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Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People
From the bestselling author of What's the Matter With Kansas, a scathing look at the standard-bearers of liberal politics -- a book that asks: what's the matter with Democrats?
It is a widespread belief among liberals that if only Democrats can continue to dominate national elections, if only those awful Republicans are beaten into submission, the country will be on the right course.
But this is to fundamentally misunderstand the modern Democratic Party. Drawing on years of research and first-hand reporting, Frank points out that the Democrats have done little to advance traditional liberal goals: expanding opportunity, fighting for social justice, and ensuring that workers get a fair deal. Indeed, they have scarcely dented the free-market consensus at all. This is not for lack of opportunity: Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and yet the decline of the middle class has only accelerated. Wall Street gets its bailouts, wages keep falling, and the free-trade deals keep coming.
With his trademark sardonic wit and lacerating logic, Frank's Listen, Liberal lays bare the essence of the Democratic Party's philosophy and how it has changed over the years. A form of corporate and cultural elitism has largely eclipsed the party's old working-class commitment, he finds. For certain favored groups, this has meant prosperity. But for the nation as a whole, it is a one-way ticket into the abyss of inequality. In this critical election year, Frank recalls the Democrats to their historic goals-the only way to reverse the ever-deepening rift between the rich and the poor in America.
It is a widespread belief among liberals that if only Democrats can continue to dominate national elections, if only those awful Republicans are beaten into submission, the country will be on the right course.
But this is to fundamentally misunderstand the modern Democratic Party. Drawing on years of research and first-hand reporting, Frank points out that the Democrats have done little to advance traditional liberal goals: expanding opportunity, fighting for social justice, and ensuring that workers get a fair deal. Indeed, they have scarcely dented the free-market consensus at all. This is not for lack of opportunity: Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and yet the decline of the middle class has only accelerated. Wall Street gets its bailouts, wages keep falling, and the free-trade deals keep coming.
With his trademark sardonic wit and lacerating logic, Frank's Listen, Liberal lays bare the essence of the Democratic Party's philosophy and how it has changed over the years. A form of corporate and cultural elitism has largely eclipsed the party's old working-class commitment, he finds. For certain favored groups, this has meant prosperity. But for the nation as a whole, it is a one-way ticket into the abyss of inequality. In this critical election year, Frank recalls the Democrats to their historic goals-the only way to reverse the ever-deepening rift between the rich and the poor in America.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published March 15, 2016
About the author
Thomas Frank
52 books672 followersThomas Frank is the author of Pity the Billionaire, The Wrecking Crew, and What's the Matter with Kansas? A former columnist for The Wall Street Journal and Harper's, Frank is the founding editor of The Baffler and writes regularly for Salon. He lives outside Washington, D.C.
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March 29, 2016
Monica Lewinsky saved social security.
I am a lifelong Democrat.
I am a working man.
I am so depressed by this book.
I highly recommend it.
I am a lifelong Democrat.
I am a working man.
I am so depressed by this book.
I highly recommend it.
February 1, 2016
Thomas Frank stirs up my aggravation with our political system as no other person can. He excoriates the Democratic Party for selling out the American People (those not part of the Top Ten Percent). I read many passages of this book aloud to my wife, and both of us were like, "Damn, Thomas Frank! Tell it."
I don't mean to get all political on Goodreads, but Frank does a brilliant job breaking down the empty promises of Democrats during election season since the Clinton era and the things they actually accomplished for working class people which is very little to nothing. Frank's dissection of the way in which meritocracy and the rise of the professional class has allowed the Democrats to turn their backs on serious issues of inequality is compelling--and scary. It's pretty damning evidence I have to admit that this book helped me challenge my own perspective on my so-called liberalism. So glad Thomas Frank has stepped into the ring this election season.
I don't mean to get all political on Goodreads, but Frank does a brilliant job breaking down the empty promises of Democrats during election season since the Clinton era and the things they actually accomplished for working class people which is very little to nothing. Frank's dissection of the way in which meritocracy and the rise of the professional class has allowed the Democrats to turn their backs on serious issues of inequality is compelling--and scary. It's pretty damning evidence I have to admit that this book helped me challenge my own perspective on my so-called liberalism. So glad Thomas Frank has stepped into the ring this election season.
February 11, 2017
Damning critique of the neoliberal wing of the Democratic party. I pretty much agree with most (heck all!) of Franks’ analysis, although he veers into a full blown sarcastic polemic. Which is ok I guess, I mean, I agree with his points and his arguments but sometimes the anger is so seething that it distracts from the argument. I guess the more emotional someone gets with their arguments the more leery I get… and I do have to say I often have trouble myself in avoiding this trap! It’s not always easy to decouple emotion from one’s arguments!!! easier said than done. But that said Franks’ presents a strong point by point critique throughout his book and I generally agree with his assessments.
Ever since the election of that man who shall not be named there’s been a lot of writings out there mirroring Franks’ critique of the neoliberal wing of the Democratic party and how this powerful elite has turned its back on the working class, and even large segments of the middle class. This has provided an opening for the Republicans to use cultural and identity issues as trojan horses to capture large segments of the working class, these issues providing cover for their less popular economically regressive agenda (that’s my interpretation of their general economic positioning). It’s been a brilliant strategy, and ever since the 70s when Democrats started turning their back on the working class Republicans seized this opportunity to drive a wedge into this demographic, peeling off large segments and assimilating them into their base. In many respects Democrats sowed the seeds of their own destruction, and have yet to fully learn the lessons. Franks’ provides a nice analysis and overview of this history.
Over the last 40 years there is an entitled smug arrogant educated professional elite that has gained power in the Democratic party (Clintons are emblematic), and their economic philosophy runs counter in many respects to core progressive economic principles. They are anti-New Dealers, anti-progressives, banking elites, captains of industry (specially Silicon Valley), and they don’t want to hear about inequality. They have fully bought into the narrative that we live in a pure meritocracy, therefore those who succeed do so on their own merit, intelligence, perseverance, hard work, etc, while those who don’t succeed, don’t get educations (regardless of access), who suffer are 100% accountable for their lots in life. I’m all for personal accountability, but imo like most things it is a mix. There are systematic barriers and entrenched wealth that tilts the field in favor of certain people while putting up barriers for others. It’s sneaky to ignore this disparity in opportunities, ignoring the system barriers, system rules, power dynamics in the system, and trying to pin everything on the individual. Opportunities are hoarded by elite segments of our society, there is more margin for error when one has wealth and power. Of course there are people who can transcend their lack of opportunities, economic disadvantages, and these cases are always seized upon and highlighted by the elite to showcase how the system has fluidity and fairness. As far as I can tell though, from the data I’ve seen, fluidity between social classes, the actuality of the American dream, at least currently, is largely in retreat and in many respects illusory. And this Democratic elite has largely championed progressive cultural and identity issues, which I do think are important, but often at the cost of focusing or championing progressive economic issues (largely because it doesn’t fit their agenda and narrative).
The idea of meritocracy is often used to justify one’s wealth and justify the poverty of others, to me it often warps into a self-serving narrative meant to mythologize one’s own success and reinforce the status quo. That’s not to say that people who have succeeded haven’t worked hard, aren’t smart and awesome, but as too often happens many in this group discount their access to opportunities while ignoring the lack of access to opportunities that many others face. Personally, I’m a believer in aspiring towards meritocracy, while counterbalancing the effects of meritocratic winners taking all by enacting greater redistribution, fairer more equal distribution of educational resources, universal healthcare, solid safety net, exploration of universal basic income, establishing more balanced relationships between capital and labor, etc etc. Too often meritocracy is used in this sneaky cynical way to deny people respect of their human dignity, it is used as an excuse to let people die in the street, it is used as an excuse to judge others. Meritocracy without humanism is dangerous, callous, and frankly soulless. That's how I see it. It's a slippery slope when applied in too extreme a manner, it is a way of denying compassion and destroying man's humanity.
I think the most important point that Franks hit upon was the necessity for the liberal professional cosmopolitan elites to engage in a bit more humility (and yes one can argue other side could engage a bit more in this as well ha!). We (consider myself part of this group) need to avoid moral and intellectual grandstanding, our smug cultural arrogance often leads us to look down upon the non-educated, the rural populace, conservatives. By automatically and unequivocally viewing them as morally-backward idiotic rubes we push people away, we antagonize, we disrespect, and we preclude effective dialogue. Not only does it not serve our interests, but it is rather disrespectful and inhumane as well! Plus, if the packaging is done right, and the messenger plays it smart, I think large segments of the working class would be open to the progressive economic agenda. Maybe I’m naive, maybe I underestimate the average American’s distrust of government (although in its current incarnation distrust is justified!), fear and leeriness of bureaucracy, and their lionization of the individual and the ethos of surviving on one’s own and refusing hand-outs no matter how badly one is getting hammered… but I suspect that if people see this is a policy path to open opportunities that could give greater/fairer chances for individual success then maybe it can be sold effectively. But as so often happens, the suffering has to hit catastrophic levels before critical mass of people will push for major political system changes.
As always, please feel free to jump in and critique any of my thinking. It’s helpful to hear from others.
Ever since the election of that man who shall not be named there’s been a lot of writings out there mirroring Franks’ critique of the neoliberal wing of the Democratic party and how this powerful elite has turned its back on the working class, and even large segments of the middle class. This has provided an opening for the Republicans to use cultural and identity issues as trojan horses to capture large segments of the working class, these issues providing cover for their less popular economically regressive agenda (that’s my interpretation of their general economic positioning). It’s been a brilliant strategy, and ever since the 70s when Democrats started turning their back on the working class Republicans seized this opportunity to drive a wedge into this demographic, peeling off large segments and assimilating them into their base. In many respects Democrats sowed the seeds of their own destruction, and have yet to fully learn the lessons. Franks’ provides a nice analysis and overview of this history.
Over the last 40 years there is an entitled smug arrogant educated professional elite that has gained power in the Democratic party (Clintons are emblematic), and their economic philosophy runs counter in many respects to core progressive economic principles. They are anti-New Dealers, anti-progressives, banking elites, captains of industry (specially Silicon Valley), and they don’t want to hear about inequality. They have fully bought into the narrative that we live in a pure meritocracy, therefore those who succeed do so on their own merit, intelligence, perseverance, hard work, etc, while those who don’t succeed, don’t get educations (regardless of access), who suffer are 100% accountable for their lots in life. I’m all for personal accountability, but imo like most things it is a mix. There are systematic barriers and entrenched wealth that tilts the field in favor of certain people while putting up barriers for others. It’s sneaky to ignore this disparity in opportunities, ignoring the system barriers, system rules, power dynamics in the system, and trying to pin everything on the individual. Opportunities are hoarded by elite segments of our society, there is more margin for error when one has wealth and power. Of course there are people who can transcend their lack of opportunities, economic disadvantages, and these cases are always seized upon and highlighted by the elite to showcase how the system has fluidity and fairness. As far as I can tell though, from the data I’ve seen, fluidity between social classes, the actuality of the American dream, at least currently, is largely in retreat and in many respects illusory. And this Democratic elite has largely championed progressive cultural and identity issues, which I do think are important, but often at the cost of focusing or championing progressive economic issues (largely because it doesn’t fit their agenda and narrative).
The idea of meritocracy is often used to justify one’s wealth and justify the poverty of others, to me it often warps into a self-serving narrative meant to mythologize one’s own success and reinforce the status quo. That’s not to say that people who have succeeded haven’t worked hard, aren’t smart and awesome, but as too often happens many in this group discount their access to opportunities while ignoring the lack of access to opportunities that many others face. Personally, I’m a believer in aspiring towards meritocracy, while counterbalancing the effects of meritocratic winners taking all by enacting greater redistribution, fairer more equal distribution of educational resources, universal healthcare, solid safety net, exploration of universal basic income, establishing more balanced relationships between capital and labor, etc etc. Too often meritocracy is used in this sneaky cynical way to deny people respect of their human dignity, it is used as an excuse to let people die in the street, it is used as an excuse to judge others. Meritocracy without humanism is dangerous, callous, and frankly soulless. That's how I see it. It's a slippery slope when applied in too extreme a manner, it is a way of denying compassion and destroying man's humanity.
I think the most important point that Franks hit upon was the necessity for the liberal professional cosmopolitan elites to engage in a bit more humility (and yes one can argue other side could engage a bit more in this as well ha!). We (consider myself part of this group) need to avoid moral and intellectual grandstanding, our smug cultural arrogance often leads us to look down upon the non-educated, the rural populace, conservatives. By automatically and unequivocally viewing them as morally-backward idiotic rubes we push people away, we antagonize, we disrespect, and we preclude effective dialogue. Not only does it not serve our interests, but it is rather disrespectful and inhumane as well! Plus, if the packaging is done right, and the messenger plays it smart, I think large segments of the working class would be open to the progressive economic agenda. Maybe I’m naive, maybe I underestimate the average American’s distrust of government (although in its current incarnation distrust is justified!), fear and leeriness of bureaucracy, and their lionization of the individual and the ethos of surviving on one’s own and refusing hand-outs no matter how badly one is getting hammered… but I suspect that if people see this is a policy path to open opportunities that could give greater/fairer chances for individual success then maybe it can be sold effectively. But as so often happens, the suffering has to hit catastrophic levels before critical mass of people will push for major political system changes.
As always, please feel free to jump in and critique any of my thinking. It’s helpful to hear from others.
December 25, 2018
There was a time when America worked. Not just for the well-born and expensively educated. But for millions of working class men and women whose jobs paid enough for them to live comfortably, own a home, maybe send the kids to college.
How did we go from this?
And this?
To this?
And this.
It took a new consensus. A bipartisan consensus. Democrats like to blame it all on Ronald Reagan whose policies are not without fault. But as Thomas Frank explains in this furiously angry, brilliant book "...the triumph of Clinton marked the end of the Democrats as a party committed to working people and egalitarianism...it wasn't until Clinton was seated in the Oval Office and the Democrats in Congress had gone down to defeat that 'the old New Deal and Great Society consensus on domestic matters finally collapsed'."
