Just look at the electoral map. Obama beat Romney by about the same margin as Biden beat Trump. But Obama’s margin in Michigan was 10 points, while Biden’s was 3. Obama’s 7 point margin in Wisconsin evaporates to 1 point.
Where did those other votes come from? To a significant degree, it was from affluent suburbs were the management class lives. Democrats now are utterly reliant on the very people they need to heavily tax to deliver any of their progressive promises. You can’t have a meaningful liberal party which counts among its base Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Fortune 500 executives.
And it shows. Supposed democrats will now happily say we need immigration so we can have cheap strawberries. And they’ll embrace social ideas that alienate non-college educated working class people, because their priorities are different. A Facebook engineer can make whatever theoretical statements he wants about universal paid paternity leave. But at the end of the day, he or she gets 5 months from a big profitable corporation, and has no incentive to make the political compromises necessary to advance such a policy.
Social issues are really the only thing where the party is unified and can push through changes, especially through the administrative state. We didn’t get a permanent child tax credit, or paid family leave, but we did get abortions and DEI in the military.
Democrats jumped there headfirst led by Clinton in 1992, and have not, since then, been any farther out of a “neoliberal corner” than they are today (which is not that far, to be sure, but its absolutely not the case that its something they recently backed into in response to Trump.)