispanics and Asians. This was the single most significant gain Trump made demographically, and it is the most portentous for Democrats, who have assumed that young people would continue to vote for them by huge margins.

Democrats used to own the future-oriented vote. They were seen as naturally allied with youth culture and high tech.

What changed? The left wing of the Democratic Party argues that Obama and his ilk got in bed with business and tech, embraced right-wing economics and, over time, lost the working-class vote.

The problem with this argument is that the facts point in the opposite direction. As Ezra Klein, one of today’s shrewdest observers of economic policy, notes, “Since Bill Clinton … the party’s economic policy has become relentlessly more left. Barack Obama was well to Bill Clinton’s left. Hillary Clinton ran on an agenda well to Barack Obama’s left. Joe Biden ran on an agenda — and governed on an agenda — to Hillary Clinton’s left.”

And over those decades, the Democratic Party’s support among working-class voters has cratered.

Meanwhile, Trump runs his campaigns on a mixture of some populism but lots of libertarian policy ideas, appoints billionaires to all-important economic posts, and still won more of the working-class vote this year than any Republican in decades. Why? In my view, two reasons. First, voters these days are powerfully influenced by cultural issues such as immigration, identity and the so-called woke agenda. Second, the working class is not overwhelmingly anti-capitalist. When he was running for president, polls often showed that Bernie Sanders’s economic ideas, including Medicare-for-all, were more popular among college-educated voters than working-class ones. Trump’s anti-statism appeals to outsiders who feel the system is corrupt and inefficient.

Democrats now say they need their own Elon Musk and Joe Rogan. Except they had them — in Elon Musk and Joe Rogan. Rogan was a Bernie Bro. In 2022, Musk said he “voted overwhelmingly for Democrats historically.” This is not an endorsement of either Rogan or Musk. But it is a critique of policies that have needlessly alienated many young, aspirational voters who identify with risk-taking, disruption and embracing new technologies.

Politics is a game of addition, and rather than growing their base, Democrats are subtracting from it while Trump is expanding his. If Trump is able to maintain or expand support among young Hispanic and Asian men — and perhaps even bring more young Black men into the fold — he will have created for Republicans what has so far eluded them: a working MAGA majority coalition.

The Democratic Party has become a party of urban, educated, middle- and upper-middle-class voters, allied with minorities and young people. Apparently, the only major group with which Harris gained vote share in the election was White college educated voters. And yet the party remains deeply uncomfortable with its new base, still pining for its working-class roots. And so it turns on business, technologists, risk-seeking young men — who after a while, having begun to notice that the party doesn’t like them, are now returning the favor.

Email: fareed.zakaria.gps@turner.com.