Repeal of Glass-Steagall. Capital gains tax cuts. Blocking derivative securities regulation. And worst of all for the families of Detroit, the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement. Only the Lewinsky scandal saved Social Security from a bipartisan attempt by Clinton and Newt Gingrich to privatize the plan. The last vestiges of hope for Detroit died with welfare reform and a crime bill that made mass incarceration the go-to solution for whatever ailed inner cities.
"Only smiling Bill Clinton, well-known friend of working families, could commit such betrayals."
The power of Frank's indictment of both the Clinton and the Obama administrations lies not just in the facts he marshals, but in his analysis of precisely why the New Deal consensus died and how Democrats replaced it with the social liberalism of the new rich, an infatuation with 'professionalism' and financial sophistication, and a fantasy that higher education is the only right path to 'economic opportunity'.
For those left behind there was nowhere to turn, no one left to understand.
How did we go from this?
And this?
To this?
And this.
It took a new consensus. A bipartisan consensus. Democrats like to blame it all on Ronald Reagan whose policies are not without fault. But as Thomas Frank explains in this furiously angry, brilliant book "...the triumph of Clinton marked the end of the Democrats as a party committed to working people and egalitarianism...it wasn't until Clinton was seated in the Oval Office and the Democrats in Congress had gone down to defeat that 'the old New Deal and Great Society consensus on domestic matters finally collapsed'."
Repeal of Glass-Steagall. Capital gains tax cuts. Blocking derivative securities regulation. And worst of all for the families of Detroit, the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement. Only the Lewinsky scandal saved Social Security from a bipartisan attempt by Clinton and Newt Gingrich to privatize the plan. The last vestiges of hope for Detroit died with welfare reform and a crime bill that made mass incarceration the go-to solution for whatever ailed inner cities.
"Only smiling Bill Clinton, well-known friend of working families, could commit such betrayals."
The power of Frank's indictment of both the Clinton and the Obama administrations lies not just in the facts he marshals, but in his analysis of precisely why the New Deal consensus died and how Democrats replaced it with the social liberalism of the new rich, an infatuation with 'professionalism' and financial sophistication, and a fantasy that higher education is the only right path to 'economic opportunity'.
For those left behind there was nowhere to turn, no one left to understand.
March 19, 2016
Hot damn. This is a gallon of lighter fluid for that liberal fire you've been stoking in your heart. Far too few writers are willing to take our own Democratic Party to task for its failings and flaws. Must read for anyone hoping for politics that value people over profits.
November 28, 2016
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Like many others, I was shocked and saddened to witness the election of Donald Trump as President last month; and given that the way he won was by tens of millions of people voting for him who had directly voted for Obama in just the last election, I thought it was high time I finally learned a little more about why the American electorate chose to do this in the first place (besides the typical pre-election blowoff that "they're all a bunch of racist Nazis"), and so over the next few months I'll be reading a series of books recommended to me by others that supposedly help explain this. This was the first book of the list to become available at my local library, written by the former founder of Chicago '90s liberal intellectual magazine The Baffler; and it turned out to be half eye-opening, although unfortunately the other half turned out to be eye-rolling, leaving a mixed bag when it comes to whether to recommend it or not.
The eye-opening part, and definitely the part most worth your time, is Frank's detailed history of the Democratic Leadership Council, the organization that ultimately put Bill Clinton in the White House but that I and my fellow Generation Xers largely didn't even know existed when we voted for him in 1992. Started in the early 1970s by a group of young idealistic hippie politicians, all of whom had attended college and all of whom received deferments from Vietnam, the group certainly started with noble intentions; tired of the old Democratic Party power base of the rural working class, the very people who supported the war and who continued to drag naked racism well into the '70s, the DLC spent twenty years systematically pushing such people out of the power structure of the party, believing instead that the "New Democrats" (as they called themselves) should be a party of meritocracy, educational excellence, technological innovation and embrace of big business, culminating in the '90s when they got their former leader Clinton elected as President.
This is where we get the "neoliberalist" economics that are so rapidly becoming such a villain in the wake of Trump's election win; inspired by the collapse in the '70s of Roosevelt's Keynesian "New Deal" economics into runaway government bureaucracy and hyperinflation, right in the same years the DLC was being formed, neoliberalism instead believes in radical deregulation of markets, the forced end of organized labor, and a "benevolent dictatorship" of elite Ivy-educated technocrats to rule over all the uneducated, mouthbreathing masses (which, to remind you, was originally inspired by a very valid complaint, that these mouthbreathing masses were the people who pushed racism and the Vietnam War way farther into history than either should've existed). And this just happens to be the same things the Republicans believe in too, or at least the Republican Party post-1980 as largely defined by Ronald Reagan; so, as Frank smartly explains, if it sometimes seems here in the 21st century that both parties seem to be made up of the same banker billionaires enacting the same exact blue-collar-punishing policies, that's because they are, a triumph of neoliberalism that was so all-encompassing by the '90s that no one even questioned its existence anymore, which is why I and my Generation X cohorts grew up not understanding that there was even an alternative.
All of this is really intelligent stuff, and it's worth reading this book to see how the DLC has pulled the wool over all of our eyes for so long, painting themselves as the "protector of the people" when in fact they have actually been actively hostile to anyone who doesn't have a college degree and doesn't live in a big city, a huge reason that so many self-made white-collar suburbanites turned against the party here in 2016 when it became clear that yet another neoliberal billionaire Ivy-educated technocrat was to be their official nominee. Unfortunately, though, Frank has a lot more to say about the Democrats than this, and that's where he starts getting into eye-rolling rant territory; entire chapters devoted to what a fuckup Obama was, entire chapters devoted to how anyone who's ever been an employee of a tech startup is a sellout monster, entire chapters on how anyone who's ever recommended that a poor person try to get into college is a dead-eyed sociopath who hates the working class, with special amounts of piss and vinegar directed at such individuals as Richard Florida (inventor of the term "creative class"), who Frank attacks in such a vindictive and personal way that he seems less like a political opponent and more like a jilted ex-lover.
I have a friend here in Chicago who actually went to college with Frank, and she had an illuminating story to tell me about him; how every time he would attend a party that happened to have the TV on (like an election party or a movie-watching party), he would spend the whole night ranting and raving about each and every single commercial that would air, pointing to the others in the room incredulously and yelling, "Why aren't you people getting outraged about this? Why am I the only person getting outraged about this?" That's exactly what Listen, Liberal comes off as, like a guy who's outraged at basically everything in the world and doesn't have the discipline to focus his arguments in on the things most worth getting mad about, a guy who takes eight years of Obama accomplishments and dismisses them in a single half-sentence (paraphrased, "Sure, he reformed healthcare, got gay marriage legalized, kept the country from going bankrupt during the economic crisis, and managed to get the largest stimulus package in American history passed, but..."), because he's too busy screaming about how every software developer in America is inherently evil, because they took a job away from a noble farmer.
To be honest, that's exactly what The Baffler was like when it was being published too, which is why it was never more than a special-interest publication for philosophy majors and hipster radicals; and while Listen, Liberal is recommended for sure, if for nothing else than to get a revealing primer on neoliberalism and why it's the cause of all our current problems, that recommendation unfortunately is a limited one today, a book you need to take with a large grain of salt in order to enjoy it at its fullest.
Out of 10: 7.9
Like many others, I was shocked and saddened to witness the election of Donald Trump as President last month; and given that the way he won was by tens of millions of people voting for him who had directly voted for Obama in just the last election, I thought it was high time I finally learned a little more about why the American electorate chose to do this in the first place (besides the typical pre-election blowoff that "they're all a bunch of racist Nazis"), and so over the next few months I'll be reading a series of books recommended to me by others that supposedly help explain this. This was the first book of the list to become available at my local library, written by the former founder of Chicago '90s liberal intellectual magazine The Baffler; and it turned out to be half eye-opening, although unfortunately the other half turned out to be eye-rolling, leaving a mixed bag when it comes to whether to recommend it or not.
The eye-opening part, and definitely the part most worth your time, is Frank's detailed history of the Democratic Leadership Council, the organization that ultimately put Bill Clinton in the White House but that I and my fellow Generation Xers largely didn't even know existed when we voted for him in 1992. Started in the early 1970s by a group of young idealistic hippie politicians, all of whom had attended college and all of whom received deferments from Vietnam, the group certainly started with noble intentions; tired of the old Democratic Party power base of the rural working class, the very people who supported the war and who continued to drag naked racism well into the '70s, the DLC spent twenty years systematically pushing such people out of the power structure of the party, believing instead that the "New Democrats" (as they called themselves) should be a party of meritocracy, educational excellence, technological innovation and embrace of big business, culminating in the '90s when they got their former leader Clinton elected as President.
This is where we get the "neoliberalist" economics that are so rapidly becoming such a villain in the wake of Trump's election win; inspired by the collapse in the '70s of Roosevelt's Keynesian "New Deal" economics into runaway government bureaucracy and hyperinflation, right in the same years the DLC was being formed, neoliberalism instead believes in radical deregulation of markets, the forced end of organized labor, and a "benevolent dictatorship" of elite Ivy-educated technocrats to rule over all the uneducated, mouthbreathing masses (which, to remind you, was originally inspired by a very valid complaint, that these mouthbreathing masses were the people who pushed racism and the Vietnam War way farther into history than either should've existed). And this just happens to be the same things the Republicans believe in too, or at least the Republican Party post-1980 as largely defined by Ronald Reagan; so, as Frank smartly explains, if it sometimes seems here in the 21st century that both parties seem to be made up of the same banker billionaires enacting the same exact blue-collar-punishing policies, that's because they are, a triumph of neoliberalism that was so all-encompassing by the '90s that no one even questioned its existence anymore, which is why I and my Generation X cohorts grew up not understanding that there was even an alternative.
All of this is really intelligent stuff, and it's worth reading this book to see how the DLC has pulled the wool over all of our eyes for so long, painting themselves as the "protector of the people" when in fact they have actually been actively hostile to anyone who doesn't have a college degree and doesn't live in a big city, a huge reason that so many self-made white-collar suburbanites turned against the party here in 2016 when it became clear that yet another neoliberal billionaire Ivy-educated technocrat was to be their official nominee. Unfortunately, though, Frank has a lot more to say about the Democrats than this, and that's where he starts getting into eye-rolling rant territory; entire chapters devoted to what a fuckup Obama was, entire chapters devoted to how anyone who's ever been an employee of a tech startup is a sellout monster, entire chapters on how anyone who's ever recommended that a poor person try to get into college is a dead-eyed sociopath who hates the working class, with special amounts of piss and vinegar directed at such individuals as Richard Florida (inventor of the term "creative class"), who Frank attacks in such a vindictive and personal way that he seems less like a political opponent and more like a jilted ex-lover.
I have a friend here in Chicago who actually went to college with Frank, and she had an illuminating story to tell me about him; how every time he would attend a party that happened to have the TV on (like an election party or a movie-watching party), he would spend the whole night ranting and raving about each and every single commercial that would air, pointing to the others in the room incredulously and yelling, "Why aren't you people getting outraged about this? Why am I the only person getting outraged about this?" That's exactly what Listen, Liberal comes off as, like a guy who's outraged at basically everything in the world and doesn't have the discipline to focus his arguments in on the things most worth getting mad about, a guy who takes eight years of Obama accomplishments and dismisses them in a single half-sentence (paraphrased, "Sure, he reformed healthcare, got gay marriage legalized, kept the country from going bankrupt during the economic crisis, and managed to get the largest stimulus package in American history passed, but..."), because he's too busy screaming about how every software developer in America is inherently evil, because they took a job away from a noble farmer.
To be honest, that's exactly what The Baffler was like when it was being published too, which is why it was never more than a special-interest publication for philosophy majors and hipster radicals; and while Listen, Liberal is recommended for sure, if for nothing else than to get a revealing primer on neoliberalism and why it's the cause of all our current problems, that recommendation unfortunately is a limited one today, a book you need to take with a large grain of salt in order to enjoy it at its fullest.
Out of 10: 7.9
April 3, 2023
Re-read edits 3/3/23. No changes. Biden's throwing the railway workers under the bus just highlights Frank's insightfulness...
I have been following Frank's writings for some time, and this is really a masterpiece to understand how the Democratic party transformed itself from 'the party of the people' to the party representing the 'professional managerial class' (PMC) since the 1980s. Sometimes this shift has been called the 'third way' or the rise of the 'new democrats', but it basically involves jettisoning the New Deal and policies enacted in the 1950s and 60s under various New Deal embracing administrations like LBJ. Written in 2016 before the outcome of the US presidential election, the insights Frank puts forth regarding the changed nature of the Democratic party are just as relevant today as four years ago.
Frank traces the change from a party that represented labor to embracing the PMC and the impacts with snarky prose that really grips the reader, even though it can be very depressing to say the least. The 'New Economy' that emerged under Reagan began a sharp turn in US governmental policy and was embraced by first Bill Clinton and later Obama. I liken this to a shift from embracing New Deal policies by basically both parties to rejecting them; while the logic of the rejection differs between the GOP and the Democrats, the national impact, especially for labor has been fundamental.
We know that in post WWII, a rising tide of income lifted all ships. America prospered across all income levels. For example, from the Great Depression until 1980, the lower 90% of Americans took home 70% of all income gains. Wages rose with increased labor productivity. These trends basically stopped in the late 1970s and wages and so forth have basically stagnated for the bottom 90% since then. This means that the great gains in income have all basically been gone toward the top 10%. Young people today are now expected to have less income and less secure jobs then their parents. So how did we get here?
To quote Frank: "This book is about the failure of the Democratic Party-- about how they failed when the conditions for success were perfect."
The ever growing economic inequality in America has defined life for Americans for 40 years and counting, something Obama called the 'defining challenge of our time'. Yet, what have the Democrats actually done to address this challenge, even when they control local, state and the federal government? Not much. "They offer the same high-minded demurrals and policy platitudes they've been offering since the 1980s. They remind us that there's nothing anyone can do about globalization or technology. They promise charter schools, and job training, and student loans, but other than that-- well, they've got nothing."
