I think the "Democratic side" is a part of the problem because it was instrumental in "normalizing deviance" - i.e. presenting nono-conventional life styles, delinquency or even barbarism as "normal" under the banner of nihilistic relativism. I think there are two distinct phenomena at the roots of this development. First, is the abandonment of the class struggle frame of reference that focuses on control of the mainstream economic and political institutions, and replacing it with the individual rights frame of reference that focuses on individuals choice, lifestyles, and cultural preferences. David Harvey speaks about that quite eloquently in his new book (_A brief History of Neo-liberalism_) and argues that this change in the frame of reference on the left inadvertently helped to legitimate the neo-liberal project.
The second phenomenon is cultural elitism of a big part of the "Democratic side" - which is manifested inter alia by focus on exotic experiences instead of mundane "bread and butter" issues and by the "noble savage" paternalism toward lower social strata. That is to say, much of the economic struggles of the "middle class" to maintain their standards of living became boring and "bourgeois," - the weird and the exotic, the stereotypic "two wiccan lesbians wanting to marry and adopt an orphaned dolphin" - is now in. Further down this line, the adolescent contumacy and shock value became the dominant cultural value and a deciding factor what is "hip" and what is "square" - thus shouting obscenities at parents, teachers and authorities became synonymous with the avant garde struggle for social justice and against capitalism and globalization.
Another strain in this "counter-cultural" trend was paternalism toward lower social strata. The cultural elites saw them as passive objects torn by external forces and devoid of human agency. At the same time their poverty and life styles were glamorized in a search for the weird and the exotic - the "only intellectuals love poverty, the poor people love luxury" thing. This was partly because the lower social strata and their often dysfunctional life styles were seen as nonthreatening to the secure social status of the cultural elites, and partly to provide self-righteous justification for these elite intellectuals to step into the "Robin Hood" or "Superman" shoes as "defenders of the less-fortunate."
So the end result of this re-alignment of the "Democratic side" - or perhaps its intellectual part- was their alienation from the concerns of most ordinary people. The right wing propaganda exploited that theme to the full possible extent - to be sure - but that propaganda would not stick if it did not have a kernel of truth in it. In my experience, the majority of the middle class people that I met in various walks of life perceive the "Democratic side" in those terms (not to mention the left that is often qualified by the adjective "loony"). These are not necessarily ditto heads - many of those people are quite sympathetic to the "bread-and butter" social democracy - they are just turned off by the weird counterculturalism and pandering to narrow special interests (sexual minorities, poor blacks, elite intellectuals, etc). I am pretty sure that other people on this list had similar experiences.
This trend has been particularly strong in the US, but I am not sure to what extent it affected other countries, especially the EU. I think that is the message of the Teixeira piece is that it is a cul-de sac for the 'Democratic side' - from which it must back-pedal and redefine itself as the party that speaks to the concerns of the majority of the people rather than those of narrowly defined minorities with whom almost nobody else identifies.
Wojtek