I will not go through the blow by blow of how the Democratic party abandoned the New Deal and the working class and instead embraced 'innovation' and the 'knowledge economy' along with professionals and innovators; Frank does that all too well. Dumping labor and turning toward finance and silicon valley as the new way forward has become a hallmark of the Democrats.
What is unique about this book is rather than blame the failure to tackle income inequality on the GOP and their evil ways, Frank turns the spotlight squarely on how the Democrats willingly served as agents to further inequality--from international trade deals, to drastically cutting social welfare, to 'crime reform' bills that incarcerated millions, to bailing out our 'too big to fail' financial institutions-- all of this can be laid at the feet of the Democrats. 5 glowing, but depressing stars!
I have been following Frank's writings for some time, and this is really a masterpiece to understand how the Democratic party transformed itself from 'the party of the people' to the party representing the 'professional managerial class' (PMC) since the 1980s. Sometimes this shift has been called the 'third way' or the rise of the 'new democrats', but it basically involves jettisoning the New Deal and policies enacted in the 1950s and 60s under various New Deal embracing administrations like LBJ. Written in 2016 before the outcome of the US presidential election, the insights Frank puts forth regarding the changed nature of the Democratic party are just as relevant today as four years ago.
Frank traces the change from a party that represented labor to embracing the PMC and the impacts with snarky prose that really grips the reader, even though it can be very depressing to say the least. The 'New Economy' that emerged under Reagan began a sharp turn in US governmental policy and was embraced by first Bill Clinton and later Obama. I liken this to a shift from embracing New Deal policies by basically both parties to rejecting them; while the logic of the rejection differs between the GOP and the Democrats, the national impact, especially for labor has been fundamental.
We know that in post WWII, a rising tide of income lifted all ships. America prospered across all income levels. For example, from the Great Depression until 1980, the lower 90% of Americans took home 70% of all income gains. Wages rose with increased labor productivity. These trends basically stopped in the late 1970s and wages and so forth have basically stagnated for the bottom 90% since then. This means that the great gains in income have all basically been gone toward the top 10%. Young people today are now expected to have less income and less secure jobs then their parents. So how did we get here?
To quote Frank: "This book is about the failure of the Democratic Party-- about how they failed when the conditions for success were perfect."
The ever growing economic inequality in America has defined life for Americans for 40 years and counting, something Obama called the 'defining challenge of our time'. Yet, what have the Democrats actually done to address this challenge, even when they control local, state and the federal government? Not much. "They offer the same high-minded demurrals and policy platitudes they've been offering since the 1980s. They remind us that there's nothing anyone can do about globalization or technology. They promise charter schools, and job training, and student loans, but other than that-- well, they've got nothing."
I will not go through the blow by blow of how the Democratic party abandoned the New Deal and the working class and instead embraced 'innovation' and the 'knowledge economy' along with professionals and innovators; Frank does that all too well. Dumping labor and turning toward finance and silicon valley as the new way forward has become a hallmark of the Democrats.
What is unique about this book is rather than blame the failure to tackle income inequality on the GOP and their evil ways, Frank turns the spotlight squarely on how the Democrats willingly served as agents to further inequality--from international trade deals, to drastically cutting social welfare, to 'crime reform' bills that incarcerated millions, to bailing out our 'too big to fail' financial institutions-- all of this can be laid at the feet of the Democrats. 5 glowing, but depressing stars!
March 31, 2016
A valid critique of the Democratic Party, which has been historically cast as the ally of the working man. Frank points out that recent decades have seen a shift in the party toward the center, as it embraces well-moneyed and socially liberal professionals as its new base, effectively leaving the poor behind. While the Clinton and Obama presidencies saw many of the vital protections for the poor and working class eroded, Democratic leadership has been a boon to the wealthiest members of society. As an example, Obama's Affordable Care Act has strengthened the biggest insurance and pharmaceutical companies. The former were entrenched as permanent, ubiquitous fixtures of health care coverage for all Americans, as Obamacare made no provision for a public option. The latter threw their support behind the president in exchange for a promise that he would in no way challenge the practice of charging outrageously high prices for essential medications. Perhaps most egregious of all, however, was the failure to hold the banks accountable for the financial crisis that all but guaranteed his election in 2008.
While Frank is very effective at demonstrating the Dems' abandonment of ordinary people, his narrow focus on the struggle between management and labor leaves out a very important player: the consumer. He laments any attempts to undermine the position of unionized workers, even when those industries have become notorious for poor quality and zero accountability. For example, he vociferously defends teachers' unions from political efforts to challenge the tenure system, but completely ignores the pervasive problem of disinterested and/or incompetent teachers effectively appointed for life. He opposes the ride-sharing app Uber, primarily because of its effect on unionized taxi drivers, rather than confronting cab companies' own failures to address significant problems in cost, convenience and comfort. In general, Frank shows a baffling hostility toward innovation and meritocracy; certainly it is a problem that millions are being left behind in the new economy but why does confronting this issue necessarily require scaling back incentives for the most creative and innovative thinkers among us? I do not see how such quasi-Marxist zero-sum thinking can fix the broken system.
These shortcomings aside, his thesis as a whole is a strong one. He does not really address the 2016 presidential campaign--- I get the impression that the book was all but finished several months ago--- but he nonetheless provides a very compelling argument to account for the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Millions of working people have been disenfranchised with the Democrats' turn to moneyed interests. As a result, they have gravitated toward two candidates who are ideologically opposite on the two-dimensional left-right plane, and yet perfectly concordant in their shared populism. Frank concludes the book pessimistically, questioning if the problem can ever be remedied in the current two party system. Don't look now, but those parties appear to be exploding. Amidst the rubble, let's hope a solution to inequality can be found.
While Frank is very effective at demonstrating the Dems' abandonment of ordinary people, his narrow focus on the struggle between management and labor leaves out a very important player: the consumer. He laments any attempts to undermine the position of unionized workers, even when those industries have become notorious for poor quality and zero accountability. For example, he vociferously defends teachers' unions from political efforts to challenge the tenure system, but completely ignores the pervasive problem of disinterested and/or incompetent teachers effectively appointed for life. He opposes the ride-sharing app Uber, primarily because of its effect on unionized taxi drivers, rather than confronting cab companies' own failures to address significant problems in cost, convenience and comfort. In general, Frank shows a baffling hostility toward innovation and meritocracy; certainly it is a problem that millions are being left behind in the new economy but why does confronting this issue necessarily require scaling back incentives for the most creative and innovative thinkers among us? I do not see how such quasi-Marxist zero-sum thinking can fix the broken system.
These shortcomings aside, his thesis as a whole is a strong one. He does not really address the 2016 presidential campaign--- I get the impression that the book was all but finished several months ago--- but he nonetheless provides a very compelling argument to account for the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Millions of working people have been disenfranchised with the Democrats' turn to moneyed interests. As a result, they have gravitated toward two candidates who are ideologically opposite on the two-dimensional left-right plane, and yet perfectly concordant in their shared populism. Frank concludes the book pessimistically, questioning if the problem can ever be remedied in the current two party system. Don't look now, but those parties appear to be exploding. Amidst the rubble, let's hope a solution to inequality can be found.
April 19, 2017
Frank’s thesis in this book is that Democrats have not been effective creating a party that changes with the demands of the country. Democrats lost the last presidential election, not because Trump was so good, but because the Dems were so inadequate.
We can’t pin the idea that some folks think they deserve high status on liberal intellectuals only. Not all intellectuals are liberal, difficult as it is to find a Republican we can call intellectual. Heads of American corporations (who can often be Republican) may think they are the “best of the best” and deserve the truly obscene amounts of money they earn in salary, bonuses, and deferred stock. The truth is that nothing they could possibly do in the course of a day would ever be worth such huge differentials in salary from the worker bees of the corporation. Frank is focused on the left in this book.
But enough about what I think. Frank’s view of the meritocracy does inform our debate. He notes Jacob Weisberg of the New Republic fretted about the
Frank casts aspersions on “Liberal Gilt” (a useful and accurate descriptor) but what does he really think needs to be done in middle America where manufacturing has fled and farming is owned by four or five monopolists? If these folks aren’t worried enough to be heading back to some kind of schooling, then they’d better innovate without the schooling. Frank complains that liberals call this “reality.” My forehead wrinkles when I think of him trying to explain to me Trump’s plan to bring back coal jobs.
Frank is a liberal. He makes the excellent point that sometimes the ruling Democrats in Obama’s administration didn’t look widely enough for social innovators: most of Obama’s Cabinet and other advisors had east coast IV-league educations. There is a groupthink that goes along with this. Also, the incestuous relationship among the wealthy is unhealthy. Frank plays gadfly when it would have been a better book if he’d spoken with others about what to do with the jobless in Kansas if they don’t want to learn anything new. I frankly can’t see beyond education, IV-league or not.
He gives his main points in a YouTube video here.
"When it comes to the ‘defining challenge of our time,’ however, many of our modern Democratic leaders falter. They acknowledge that inequality is rampant and awful, but they cannot find the conviction or imagination to do what is necessary to reverse it."He also makes the not-inaccurate point that the intellectual “elites” all think they deserve status because they are the “best of the best.” After all they went to school and learned a few things, and now they might think they can tell everyone else where their thinking is deficient. I have a certain amount of sympathy for both sides in this argument. Intellectuals are picked to solve difficult problems because they know how to approach the problems. Folks that think difficult problems are solved by wishing them away may need another look at history.
We can’t pin the idea that some folks think they deserve high status on liberal intellectuals only. Not all intellectuals are liberal, difficult as it is to find a Republican we can call intellectual. Heads of American corporations (who can often be Republican) may think they are the “best of the best” and deserve the truly obscene amounts of money they earn in salary, bonuses, and deferred stock. The truth is that nothing they could possibly do in the course of a day would ever be worth such huge differentials in salary from the worker bees of the corporation. Frank is focused on the left in this book.
But enough about what I think. Frank’s view of the meritocracy does inform our debate. He notes Jacob Weisberg of the New Republic fretted about the
“increasingly cozy relationships between the press, law, academic and government” that he saw there. “There’s rarely been a time…when the governing elites in so many fields were made up of such a tight, hermetic and incestuous clique.”Aside from noting trenchant observations made by others, Frank’s criticisms can be sarcastic and without a remedy. He hits Massachusetts pretty hard (he makes it funny) for some of the pretty crazy political rhetoric about innovation and brain trust, and he sounds incredulous that all these smart people would believe their own hype. The truth is they probably don’t. They are aspiring, too.
Frank casts aspersions on “Liberal Gilt” (a useful and accurate descriptor) but what does he really think needs to be done in middle America where manufacturing has fled and farming is owned by four or five monopolists? If these folks aren’t worried enough to be heading back to some kind of schooling, then they’d better innovate without the schooling. Frank complains that liberals call this “reality.” My forehead wrinkles when I think of him trying to explain to me Trump’s plan to bring back coal jobs.
Frank is a liberal. He makes the excellent point that sometimes the ruling Democrats in Obama’s administration didn’t look widely enough for social innovators: most of Obama’s Cabinet and other advisors had east coast IV-league educations. There is a groupthink that goes along with this. Also, the incestuous relationship among the wealthy is unhealthy. Frank plays gadfly when it would have been a better book if he’d spoken with others about what to do with the jobless in Kansas if they don’t want to learn anything new. I frankly can’t see beyond education, IV-league or not.
He gives his main points in a YouTube video here.
October 25, 2022
I read this book first thing when it came out in 2016. I could not get anyone else to read it. One person said he had heard all this "ad nauseum." Too bad his candidate, Hillary, lost because the party had drifted so far away from where it used to be.
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How Democrats Lost the Working Class Vote
https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...
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How Democrats Lost the Working Class Vote
https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...
December 3, 2016
Wow. Even allowing for exaggeration (Frank, a truly outraged liberal, piles the vituperation on here with all the fury of a betrayed lover) this is a dismaying expose of the failures of the Democratic party. And I'll admit, to my shame, that I would probably have written him off as a disgruntled radical before last month's presidential election. That was an eye-opener, though, and now, along, I assume, with many others, I'm open to taking a closer look at where and how the Democrats lost credibility with so many of the union members and other blue collar workers who, until recently, were their faithful supporters. I listened to this as an audiobook, read by the author, and while that was a plus in that he reads with great expression and conviction (and he has a fine, clear voice), it was a drawback for pretty much the same reason (well, except the fine voice part). He does a lot of ranting, and he tends to go on and on about things long past the point where you want to say, “All right! I get it. Now can we move on?” If I'd been reading the book myself I'd have skimmed these places. But still...
His big point is that the Democrats have ignored the issue of income inequality, having written it off as an inescapable side effect of the “new economy,” and that their love these days is all for “professionals” (meaning, doctors, lawyers, bankers, and, most of all, technology entrepreneurs). Since I've tended to buy into the idea of the inevitability of the loss of certain industries and the need for education to help workers prepare for employment in new fields myself, I found his tirades more tolerable and even convicting than I normally would have. I definitely disagreed with him, or at least doubted him, on some points, but he gave me things to consider and to dig into more deeply.
The book's conclusion will give a better idea than my words of what Frank is on about.
”This book has been a catalog of the many ways the Democratic party has failed to tackle income inequality, even though that is the leading social issue of the times, and its many failures to get tough with the financial industry, even though Wall Street was the leading culprit in the global downturn and the slump that never ends. The larger message is that this is what it looks like when a leftish party loses its concern in working people, the traditional number one constituency for left parties the world over. But we should also acknowledge the views of the people for whom the Democrats are all you could ask for in a political party. I'm thinking here of the summertime residents on Martha's Vineyard. The sorts of people to whom the politicians listen with patience and understanding. No one treats this group as though they have “nowhere else to go.” On the contrary, for them the political process works wonderfully. It's responsive to their concerns, its representatives are respectful, and the party as a whole treats them with a gratifying deference. For them the Democrats deliver in all the conventional ways: generous subsidies for the right kinds of businesses, a favorable regulatory climate, and legal protections for their innovations...
While there are many great Democrats and many exceptions to the trends I've described in this book, by and large the story has been a disappointing one. We have surveyed this party's thoughts and deeds from the 70's to the present. We've watched them abandon whole classes and regions and industries, and we know now what the results have been. Their leadership faction has no intention of doing what the situation requires. It's time to face the obvious: that the direction that the Democrats have chosen to follow for the last few decades has been a failure for both the nation and for their own partisan health. Failure is admittedly a harsh word, but what else are we to call it when the left party in a system chooses to confront an epic economic breakdown by talking hopefully about entrepreneurship and innovation? When the party of professionals repeatedly falls for bad, self-serving ideas like bank deregulation, the creative class, and empowerment through microlending? When the party of the common man basically allows aristocracy to return?
Now, all political parties are alliances of groups with disparate interests, but the contradictions in the Democratic party coalition seem unusually sharp. The Democrats' posture as the “party of the people,” even as they dedicate themselves ever more resolutely to serving and glorifying the professional class. Worse, they combine self-righteousness and class privilege in a way that Americans find stomach turning. And every two years they simply assume that being non-Republican is sufficient to rally the voters of the nation to their standard. This cannot go on.”
This was published in March of 2016. Now, in early December, the Democratic party has been knocked down in a way that makes reevaluation of its priorities and positions seem more likely. And I hope it will. We need (at least) two viable parties in this country, and the diatribes of critics like Frank are a valuable check to easy assumptions about the “inevitabilities” of what “markets” or “the times” mandate. The long rants had me ready to give this three stars, but, then, it made me think about some things I've not given much thought to and I'm giving it four.
July 24, 2023
If you think the Democrat is the lesser of two evils, read this book and think again. Bill Clinton did far more damage than any Republican could have: NAFTA. Ending Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Vastly ballooning the prison population. Banking deregulation.
Obama is pushing the Trans-Pacific Partnership--treason: subordinating national law to international corporations' profit. Obamacare cleverly puts insurance companies on a "cost-plus" basis: by legislating that insurers can charge "only" $100 for every $80 they pay clinics on patients' behalf, insurance companies now have incentive to negotiate /higher/ medical bills! Obama in his Labor Day speech 2009 said, "the insurance industry . . . should be free to make a profit."
http://worleydervish.blogspot.com/200...
Brilliant rebuttal to the neoliberal attitude of the Clintons and Obama on medical care:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jng4T...
If you think Hillary is the responsible choice, think again. She has the ability to push through the TPP. To privatize Social Security--which Bill tried and failed to do.
For more of Hillary's true colors, see The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics, Dan Kaufman.
If Trump is elected, Democrats in Congress will oppose him on proposals to screw everyone else for the benefit of the rich. Only Democrats can accomplish this.
Vote Green. Read Thomas Frank's book to see why.
Hint: Here's where Democrats' money comes from: Same place Republicans' money comes from: https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspec...
April 9, 2016
I viewed Bill Clinton's presidency and the Clintons generally in a mostly positive light before picking this up. WOW. I didn't realize what a huge sellout Clinton was to working class people and people of color. It was a bit of a shock. After reading this, I feel a bit bad for laying all the blame for the financial collapse at the feet of Bush, which makes me a little sick to say, honestly. I thought the repeal of Glass_Steagall was a momentary lapse of judgement, or arm-twisting from Republicans.... No, it was Clinton's knob job to Wall St., his newfound political allies.
Thomas Frank, author of 'What's the Matter With Kansas' (another great book that, although written in 2005, is still VERY relevant today if one is looking to understand the type of "backlash" conservative thinking that has given rise to Trump and the Tea Party), has turned his razor sharp eye to the liberals. And what he's revealed will blow your hair back.
If you consider yourself a liberal, as do I, you HAVE TO read this book.
I'll just leave this right here, and quietly tip-toe out of the room...
“It is time to face the obvious: that the direction the Democrats have chosen to follow for the last few decades has been a failure for both the nation and for their own partisan health. “Failure” is admittedly a harsh word, but what else are we to call it when the left party in a system chooses to confront an epic economic breakdown by talking hopefully about entrepreneurship and innovation? When the party of professionals repeatedly falls for bad, self-serving ideas like bank deregulation, the “creative class,” and empowerment through bank loans? When the party of the common man basically allows aristocracy to return?”
Thomas Frank, author of 'What's the Matter With Kansas' (another great book that, although written in 2005, is still VERY relevant today if one is looking to understand the type of "backlash" conservative thinking that has given rise to Trump and the Tea Party), has turned his razor sharp eye to the liberals. And what he's revealed will blow your hair back.
If you consider yourself a liberal, as do I, you HAVE TO read this book.
I'll just leave this right here, and quietly tip-toe out of the room...
“It is time to face the obvious: that the direction the Democrats have chosen to follow for the last few decades has been a failure for both the nation and for their own partisan health. “Failure” is admittedly a harsh word, but what else are we to call it when the left party in a system chooses to confront an epic economic breakdown by talking hopefully about entrepreneurship and innovation? When the party of professionals repeatedly falls for bad, self-serving ideas like bank deregulation, the “creative class,” and empowerment through bank loans? When the party of the common man basically allows aristocracy to return?”
May 25, 2016
Some outlooks and observations that are factual and truthful to scale at the same time. A situation less rarely seen or heard by governmental policy or announcement of their appointed czars in over a decade.
If his (Frank's) purpose is to inform or to rabble rouse, regardless. The Democratic Party in most of the issues and liberal platform points of long past purposes and eventual incorporation into practical applications that actually worked for a PROGRESS? All of that ceased earlier than he designates here.
Most of the core trait to tolerate and be fair in actions for difference, both which were always evident in the Democratic party for my youth and middle age? GONE. I can remember when liberal meant to tolerate and be tolerant for "other". Not belittling for difference, nor attrition by bullying tactics a requirement of self-serving hubris and arrogance. And in applications? Those have been gone with the Dems for more than a couple decades. And now is the time for it to be noticed? The Democratic Party left the working man and woman, the middle class of strong family base, and traditional patriot citizens many years ago. It left them, they did not leave it. And where I live, that goes for both white and black patriot citizens. The ones who go to work.
Well, it hardly matters. Because those IN government have such elitist perceptions now that "common" words of English no longer mean the same as those exact words do to/for those who are NOT government employed or supported. The divide is wider than it has ever been in my lifetime. And it isn't only in income per year capita either.
If his (Frank's) purpose is to inform or to rabble rouse, regardless. The Democratic Party in most of the issues and liberal platform points of long past purposes and eventual incorporation into practical applications that actually worked for a PROGRESS? All of that ceased earlier than he designates here.
Most of the core trait to tolerate and be fair in actions for difference, both which were always evident in the Democratic party for my youth and middle age? GONE. I can remember when liberal meant to tolerate and be tolerant for "other". Not belittling for difference, nor attrition by bullying tactics a requirement of self-serving hubris and arrogance. And in applications? Those have been gone with the Dems for more than a couple decades. And now is the time for it to be noticed? The Democratic Party left the working man and woman, the middle class of strong family base, and traditional patriot citizens many years ago. It left them, they did not leave it. And where I live, that goes for both white and black patriot citizens. The ones who go to work.
Well, it hardly matters. Because those IN government have such elitist perceptions now that "common" words of English no longer mean the same as those exact words do to/for those who are NOT government employed or supported. The divide is wider than it has ever been in my lifetime. And it isn't only in income per year capita either.
May 6, 2021
A well worn but well-done diatribe against liberal establishment.
Frank uses both a scalpel and a hacksaw as he completely dismantles the myth of virtue from the democratic party and how it has moved away from being the party of the people to the slightly less right party of corporate interest. A profound observation for me was that the liberal class is the professional class. While quite obvious at face value, this statement explains so much. The liberal professional class has morphed the democratic party into a bunch of technocratic wonks who bask in their own meritocracy. One of the harsh natures of a meritocratic state is that there is no inter-class solidarity. Meritocracy can only exist in a state of inequality. If the liberal class is the meritocratic professional class, then those same people will perpetuate the economic machines that promote the differentiated classes.
The liberal class believes that education is a panacea to all social disparities. Armed with this belief, they apply theory over protest- constantly seeking to confirm their own ideology. The liberal class is obsessed with pining for consensus rather than disgust or protest against the non-functional process. All of this hand-wringing and virtue signaling has led to a very unfavorable outcome: complete abandonment of the working class. Rather than actually legislation that directly helps the working class (this includes non-white people btw), the liberal class only perpetuates its own class by buttressing itself with ivy league wonks who seek nonsense engineering like "innovation" or "creativity" without effecting any change. The liberal class flatters privilege rather than condemns it. The virtue quest is a distraction from neoliberal deregulation.
Frank offers an scathing if not retrospectively obvious critique of Bill Clinton. Clinton ensured vast market deregulation, creating NAFTA (which Frank claims has been disastrous for labor force power), racist crime bills (100:1 crack:cocaine), repealing the Glass-Steagall. Oh and btw, if he hadn't been embroiled by a sexual scandal, he very well may have privatized social security with his pal Newt Gingrich. Enter Obama and his claims of hope and change who did little to change anything with the opportunity to do so. Frank questions Obama's wall street bailouts, which could've been an opportunity to overhaul the entire financial system. While Obama did indeed institute AHA, which has been good for some Americas, it is an overwrought and bloated law which seeks to keep insurance companies very much at the head of the table. Hilary claimed to oppose NAFTA and TPP while running in 2008 and 2016 yet was involved in both of these trade deals. Hilary was a board of director for Walmart in the 1980s. She voted for the Iraq War. She is basically a neoconservative on par with McCain of Romney.
I could go on, but the point is clear: the democratic party is republican lite. It is a party that supports privatization, deregulation, social welfare austerity, racist crime bills, government surveillance, corporate monopolization and neoimperialism all while serving up the politics of inclusion to virtue signal as a grand distraction. Is it any wonder there is class resentment for democratic leaders? Is there any surprise that voters could be manipulated by a wall street demagogue claiming to dismantle the disastrous democrat policies of the last 30 years? The illusion is that we believe there is a difference between these two corporate, plutocratic parties. It goes without saying that republican policymaking has been even worse for the average American for the very reasons I've just outlined from the democratic establishment. The are two sides of the very same coin. The propaganda has devolved so much since the rise of Trumpism that it's got Americans to change our fear ideology from foreign terrorism to domestic culture wars. We fear and revile our ideologically opposite neighbor more than anything else now. If you believe that one party has inherently more virtue that the other, it's a sure bet you have been manipulated by propaganda.
We need a change. We need a new party. We need someone NORMAL who actually cares about the average American. While I'm certainly glad that the blatantly corrupt Trump is on his way out, I personally have no faith in the incoming Biden-elect to change anything. On to the next economic disaster...
Frank uses both a scalpel and a hacksaw as he completely dismantles the myth of virtue from the democratic party and how it has moved away from being the party of the people to the slightly less right party of corporate interest. A profound observation for me was that the liberal class is the professional class. While quite obvious at face value, this statement explains so much. The liberal professional class has morphed the democratic party into a bunch of technocratic wonks who bask in their own meritocracy. One of the harsh natures of a meritocratic state is that there is no inter-class solidarity. Meritocracy can only exist in a state of inequality. If the liberal class is the meritocratic professional class, then those same people will perpetuate the economic machines that promote the differentiated classes.
The liberal class believes that education is a panacea to all social disparities. Armed with this belief, they apply theory over protest- constantly seeking to confirm their own ideology. The liberal class is obsessed with pining for consensus rather than disgust or protest against the non-functional process. All of this hand-wringing and virtue signaling has led to a very unfavorable outcome: complete abandonment of the working class. Rather than actually legislation that directly helps the working class (this includes non-white people btw), the liberal class only perpetuates its own class by buttressing itself with ivy league wonks who seek nonsense engineering like "innovation" or "creativity" without effecting any change. The liberal class flatters privilege rather than condemns it. The virtue quest is a distraction from neoliberal deregulation.
Frank offers an scathing if not retrospectively obvious critique of Bill Clinton. Clinton ensured vast market deregulation, creating NAFTA (which Frank claims has been disastrous for labor force power), racist crime bills (100:1 crack:cocaine), repealing the Glass-Steagall. Oh and btw, if he hadn't been embroiled by a sexual scandal, he very well may have privatized social security with his pal Newt Gingrich. Enter Obama and his claims of hope and change who did little to change anything with the opportunity to do so. Frank questions Obama's wall street bailouts, which could've been an opportunity to overhaul the entire financial system. While Obama did indeed institute AHA, which has been good for some Americas, it is an overwrought and bloated law which seeks to keep insurance companies very much at the head of the table. Hilary claimed to oppose NAFTA and TPP while running in 2008 and 2016 yet was involved in both of these trade deals. Hilary was a board of director for Walmart in the 1980s. She voted for the Iraq War. She is basically a neoconservative on par with McCain of Romney.
I could go on, but the point is clear: the democratic party is republican lite. It is a party that supports privatization, deregulation, social welfare austerity, racist crime bills, government surveillance, corporate monopolization and neoimperialism all while serving up the politics of inclusion to virtue signal as a grand distraction. Is it any wonder there is class resentment for democratic leaders? Is there any surprise that voters could be manipulated by a wall street demagogue claiming to dismantle the disastrous democrat policies of the last 30 years? The illusion is that we believe there is a difference between these two corporate, plutocratic parties. It goes without saying that republican policymaking has been even worse for the average American for the very reasons I've just outlined from the democratic establishment. The are two sides of the very same coin. The propaganda has devolved so much since the rise of Trumpism that it's got Americans to change our fear ideology from foreign terrorism to domestic culture wars. We fear and revile our ideologically opposite neighbor more than anything else now. If you believe that one party has inherently more virtue that the other, it's a sure bet you have been manipulated by propaganda.
We need a change. We need a new party. We need someone NORMAL who actually cares about the average American. While I'm certainly glad that the blatantly corrupt Trump is on his way out, I personally have no faith in the incoming Biden-elect to change anything. On to the next economic disaster...
October 2, 2021
An incredibly well-researched account of how America's "Party of the People", severed its connection with workers and average Americans, choosing to court (and flatter, and appease) Wall Street and Silicon Valley instead, abandoning Keynesianism for neoliberalism in the process. This means Thomas Frank's account begins with the Humphrey and McGovern campaigns of 1968 and 1972 respectively, and ends just before Hilary Clinton goes on national TV and chides her base about expecting too much and ripping one from the "Basket of Deplorables" (something subsequently not appreciated the working class her party had abandoned) who were already in the bag for Donald J. Trump.
As thoroughly documented as this narrative is, it is none the less proud to fly its partisan flag—progressive-wing Dem Mr. Frank refuses to hide behind faux-"neutral" journalistic conventions, and freely shares his own biases and even examines them when warranted. His candor was most welcome, I think, as was his tone, which treads a fine balance between exasperated, tenacious, dyspeptic, quixotic, and despairing.
The problem, as Frank sees it at one point, is "I've got the wrong liberalism": raised to expect a Democratic party that was connected, however tentatively and intermittently, to the achievements of Roosevelt's depression-era New Deal, instead he becomes a spectator at the dismantling of the welfare state, the rise of the prison-industrial complex, and the enshrining of corporate rights (with NAFTA, Citizens United, etc. etc.) at the expense of those of workers, the environment and life as we once knew it.
That this was all the work of establishment Democrats and not some bogey-ish Republican Party (who did help the process along, of course) will come as a surprise to many liberals, who by the end of the book will surely cry foul over what has been done in their name. At least, I hope they will, as it will be fairly hard for them to argue with all the facts on display here concerning the Obama, Clinton, and even the Carter administrations. It ain't a pretty sight, folks. (some deets are in my updates, but really, you'll have to read the book to get the bleak, bleaker, bleakest picture of the timeline in full…)
But the real problem is the college-educated Liberal class itself, which sees itself as somehow above reproach and as the champion of (inevitable) historical Progress. Also known as the technocratic PMC or Professional Managerial Class, it arrogates to itself a veneer of virtue and of earned merit, even as it rigs its so-called "meritocracy" to insure its own self-reproduction.
A fitting companion to similarly searing works by Curtis White and Chris Hedges, this book will show you how we got from "there" (full employment, a social safety net, a comparatively-tamed Wall St.) to "here" (that opioid- and gambling-addicted/hopelessly-indebted/pornified dystopia detailed most fully in Hedges' own America: The Farewell Tour)
Highly recommended, with one star-reducing caveat: it focuses solely on U.S. politics, and misses a giant opportunity to forge links with the political histories of similar western nations, such as the capitulation of Germany's Schroeder and Britain's Blair to the "inevitability" of globalized neoliberalism at just about the same time. For example, didya know that, just as chairperson Bill Clinton instructed the Democratic Leadership Council to sever all ties with New Deal-ism in 1990, in that very same year Mr. Blair displayed that audacity of hope when, in the pages for Socialism Today no less, he celebrated the ubiquity and naturalism (and lifts-all-boatsism) of the capital-M "Market"... Surely such synchronicity deserves, at the very least, an invisible and inaudible hand!
As thoroughly documented as this narrative is, it is none the less proud to fly its partisan flag—progressive-wing Dem Mr. Frank refuses to hide behind faux-"neutral" journalistic conventions, and freely shares his own biases and even examines them when warranted. His candor was most welcome, I think, as was his tone, which treads a fine balance between exasperated, tenacious, dyspeptic, quixotic, and despairing.
The problem, as Frank sees it at one point, is "I've got the wrong liberalism": raised to expect a Democratic party that was connected, however tentatively and intermittently, to the achievements of Roosevelt's depression-era New Deal, instead he becomes a spectator at the dismantling of the welfare state, the rise of the prison-industrial complex, and the enshrining of corporate rights (with NAFTA, Citizens United, etc. etc.) at the expense of those of workers, the environment and life as we once knew it.
That this was all the work of establishment Democrats and not some bogey-ish Republican Party (who did help the process along, of course) will come as a surprise to many liberals, who by the end of the book will surely cry foul over what has been done in their name. At least, I hope they will, as it will be fairly hard for them to argue with all the facts on display here concerning the Obama, Clinton, and even the Carter administrations. It ain't a pretty sight, folks. (some deets are in my updates, but really, you'll have to read the book to get the bleak, bleaker, bleakest picture of the timeline in full…)
But the real problem is the college-educated Liberal class itself, which sees itself as somehow above reproach and as the champion of (inevitable) historical Progress. Also known as the technocratic PMC or Professional Managerial Class, it arrogates to itself a veneer of virtue and of earned merit, even as it rigs its so-called "meritocracy" to insure its own self-reproduction.
A fitting companion to similarly searing works by Curtis White and Chris Hedges, this book will show you how we got from "there" (full employment, a social safety net, a comparatively-tamed Wall St.) to "here" (that opioid- and gambling-addicted/hopelessly-indebted/pornified dystopia detailed most fully in Hedges' own America: The Farewell Tour)
Highly recommended, with one star-reducing caveat: it focuses solely on U.S. politics, and misses a giant opportunity to forge links with the political histories of similar western nations, such as the capitulation of Germany's Schroeder and Britain's Blair to the "inevitability" of globalized neoliberalism at just about the same time. For example, didya know that, just as chairperson Bill Clinton instructed the Democratic Leadership Council to sever all ties with New Deal-ism in 1990, in that very same year Mr. Blair displayed that audacity of hope when, in the pages for Socialism Today no less, he celebrated the ubiquity and naturalism (and lifts-all-boatsism) of the capital-M "Market"... Surely such synchronicity deserves, at the very least, an invisible and inaudible hand!
March 14, 2016
Every Democrat needs to read this book. Period.
May 28, 2017
Those of us who voted Democratic in the recent election are, right about now, harboring multiple and simultaneous thoughts. One of them is: I told you so. Another one is: holy shit.
Another thought (and it may, unfortunately, only be plaguing a cross-section of Democrats who voted in the last election) is: we fucked up.
My “we” here is an all-inclusive we that includes all Democratic politicians, including all past Democratic presidents since 1992 (you know who you are, Bill and Barack), and anyone and everyone who either identifies as a Democrat or tends to primarily vote Democratic. Obviously, this includes myself, so don’t think that I’m letting myself off the hook here. We all share the collective blame for getting us into this mess.
It goes without saying what I am referring to when I say “fucked up”, but this is perhaps an erroneous assumption. Clearly, the fact that we fucked up doesn’t go without saying because there are still many Democrats and liberal pundits who have put the blame on just about everyone else---James Comey, Bernie Sanders, every third-party nominee, Donald Trump, Russia, lazy journalism, the existence of private email servers, Satan---except for themselves.
It’s time to face reality, though: We Democrats are to blame for this mess. Granted, this doesn’t mean that certain other parties didn’t also contribute to the mess, but the majority of blame belongs to us. We need to own it, accept it, and deal with it if we are going to make the Democratic party a viable party ever again.
This is the basic take-away of Thomas Frank’s scathing, cringe-worthy, spot-on indictment of the Democratic party---a party that was once the party of the working man (and woman) but, sadly no more---in his new book “Listen, Liberal, or Whatever Happened to the Party of the People?”.
In a nutshell, somewhere between FDR’s New Deal and the present, Democrats stopped giving a shit about the people that were their own base (lower middle class, working class, poor people), shifted away from the far-left liberalism of the past, and started courting the very people they once considered the Enemy (Big Business, Banks, Wall Street).
All of this has led to a large section of the populace who feels utterly disenfranchised for one very good reason: they are utterly disenfranchised. Nobody has their back now, and the few politicians who do try to stand up for these people face powerful opposing forces from both parties. Democrats who claim to speak for the poor, the homeless, the people who have slipped through the cracks of social welfare are, more often than not, paying lip service to a humanitarian ideal in which they don’t really believe.
Frank has done thorough research, committed himself to being objective, and has published a cogent argument in “Listen, Liberal”. It is a must-read for anyone who considers him or herself a liberal as well as a loyal Democrat.
Perhaps Frank says it best: “It is time to face the obvious: that the direction the Democrats have chosen to follow for the last few decades has been a failure for both the nation and for their own partisan health. “Failure” is admittedly a harsh word, but what else are we to call it when the left party in a system chooses to confront an epic economic breakdown by talking hopefully about entrepreneurship and innovation? When the party of professionals repeatedly falls for bad, self-serving ideas like bank deregulation, the “creative class”, and empowerment through bank loans? When the party of the common man basically allows aristocracy to return? (p. 255-256)”
Another thought (and it may, unfortunately, only be plaguing a cross-section of Democrats who voted in the last election) is: we fucked up.
My “we” here is an all-inclusive we that includes all Democratic politicians, including all past Democratic presidents since 1992 (you know who you are, Bill and Barack), and anyone and everyone who either identifies as a Democrat or tends to primarily vote Democratic. Obviously, this includes myself, so don’t think that I’m letting myself off the hook here. We all share the collective blame for getting us into this mess.
It goes without saying what I am referring to when I say “fucked up”, but this is perhaps an erroneous assumption. Clearly, the fact that we fucked up doesn’t go without saying because there are still many Democrats and liberal pundits who have put the blame on just about everyone else---James Comey, Bernie Sanders, every third-party nominee, Donald Trump, Russia, lazy journalism, the existence of private email servers, Satan---except for themselves.
It’s time to face reality, though: We Democrats are to blame for this mess. Granted, this doesn’t mean that certain other parties didn’t also contribute to the mess, but the majority of blame belongs to us. We need to own it, accept it, and deal with it if we are going to make the Democratic party a viable party ever again.
This is the basic take-away of Thomas Frank’s scathing, cringe-worthy, spot-on indictment of the Democratic party---a party that was once the party of the working man (and woman) but, sadly no more---in his new book “Listen, Liberal, or Whatever Happened to the Party of the People?”.
In a nutshell, somewhere between FDR’s New Deal and the present, Democrats stopped giving a shit about the people that were their own base (lower middle class, working class, poor people), shifted away from the far-left liberalism of the past, and started courting the very people they once considered the Enemy (Big Business, Banks, Wall Street).
All of this has led to a large section of the populace who feels utterly disenfranchised for one very good reason: they are utterly disenfranchised. Nobody has their back now, and the few politicians who do try to stand up for these people face powerful opposing forces from both parties. Democrats who claim to speak for the poor, the homeless, the people who have slipped through the cracks of social welfare are, more often than not, paying lip service to a humanitarian ideal in which they don’t really believe.
Frank has done thorough research, committed himself to being objective, and has published a cogent argument in “Listen, Liberal”. It is a must-read for anyone who considers him or herself a liberal as well as a loyal Democrat.
Perhaps Frank says it best: “It is time to face the obvious: that the direction the Democrats have chosen to follow for the last few decades has been a failure for both the nation and for their own partisan health. “Failure” is admittedly a harsh word, but what else are we to call it when the left party in a system chooses to confront an epic economic breakdown by talking hopefully about entrepreneurship and innovation? When the party of professionals repeatedly falls for bad, self-serving ideas like bank deregulation, the “creative class”, and empowerment through bank loans? When the party of the common man basically allows aristocracy to return? (p. 255-256)”
May 17, 2017
This is a book-length essay about the massive failures of the Democratic Party over the last 40 years or so. It was written before the 2016 election, but makes that result much easier to understand. Frank's main point is that while Democrats give constant lip service to helping the middle-class and reducing inequality, their policies have done the opposite. The main reason, according to Frank, is that the party is run by one class of people (the "well-graduated" professional class) and naturally they enact policies that benefit their own class (instead of the top 1%, think top 10%).
This is not a partisan argument; Frank does not hesitate to say that the Republicans are even worse than the Democrats. But he makes a convincing argument that in a two-party system, if the left party gives up on implementing policies to help working people, the result will be a massive flow of wealth and power to those at the top, which is what we have seen.
This is not a partisan argument; Frank does not hesitate to say that the Republicans are even worse than the Democrats. But he makes a convincing argument that in a two-party system, if the left party gives up on implementing policies to help working people, the result will be a massive flow of wealth and power to those at the top, which is what we have seen.
March 5, 2017
Oh, sadness. Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal or Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? is a relatively short book but it took me forever to read because it made me sad, angry, and frustrated. Frank answers my other question about the 2016 election: why did so many Obama Democrats desert the party and vote for Trump? Frank supplies those answers with brutal honesty. I’m no longer surprised that Hillary Clinton lost; if the Democratic party didn’t have its head so far up its own ass, it would have known it was going to lose.
Throughout the first few chapters of this book, Frank outlines how the party of FDR and the “New Deal” gradually turned its back on its own constituency, the working class and poor, and now worship a new class: the professionals. While Republicans are the party of flag-waving patriotism and God, Democrats are now the party of wealthy liberal professionals. They care about protecting the civil rights of minorities and the LGBTQ community. The will fight for immigration reform. Syrian refugees are welcomed with open arms. The average American worker? Uh, fuck’em. Despite my utter disgust with this new Democratic party, I still (mostly) identify with it because I think all those things listed above are important. However, ignoring the plight of the average American worker is terrible—and where did it get us? With a crazy man for president whose trips to Mar-a-Lago have already cost the American tax payers over $10 million. A crazy man who, in response to the growing Russian scandal within his administration, now claims (via tweet, of course) that Obama wire-tapped Trump Tower a la Watergate. That’s insane, of course. It’s also an indication of how incredibly desperate American voters are that they voted for this lunatic—and how incredibly fucked up the Democratic party is: “The smart get richer and the dumb get…Republicans, I guess” (42).
Democrats now value meritocracy; you deserve to be in a higher social order due to your intelligence, your advanced education and your profession. You’ve earned your right to call yourself elite, thus you deserve all the rewards that go along with it: money, status, and a place near the top of the hierarchy. While Republican conservatism believes poor people are poor due to their lack of religion, loose morals, laziness and lack of gumption, Democratic liberals believe poor people are poor because they are stupid, uneducated, or (if they are educated) they didn’t attend a prestigious enough university: “That life doesn’t shower its blessings on people who can’t make the grade isn’t a shock or an injustice; it’s the way things out to be” (33). As for both parties, the concept of personal responsibility is why poor and working class are not winners; they’ve failed in either not working hard enough and living a moral life or they’re stupid and undereducated. Thus, both parties have abandoned the working class.
A good bit of Frank’s excellent book outlines the history of meritocracy and how the professional class (also known as the technocracy) took over the Democratic party—and how welcoming the Democratic party was. They had Big Business Republican envy and wanted some of that sweet, sweet money and status for themselves. Being the party of organized labor is a drag and smudged the professional class’s image of itself. Organized labor signifies low status (ewww…they work with their hands and maybe even sweat…gross!) and the idea of solidarity goes against the meritocracy ideal of individual excellence and specialized training. Frank lists the many weaknesses of the professional class ideology: highest status people aren’t necessarily the most creative/innovative thinkers, they defend and mindlessly obey authority and a given philosophy rather than question it, they shield insiders from accountability, they fall into the peril of orthodoxy—the master narrative that overrules original thoughts/ideas.
None of the last few Democratic presidents survive this book unscathed. Jimmy Carter, a president I’ve always had respect for (despite the fact that I was really too young to be aware of, or engaged in, presidential politics during his reign) is charged with the crime of the “rise of the yuppie” and meritocracy. He hated unions because he felt that they allowed workers to prosper without regard to merit. But Bill Clinton, a product of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), was the Democratic president who really made the idea of the New Democrat a reality. With the backing of the DLC, Clinton abandoned the Democratic party’s idea of fighting for economic inequality and ushered in an era that Republicans could be jealous of: NAFTA, crime bills, more prisons and harsher sentencing, welfare reform. He dramatically weakened the power of organized labor and increased income inequality. His “get tough on crime” stance and welfare “reform” overwhelmingly affected black Americans and poor mothers. (Later in the book, Frank again brings up the Clinton welfare reform and how much it hurt poor working class women and snidely compares that to Hillary’s “I love women and children” legacy.) Frank basically sums up Clinton’s effect on the working class and black Americans: “Toil hopelessly or go to prison: that is life at the bottom, thanks to Bill Clinton” (118). Clinton’s successful presidency marked the end of the Democrats as a party committed to working people and egalitarianism.
After Clinton came the rise of the technocrats and the idea that hipsters and counterculture are now the new elite:
Ah, our dearly departed Obama. Frank shows him no love either, for good reason. While Obama did somewhat revive the idea of the New Deal by creating a New Deal-style spending program, it wasn’t big enough to really help. He also allowed Wall Street to operate much as before, wasting an opportunity to reconfigure/downsize the large banks that brought America (not to mention THE WORLD) to the brink of financial ruin. “But in terms of deeds, the Obama administration repeatedly sacrificed working people’s interests in the service of some greater goal, or for what Washington called ‘optics,’ or for no discernable reason at all” (147). Chapters 7 and 8 are a depressing examination of “what could have been.” Obama had the power and the forces of history with him, but he failed to enact legislation that could have done much for the working people and lessened Wall Street’s power and influence. When faced with a choice between the average citizen and the interests of elites, Obama always chose the elites.
If you’re under the impression that innovation is a 100% awesome great thing, think again. Frank bursts that bubble as well. He explains innovation as the rise of the technocrat, the great thinkers at Google and Facebook and the “sharing economy.” It’s all about shiny and new ways to screw over working people:
And now we have the shredding of Hillary. Frank is merciless, again with good cause. He gives many examples of how her values change depending on the circumstances. When she launched her campaign in 2015, she talked a lot about income inequality and slashing CEO pay. Were the financial elites worried? Hell, no. They knew it was just politics: “That those financiers and hedge fund managers do not actually find Hillary’s populism menacing is a well-established fact. Barack Obama’s mild rebukes caused Wall Street to explode in fury and self-pity back in 2009 and 2010; the financiers pouted and cried and picked up their campaign donations and went home. But Hillary’s comments provoke no such reaction” (218). Hillary has a firm belief in meritocracy, one of the few unchanging beliefs she doesn’t waver on. She also doesn’t waver on the idea that the liberal class is “good” and stands for “good” things. Frank introduces the virtuous self-righteousness of liberals, a characteristic that conservatives love to hate: “Nothing is more characteristic of the liberal class than its members’ sense of their own elevated goodness. It is a feeling that overrides any particular inconsistency or policy failing…It is more rarefied than that, a combination of virtue and pedigree, a matter of educational accomplishment, of taste, of status…of professionalism” (224). This class of professional liberals are always on the hunt for a righteous cause; enter the “virtue-quest.”
The virtue-quest is the hunt for the virtue-object: people and ideas whose surplus goodness can be extracted for deployment elsewhere (228). Some examples: children (It Takes a Village), Internet freedom, third-world female business entrepreneurs, and the Hillary Doctrine (supporting/defending the rights of women and girls across the world). Frank defines “virtue-quests” as the Democratic version of the Republican party’s Culture Wars:
Listen, Liberal is a devastating examination of how the Democratic party has not only abandoned working people, but made their lives incredibly more difficult. I’ve tried to cover the highlights (or lowpoints) but, as with Strangers in their Own Land, it’s best that you read the book yourself. Implicit throughout this whole book is the idea that you should know not just your candidates, but the party you support. I knew that the Democratic party was very Republican in its support of Big Business, Big Banks and Big Profits and its close ties to Wall Street, but I didn’t know why or the history of it all. Now I know at least a chunk of it—and what a horror story it is. This Democratic party that gives lip service to income inequality while throwing its strong support behind the wealthy liberal professional class cannot survive—and the defeat of Hillary and the victory of Trump quite possibly is its death. I hope so. This party’s worshipful idealization of the wealthy professional class is insane. Education is important, but it shouldn’t grant you an elite status, no matter how prestigious the institution. America needs working people and no party—Democratic or Republican—should spit on them.
Throughout the first few chapters of this book, Frank outlines how the party of FDR and the “New Deal” gradually turned its back on its own constituency, the working class and poor, and now worship a new class: the professionals. While Republicans are the party of flag-waving patriotism and God, Democrats are now the party of wealthy liberal professionals. They care about protecting the civil rights of minorities and the LGBTQ community. The will fight for immigration reform. Syrian refugees are welcomed with open arms. The average American worker? Uh, fuck’em. Despite my utter disgust with this new Democratic party, I still (mostly) identify with it because I think all those things listed above are important. However, ignoring the plight of the average American worker is terrible—and where did it get us? With a crazy man for president whose trips to Mar-a-Lago have already cost the American tax payers over $10 million. A crazy man who, in response to the growing Russian scandal within his administration, now claims (via tweet, of course) that Obama wire-tapped Trump Tower a la Watergate. That’s insane, of course. It’s also an indication of how incredibly desperate American voters are that they voted for this lunatic—and how incredibly fucked up the Democratic party is: “The smart get richer and the dumb get…Republicans, I guess” (42).
Democrats now value meritocracy; you deserve to be in a higher social order due to your intelligence, your advanced education and your profession. You’ve earned your right to call yourself elite, thus you deserve all the rewards that go along with it: money, status, and a place near the top of the hierarchy. While Republican conservatism believes poor people are poor due to their lack of religion, loose morals, laziness and lack of gumption, Democratic liberals believe poor people are poor because they are stupid, uneducated, or (if they are educated) they didn’t attend a prestigious enough university: “That life doesn’t shower its blessings on people who can’t make the grade isn’t a shock or an injustice; it’s the way things out to be” (33). As for both parties, the concept of personal responsibility is why poor and working class are not winners; they’ve failed in either not working hard enough and living a moral life or they’re stupid and undereducated. Thus, both parties have abandoned the working class.
A good bit of Frank’s excellent book outlines the history of meritocracy and how the professional class (also known as the technocracy) took over the Democratic party—and how welcoming the Democratic party was. They had Big Business Republican envy and wanted some of that sweet, sweet money and status for themselves. Being the party of organized labor is a drag and smudged the professional class’s image of itself. Organized labor signifies low status (ewww…they work with their hands and maybe even sweat…gross!) and the idea of solidarity goes against the meritocracy ideal of individual excellence and specialized training. Frank lists the many weaknesses of the professional class ideology: highest status people aren’t necessarily the most creative/innovative thinkers, they defend and mindlessly obey authority and a given philosophy rather than question it, they shield insiders from accountability, they fall into the peril of orthodoxy—the master narrative that overrules original thoughts/ideas.
None of the last few Democratic presidents survive this book unscathed. Jimmy Carter, a president I’ve always had respect for (despite the fact that I was really too young to be aware of, or engaged in, presidential politics during his reign) is charged with the crime of the “rise of the yuppie” and meritocracy. He hated unions because he felt that they allowed workers to prosper without regard to merit. But Bill Clinton, a product of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), was the Democratic president who really made the idea of the New Democrat a reality. With the backing of the DLC, Clinton abandoned the Democratic party’s idea of fighting for economic inequality and ushered in an era that Republicans could be jealous of: NAFTA, crime bills, more prisons and harsher sentencing, welfare reform. He dramatically weakened the power of organized labor and increased income inequality. His “get tough on crime” stance and welfare “reform” overwhelmingly affected black Americans and poor mothers. (Later in the book, Frank again brings up the Clinton welfare reform and how much it hurt poor working class women and snidely compares that to Hillary’s “I love women and children” legacy.) Frank basically sums up Clinton’s effect on the working class and black Americans: “Toil hopelessly or go to prison: that is life at the bottom, thanks to Bill Clinton” (118). Clinton’s successful presidency marked the end of the Democrats as a party committed to working people and egalitarianism.
After Clinton came the rise of the technocrats and the idea that hipsters and counterculture are now the new elite:
The connection between counterculture and corporate power was a typical assertion of the New Economy era, and what it implied was that rebellion was not about overturning elites, it was about encouraging business enterprise…Wherever you once found alternative and even adversarial culture, today you find people of merit and money and status. And, of course, you also find Democrats…For liberal thinkers, Wall Street was the place where money, merit, and morality came together (126-7).The idea that Wall Street is a place of merit and morality is chilling. Of course, that depends on your idea of morality. For the wealthy liberal class, creative people were to be celebrated; artists and intellectuals are a part of this group, but most important are technology people and people with advanced degrees, the experts of their chosen fields. This liberal class isn’t concerned with religious faith or traditional Christian values. They worship the very smart and the very rich. Frank’s guide to the self-righteous views of these liberals: Republicans favor the “wrong” rich (pollution-causing “old” industries) and Democrats favor the “right” rich (technology and professionals). The idea of combating income inequality isn’t even a concept to either party because (as you know) poor people deserve their fate.
Ah, our dearly departed Obama. Frank shows him no love either, for good reason. While Obama did somewhat revive the idea of the New Deal by creating a New Deal-style spending program, it wasn’t big enough to really help. He also allowed Wall Street to operate much as before, wasting an opportunity to reconfigure/downsize the large banks that brought America (not to mention THE WORLD) to the brink of financial ruin. “But in terms of deeds, the Obama administration repeatedly sacrificed working people’s interests in the service of some greater goal, or for what Washington called ‘optics,’ or for no discernable reason at all” (147). Chapters 7 and 8 are a depressing examination of “what could have been.” Obama had the power and the forces of history with him, but he failed to enact legislation that could have done much for the working people and lessened Wall Street’s power and influence. When faced with a choice between the average citizen and the interests of elites, Obama always chose the elites.
If you’re under the impression that innovation is a 100% awesome great thing, think again. Frank bursts that bubble as well. He explains innovation as the rise of the technocrat, the great thinkers at Google and Facebook and the “sharing economy.” It’s all about shiny and new ways to screw over working people:
Many of our most vaunted innovations are simply methods—electronic or otherwise—of pulling off some age-old profit-maximizing maneuver by new and unregulated means. Sometimes they are designed to accomplish things that would be regulated or even illegal under other circumstances, or else they are designed to alter relationships of economic power in some ingenious way—to strip away this or that protection from workers or copyholders, for example (209).
And now we have the shredding of Hillary. Frank is merciless, again with good cause. He gives many examples of how her values change depending on the circumstances. When she launched her campaign in 2015, she talked a lot about income inequality and slashing CEO pay. Were the financial elites worried? Hell, no. They knew it was just politics: “That those financiers and hedge fund managers do not actually find Hillary’s populism menacing is a well-established fact. Barack Obama’s mild rebukes caused Wall Street to explode in fury and self-pity back in 2009 and 2010; the financiers pouted and cried and picked up their campaign donations and went home. But Hillary’s comments provoke no such reaction” (218). Hillary has a firm belief in meritocracy, one of the few unchanging beliefs she doesn’t waver on. She also doesn’t waver on the idea that the liberal class is “good” and stands for “good” things. Frank introduces the virtuous self-righteousness of liberals, a characteristic that conservatives love to hate: “Nothing is more characteristic of the liberal class than its members’ sense of their own elevated goodness. It is a feeling that overrides any particular inconsistency or policy failing…It is more rarefied than that, a combination of virtue and pedigree, a matter of educational accomplishment, of taste, of status…of professionalism” (224). This class of professional liberals are always on the hunt for a righteous cause; enter the “virtue-quest.”
The virtue-quest is the hunt for the virtue-object: people and ideas whose surplus goodness can be extracted for deployment elsewhere (228). Some examples: children (It Takes a Village), Internet freedom, third-world female business entrepreneurs, and the Hillary Doctrine (supporting/defending the rights of women and girls across the world). Frank defines “virtue-quests” as the Democratic version of the Republican party’s Culture Wars:
It’s an imitation of politics of politics. It feels political, yes: it’s highly moralistic, it sets up an easy melodrama of good versus bad, it allows you to make all kinds of judgments about people you disagree with, but ultimately it’s a diversion, a way of avoiding any sincere discussion of the policies in question. The virtue-quest is an exciting moral crusade that seems to be extremely important but at the conclusion of which you discover you’ve got little to show for it besides NAFTA, bank deregulation, and a prison spree (228).Frank links the idea of the virtue-quest to the Hillary Doctrine and the failure of microlending—another innovation that, in the end, screws over poor people while the banks prosper. “Microlending is a perfect expression of Clintonism, bringing together wealthy financial interests with rhetoric that sounds outrageously idealistic. Microlending permits all manner of networking, virtue-seeking, and profit-taking among the lenders while doing nothing to change actual power relations—the ultimate win-win” (236).
Listen, Liberal is a devastating examination of how the Democratic party has not only abandoned working people, but made their lives incredibly more difficult. I’ve tried to cover the highlights (or lowpoints) but, as with Strangers in their Own Land, it’s best that you read the book yourself. Implicit throughout this whole book is the idea that you should know not just your candidates, but the party you support. I knew that the Democratic party was very Republican in its support of Big Business, Big Banks and Big Profits and its close ties to Wall Street, but I didn’t know why or the history of it all. Now I know at least a chunk of it—and what a horror story it is. This Democratic party that gives lip service to income inequality while throwing its strong support behind the wealthy liberal professional class cannot survive—and the defeat of Hillary and the victory of Trump quite possibly is its death. I hope so. This party’s worshipful idealization of the wealthy professional class is insane. Education is important, but it shouldn’t grant you an elite status, no matter how prestigious the institution. America needs working people and no party—Democratic or Republican—should spit on them.
November 21, 2016
This book was recommended to me by a Bernie bro online when I said I wasgoing to vote for Hillary Clinton and that she's really very good, not the evil witch monster misogynists on both the right and left enjoy painting her as. I'm the sort of person who actually reads the book recommendations of those who disagree with me, so I immediately took this book from the library.
Did I learn anything new from it? Not exactly. But I did find it very interesting and I don't necessarily disagree with Frank on his major points. The Democrats do indeed have corporate ties with certain corporations that they see as the good, futuristic, and innovative, like Google. They do promote education as the solution to many if not all of society's ills, which by necessity leaves behind anyone who for whatever reason cannot or will not pursue higher education. Higher education does not, in fact, guarantee a good living to people the way that union jobs in the past once did. These are all important points. It hadn't really occured to me before to consider this race for more education in a negative light. Even Bernie Sanders was big on promoting higher education, campaigning on debt-free college for students. So I'm not so sure that Bernie is any different from any other meritocracy-loving Democrat.
What this book doesn't do is give any ideas for solutions to these problems. Should Democrats support unions? Yes, I think they should, but I'm not sure their support of unions would do anything to prevent these jobs from disappearing. Should Democrats stop talking about intelligence and education as main qualifiers for people and ideas? Yeah, probably. As we've learned from Trump, intelligence, education, and truth are not important. My feeling at this moment is that people on the left need to take on right wing methods. We need to stop being obsessed with accuracy and instead embrace not-entirely-true things that feel true and can spread. Every time a conservative gets upset at being called racist or misogynist, we need to mock them by saying things like, "Oh, does the conservative crybaby need to go back to her safe space where no one will say anything politically incorrect to offend her?" We need to be out in the streets fighting this administration who lost the vote and won the election. Does the book speak to any of these things? No, of course not. It's content to just say Democrats are as bad as Republicans and ignore the reality that though the Democrats have indeed embraced some conservative measures and Obama did indeed fail to legally pursue Wall Street people who caused the economic collapse, the reason Bill Clinton moved to the right after his first year in office is because he literally could not get anything passed. His presidency was shaping up to be a failure because Republicans got him sidetracked with gays in the military and they were gearing up to impeach him from the start. Should he not have moved to the right to get that budget passed? Maybe not, but I'm not sure what else he could have done.
One thing I do think, though, is that if Bill had listened to Hillary, he would have done better. I think Hillary would have been the best president we've ever seen. She knew what she was doing better than anyone. If she'd never married Bill, she would have been president long ago.
The truth is, the world is fucked. We are destroying the environment and barely anyone seems to be willing to put down their bacon cheeeseburger to save it. Trump means it will be fucked sooner. Hillary could have maybe brought us into a Star Trek future, but almost half of voters chose Idiocracy instead. Would a more populist position have prevented this? I don't really think so. I think no matter what Hillary did, she'd be painted as evil for it because that's how deeply-rooted misogyny works. I'm not claiming that Democrats are perfect by any stretch, but if you want to change the Democrats, you'd better fill every level of government with left-wing populists. Except left-wing populism isn't as popular as people like Frank have blind faith that it is. The masses prefer right-wing populism that doesn't have to make sense, be rooted in reality, or cause anyone to have to think. So, am I one of Frank's meritocracy-loving Democratic elite? Maybe, but I don't have a college degree and I don't work in a meritocracy field (currently, I am a babysitter and a lice-comber [that is, I comb lice out of people's hair] for a living). But I'm literate and I have a Goodreads goal of 60 books for this year, which I am on track to achieve. So, I don't know.
Frank may be right about a lot of things, but I need solutions, not a litany of complaints. His historical remembering of the Clinton presidency is incomplete, but at the same time, I agree with much of his analysis. He doesn't seem to recall Clinton's first year or the way that Democrats had lost the '88 election by being painted as soft on crime. But whatever. We all have our limited lenses we see things through. My lense tells me that the left needs to dumb itself down and embrace Colbert's "truthiness." We need to push and push and push on things that feel true though they may not be true, like Trump being a rapist and saying that women shouldn't be allowed to wear shoes without their husband's permission, just like the right pushes and pushes on fake ass irrelevant shit like emails and Benghazi. We need to block every supreme court nominee until Trump picks Merrick Garland and we need to pursue impeachment at every turn. We need to call our Democratic representatives and tell them there is no longer anything to lose so there's no reason to take shitty compromises or to give in in any way. We need to be as tough and ruthless as they are. Frankly, I'm thinking I'll learn to shoot a gun and get an aresenal of weapons so they don't think we're easy pickings. Maybe you should do the same.
Did I learn anything new from it? Not exactly. But I did find it very interesting and I don't necessarily disagree with Frank on his major points. The Democrats do indeed have corporate ties with certain corporations that they see as the good, futuristic, and innovative, like Google. They do promote education as the solution to many if not all of society's ills, which by necessity leaves behind anyone who for whatever reason cannot or will not pursue higher education. Higher education does not, in fact, guarantee a good living to people the way that union jobs in the past once did. These are all important points. It hadn't really occured to me before to consider this race for more education in a negative light. Even Bernie Sanders was big on promoting higher education, campaigning on debt-free college for students. So I'm not so sure that Bernie is any different from any other meritocracy-loving Democrat.
What this book doesn't do is give any ideas for solutions to these problems. Should Democrats support unions? Yes, I think they should, but I'm not sure their support of unions would do anything to prevent these jobs from disappearing. Should Democrats stop talking about intelligence and education as main qualifiers for people and ideas? Yeah, probably. As we've learned from Trump, intelligence, education, and truth are not important. My feeling at this moment is that people on the left need to take on right wing methods. We need to stop being obsessed with accuracy and instead embrace not-entirely-true things that feel true and can spread. Every time a conservative gets upset at being called racist or misogynist, we need to mock them by saying things like, "Oh, does the conservative crybaby need to go back to her safe space where no one will say anything politically incorrect to offend her?" We need to be out in the streets fighting this administration who lost the vote and won the election. Does the book speak to any of these things? No, of course not. It's content to just say Democrats are as bad as Republicans and ignore the reality that though the Democrats have indeed embraced some conservative measures and Obama did indeed fail to legally pursue Wall Street people who caused the economic collapse, the reason Bill Clinton moved to the right after his first year in office is because he literally could not get anything passed. His presidency was shaping up to be a failure because Republicans got him sidetracked with gays in the military and they were gearing up to impeach him from the start. Should he not have moved to the right to get that budget passed? Maybe not, but I'm not sure what else he could have done.
One thing I do think, though, is that if Bill had listened to Hillary, he would have done better. I think Hillary would have been the best president we've ever seen. She knew what she was doing better than anyone. If she'd never married Bill, she would have been president long ago.
The truth is, the world is fucked. We are destroying the environment and barely anyone seems to be willing to put down their bacon cheeeseburger to save it. Trump means it will be fucked sooner. Hillary could have maybe brought us into a Star Trek future, but almost half of voters chose Idiocracy instead. Would a more populist position have prevented this? I don't really think so. I think no matter what Hillary did, she'd be painted as evil for it because that's how deeply-rooted misogyny works. I'm not claiming that Democrats are perfect by any stretch, but if you want to change the Democrats, you'd better fill every level of government with left-wing populists. Except left-wing populism isn't as popular as people like Frank have blind faith that it is. The masses prefer right-wing populism that doesn't have to make sense, be rooted in reality, or cause anyone to have to think. So, am I one of Frank's meritocracy-loving Democratic elite? Maybe, but I don't have a college degree and I don't work in a meritocracy field (currently, I am a babysitter and a lice-comber [that is, I comb lice out of people's hair] for a living). But I'm literate and I have a Goodreads goal of 60 books for this year, which I am on track to achieve. So, I don't know.
Frank may be right about a lot of things, but I need solutions, not a litany of complaints. His historical remembering of the Clinton presidency is incomplete, but at the same time, I agree with much of his analysis. He doesn't seem to recall Clinton's first year or the way that Democrats had lost the '88 election by being painted as soft on crime. But whatever. We all have our limited lenses we see things through. My lense tells me that the left needs to dumb itself down and embrace Colbert's "truthiness." We need to push and push and push on things that feel true though they may not be true, like Trump being a rapist and saying that women shouldn't be allowed to wear shoes without their husband's permission, just like the right pushes and pushes on fake ass irrelevant shit like emails and Benghazi. We need to block every supreme court nominee until Trump picks Merrick Garland and we need to pursue impeachment at every turn. We need to call our Democratic representatives and tell them there is no longer anything to lose so there's no reason to take shitty compromises or to give in in any way. We need to be as tough and ruthless as they are. Frankly, I'm thinking I'll learn to shoot a gun and get an aresenal of weapons so they don't think we're easy pickings. Maybe you should do the same.
February 5, 2017
My last birthday was the saddest ever. It coincided with Trump being elected president. Now he has entered office. How could this happen? True to myself, I've been trying to find the answer in books. First "Hillbilly Elegy", then "Just Mercy" and now this one, "Listen Liberal". Just the name and the cover with the pointing finger would have put me off really, but I got this recommended. Plus, in order to find answers to an unpleasant question, I must delve into issues my virtuous liberal self would rather avoid.
Thomas Frank claims that the Democratic Party has lost its appeal among the working class because they have done nothing to stem inequality in the past few decades. Instead the Democrats are enamoured by innovation and the professional class - the people with distinguished degrees. The ones who can't make it only have themselves to blame. That the system is set up in such a way that there is little way of "making it" unless you have money to start with, is completely disregarded. There is no safety net. The middle class has withered away. The poor are working three jobs to make ends meet, but are still considered "lazy" and the Democrats have done nothing to curb this development.
"Like so many other American scenes, this one is the product of decades of deindustrialization, engineered by Republicans and rationalized by Democrats. Fifty miles away, Boston is a roaring success, but the doctrine of prosperity that you see on every corner in Boston also serves to explain away the failrue you see on every corner in Fall River. This isa place where affluence never returns - not because affluence for Fall River is impossible or unimaginable, but because our country's leaders have blandly accepted a social order that constantly bids down the wages of people like these while bidding up the rewards for innovators, creatives and professionals."
A few pages later:
"Those who stil lcare about the war of Rs and Ds, Dion writes, are praciticing 'political rituals that haven't made sense since the 1980s, feathered tribesmen dancing around a god carved out of a tree trunk.'"
This is toward the end of the book. Thomas Frank has detailed the centrist politics of Bill Clinton first - who made conditions for the country's poorest far worse during his reign - to show how little the Democrats care for the working class and for combating inequality.
Here in Europe it's very easy to buy into the evil Republican and good Democrat narrative. We don't really see what happens at ground level. I had not idea that the two parties were so alike in the policies they implement and how both parties bow to the god of innovation and technological advances.
"Economies aren't ecosystems. They aren't naturally occuring phenomena to which we must learn to acclimate. Their rules are made by humans. They are, in a word, political. In a democracy we can set the economic table however we choose."
In the United States of America, that table has been set so that the rich become richer and poor become vermin. Of course, electing an uneducated bully such as Trump for president, is not going to solve the problem for the poor, not at all. I do see however, how he got the votes from the disgruntled, the people without hope, the people so sorely let down by elitist politicians.
Thomas Frank claims that the Democratic Party has lost its appeal among the working class because they have done nothing to stem inequality in the past few decades. Instead the Democrats are enamoured by innovation and the professional class - the people with distinguished degrees. The ones who can't make it only have themselves to blame. That the system is set up in such a way that there is little way of "making it" unless you have money to start with, is completely disregarded. There is no safety net. The middle class has withered away. The poor are working three jobs to make ends meet, but are still considered "lazy" and the Democrats have done nothing to curb this development.
"Like so many other American scenes, this one is the product of decades of deindustrialization, engineered by Republicans and rationalized by Democrats. Fifty miles away, Boston is a roaring success, but the doctrine of prosperity that you see on every corner in Boston also serves to explain away the failrue you see on every corner in Fall River. This isa place where affluence never returns - not because affluence for Fall River is impossible or unimaginable, but because our country's leaders have blandly accepted a social order that constantly bids down the wages of people like these while bidding up the rewards for innovators, creatives and professionals."
A few pages later:
"Those who stil lcare about the war of Rs and Ds, Dion writes, are praciticing 'political rituals that haven't made sense since the 1980s, feathered tribesmen dancing around a god carved out of a tree trunk.'"
This is toward the end of the book. Thomas Frank has detailed the centrist politics of Bill Clinton first - who made conditions for the country's poorest far worse during his reign - to show how little the Democrats care for the working class and for combating inequality.
Here in Europe it's very easy to buy into the evil Republican and good Democrat narrative. We don't really see what happens at ground level. I had not idea that the two parties were so alike in the policies they implement and how both parties bow to the god of innovation and technological advances.
"Economies aren't ecosystems. They aren't naturally occuring phenomena to which we must learn to acclimate. Their rules are made by humans. They are, in a word, political. In a democracy we can set the economic table however we choose."
In the United States of America, that table has been set so that the rich become richer and poor become vermin. Of course, electing an uneducated bully such as Trump for president, is not going to solve the problem for the poor, not at all. I do see however, how he got the votes from the disgruntled, the people without hope, the people so sorely let down by elitist politicians.
July 14, 2018
As Thomas Jefferson said, we must dream of an aristocracy of achievement arising out of a democracy of opportunity. As we move further away from that goal, we need to do more to change course, but we shouldn't just give up on the destination for the sake of throwing a mutiny.
This book delivers a valid critique of Obama-Clintonism (deregulation, incarceration, war, health system, etc.) but that is not new information. The new angle here is supposed to be a "diagnosis of the liberal malady." Frank blames the failures of the Democratic Party on a “class” of people he calls: professional, liberal, creative, expert, well-graduated, white-collar, etc. But I don’t buy it. I don't think there is a “class” of liberal professionals united in favor of the billionaires. For example, about half of American physicians support single-payer medical insurance. And I would guess that many professionals are, in any case, conservative.
A general theme of the book is to attack the concept of meritocracy: "Thus did meritocracy subvert reform." (p.166) This is very dangerous phraseology. Meritocracy is a good thing. What is the alternative: nepotism, hereditary monarchy, random selection of pilots & doctors, etc.? Our problem is not that we have a meritocracy that subverts policy. Our problem is that meritocracy has been subverted by a system that elevates ambitious phonies to positions of power.
This is not a question of my misunderstanding Frank’s sarcasm. Frank holds the “liberal class” to task for respecting expertise, but respecting actual expertise is a good thing. By using “merit” and “expertise” as insults because that’s how Obama talks about the phonies he hires is to fall for the propaganda.
This confusion extends to his argument against expanding access to college. Of course not everyone can be in the top 1%; only 1% can. But free state college for qualified students (what Bernie Sanders was proposing) means non-rich kids can go to good public universities like U. Michigan or Cal and not leave in massive debt. This is a good way to expand the middle class. Very cheap but very respectable public universities were a reality in my lifetime so it's not an impossible fairy tale. And people there can learn real stuff and obtain actual expertise.
The problem of what is going on at the Ivy League schools and what they select for is a whole other book, and is not particularly relevant to the Democratic Party, given that Trump and Bush and Bush all went to Ivies too.
This book delivers a valid critique of Obama-Clintonism (deregulation, incarceration, war, health system, etc.) but that is not new information. The new angle here is supposed to be a "diagnosis of the liberal malady." Frank blames the failures of the Democratic Party on a “class” of people he calls: professional, liberal, creative, expert, well-graduated, white-collar, etc. But I don’t buy it. I don't think there is a “class” of liberal professionals united in favor of the billionaires. For example, about half of American physicians support single-payer medical insurance. And I would guess that many professionals are, in any case, conservative.
A general theme of the book is to attack the concept of meritocracy: "Thus did meritocracy subvert reform." (p.166) This is very dangerous phraseology. Meritocracy is a good thing. What is the alternative: nepotism, hereditary monarchy, random selection of pilots & doctors, etc.? Our problem is not that we have a meritocracy that subverts policy. Our problem is that meritocracy has been subverted by a system that elevates ambitious phonies to positions of power.
This is not a question of my misunderstanding Frank’s sarcasm. Frank holds the “liberal class” to task for respecting expertise, but respecting actual expertise is a good thing. By using “merit” and “expertise” as insults because that’s how Obama talks about the phonies he hires is to fall for the propaganda.
This confusion extends to his argument against expanding access to college. Of course not everyone can be in the top 1%; only 1% can. But free state college for qualified students (what Bernie Sanders was proposing) means non-rich kids can go to good public universities like U. Michigan or Cal and not leave in massive debt. This is a good way to expand the middle class. Very cheap but very respectable public universities were a reality in my lifetime so it's not an impossible fairy tale. And people there can learn real stuff and obtain actual expertise.
The problem of what is going on at the Ivy League schools and what they select for is a whole other book, and is not particularly relevant to the Democratic Party, given that Trump and Bush and Bush all went to Ivies too.
July 8, 2016
Polemics should always be approached with caution.
The truth is that this book appeals to my political and social sensibilities. But it needs to be much more, it needs to reach out to the sceptics and the unconvinced and the out and out hostile, in order to do its work. And this height, I'm afraid, it doesn't quite reach.
It's a book about the Democratic Party and meritocracy and liberal...well, not quite hypocrisy (this is a subjective perception, after all), but certainly blindness. And the thrall of technology, technocraticism, innovation and the Bright App-Enabled future that feed into liberal thinking.
Given the rise in inequality, the tone deafness of the political class, the fragmentation of the political consensus, and the rise of the nativist (ie exclusive rather than inclusive) sentiment, one feels that these are straightforward targets. Still Listen, Liberal doesn't hit the spot as it should.
The first thing is that no one wants to be shouted at. Not even happy-clappy tech-enabled (and enriched) liberals. And this book does a lot of shouting. It is striking that there very little original research on the book. Lots of quotes from other books, reports and newspaper articles (ie, selective culling), but aside from the chapter about the logical conclusion to contemporaneous democratic/blue state thinking, there is little by way of *fact* that hasn't been said elsewhere, with a great deal more patience and the desire to convince. Lots of opinion. A fair amount of ad hominem attacks. But if anything, this embraces the tactics of the trial lawyer rather than the cool analytical head that is needed when you want to tell people (who don't recognise it) that they are pet of the problem, rather than part of the solution, as they believe.
The next is that the author, clearly, holds the democrats to a higher standard of behaviour than republicans. This is lazy. Not because the Democratic Party is supposed to be the party of the workers, but because it assumes that the viewpoint of the worker is always correct. This partisanship, where unjustified - and it sometimes is, believe it or not - ultimately leads to either cognitive dissonance or defending the indefensible. And either/both of these serve to undermine the excellent arguments advanced elsewhere in the book, about the stark inequality that personifies America today.
Tech-Utopianism and meritocratic thinking both get a good thrashing in the book, as do their champions - Clinton 42 and presumptive 45, and Obama 44. I think a lot of this resonates. But, nonetheless, really surprised to see that the author doesn't make the link between these forms of tone deafness (essentially, the presumption that our current age presents opportunities for all who can take them) and out obsession with economic growth at all costs. It may be that the author is stronger on political processes than economics, sociology and social thinking. But it's still a glaring gap in his thesis.
Ultimately, I think the principal weakness of the book is its essential incuriosity. If you think like me, then it's kinda easy to nod along and get angry as the author winds us up more and more. But this partisanship isn't what is needed. We don't need a state of the nation report. We need the 'why' to accompany the 'what'; why do the modern democrats reject the aggressive drive towards political and economic equality? Occasionally, the book brushes alongside deeper thinking about this - the thrall to meritocracy, a belief in ones own hype, the friction between economic and social freedoms - but he never stays long enough to make his case before starting to holler again.
Bottom line: I need a book on this subject, thoughtful and measured and convincing enough that I would want to buy it and gift it to my different-minded friends. To expand their vistas, encourage them to see the world from my PoV and perhaps ease them into a different way of thinking. (All these assuming that my PoV is the correct one, obvs. For the record, I don't think that. But i do think that my thinking should have a place in the broader discourse.) Anyway, this book won't - can't - be that book, because it does little to try and speak to a wider audience. And that is actually a shame and a waste.
The truth is that this book appeals to my political and social sensibilities. But it needs to be much more, it needs to reach out to the sceptics and the unconvinced and the out and out hostile, in order to do its work. And this height, I'm afraid, it doesn't quite reach.
It's a book about the Democratic Party and meritocracy and liberal...well, not quite hypocrisy (this is a subjective perception, after all), but certainly blindness. And the thrall of technology, technocraticism, innovation and the Bright App-Enabled future that feed into liberal thinking.
Given the rise in inequality, the tone deafness of the political class, the fragmentation of the political consensus, and the rise of the nativist (ie exclusive rather than inclusive) sentiment, one feels that these are straightforward targets. Still Listen, Liberal doesn't hit the spot as it should.
The first thing is that no one wants to be shouted at. Not even happy-clappy tech-enabled (and enriched) liberals. And this book does a lot of shouting. It is striking that there very little original research on the book. Lots of quotes from other books, reports and newspaper articles (ie, selective culling), but aside from the chapter about the logical conclusion to contemporaneous democratic/blue state thinking, there is little by way of *fact* that hasn't been said elsewhere, with a great deal more patience and the desire to convince. Lots of opinion. A fair amount of ad hominem attacks. But if anything, this embraces the tactics of the trial lawyer rather than the cool analytical head that is needed when you want to tell people (who don't recognise it) that they are pet of the problem, rather than part of the solution, as they believe.
The next is that the author, clearly, holds the democrats to a higher standard of behaviour than republicans. This is lazy. Not because the Democratic Party is supposed to be the party of the workers, but because it assumes that the viewpoint of the worker is always correct. This partisanship, where unjustified - and it sometimes is, believe it or not - ultimately leads to either cognitive dissonance or defending the indefensible. And either/both of these serve to undermine the excellent arguments advanced elsewhere in the book, about the stark inequality that personifies America today.
Tech-Utopianism and meritocratic thinking both get a good thrashing in the book, as do their champions - Clinton 42 and presumptive 45, and Obama 44. I think a lot of this resonates. But, nonetheless, really surprised to see that the author doesn't make the link between these forms of tone deafness (essentially, the presumption that our current age presents opportunities for all who can take them) and out obsession with economic growth at all costs. It may be that the author is stronger on political processes than economics, sociology and social thinking. But it's still a glaring gap in his thesis.
Ultimately, I think the principal weakness of the book is its essential incuriosity. If you think like me, then it's kinda easy to nod along and get angry as the author winds us up more and more. But this partisanship isn't what is needed. We don't need a state of the nation report. We need the 'why' to accompany the 'what'; why do the modern democrats reject the aggressive drive towards political and economic equality? Occasionally, the book brushes alongside deeper thinking about this - the thrall to meritocracy, a belief in ones own hype, the friction between economic and social freedoms - but he never stays long enough to make his case before starting to holler again.
Bottom line: I need a book on this subject, thoughtful and measured and convincing enough that I would want to buy it and gift it to my different-minded friends. To expand their vistas, encourage them to see the world from my PoV and perhaps ease them into a different way of thinking. (All these assuming that my PoV is the correct one, obvs. For the record, I don't think that. But i do think that my thinking should have a place in the broader discourse.) Anyway, this book won't - can't - be that book, because it does little to try and speak to a wider audience. And that is actually a shame and a waste.
April 25, 2016
5 stars for eloquent and polished style, presenting detailed, well researched history of how the Democratic Party turned away from FDR and the working class, to be captured by the Ivy League liberal elites and wall st. Minus 1 star from unrealistic bitterness and extending the callousness and "failing the working class" of Clinton to Obama. The country was not ready to turn away from Reagan in the 90's, and it is not clear that the Voting Majority is ready to do so today.
fav quotation: "This is what so many believe the ware between Ds and Rs comes down to: intellect versus ignorance; science versus faith; Harvard versus wherever it was that Sarah Palin went to collidge." His point is that Dems choosing elite technocratic positions has not helped their core working class constituents. And so yes, many of these voters have left for the Tea Party or stayed home.
A great book for Bernie supporters -- it maps where the Dem party must go, and chastises our thrall for professionals and experts, even when they are corrupt and self serving, while looking down on those they claim to represent. Yet, Bernie struggles to win a majority of Democrats, and it is not clear whether he wins a clear majority of Independents from a strong GOP candidate. He is good for America, without any doubt in my mind, but his crystal clear positions for some unfathomable reason don't draw voting majorities. Turnout is down.
This book did make me separate technocratic government (now ascendant in most western democracies) from the unabashed pro-society egalitarianism of FDR, which seems morally unsupportable now. I want to hear more calls for FDR values, and in 5, 10 years the political forces will come from the left, inevitably. Technology will give more people a voice, will increase the size of the pie while increasing inequality, and the jobs will not be there. Then Frank's time to shine will have arrived!
fav quotation: "This is what so many believe the ware between Ds and Rs comes down to: intellect versus ignorance; science versus faith; Harvard versus wherever it was that Sarah Palin went to collidge." His point is that Dems choosing elite technocratic positions has not helped their core working class constituents. And so yes, many of these voters have left for the Tea Party or stayed home.
A great book for Bernie supporters -- it maps where the Dem party must go, and chastises our thrall for professionals and experts, even when they are corrupt and self serving, while looking down on those they claim to represent. Yet, Bernie struggles to win a majority of Democrats, and it is not clear whether he wins a clear majority of Independents from a strong GOP candidate. He is good for America, without any doubt in my mind, but his crystal clear positions for some unfathomable reason don't draw voting majorities. Turnout is down.
This book did make me separate technocratic government (now ascendant in most western democracies) from the unabashed pro-society egalitarianism of FDR, which seems morally unsupportable now. I want to hear more calls for FDR values, and in 5, 10 years the political forces will come from the left, inevitably. Technology will give more people a voice, will increase the size of the pie while increasing inequality, and the jobs will not be there. Then Frank's time to shine will have arrived!
February 2, 2021
A really great look at how the Democratic Party in the U.S. has undergone a transformation in recent decades. Frank provides an objective look at the party in a way that is unbiased, not your usual us-vs-them politics, and does not fear-monger. Highly recommended for anyone interested in politics and modern history.
Read
August 6, 2016'Or, Whatever Happened To The Party Of The People' - I do love a good subtitle, and that's a beauty. To my knowledge I've not read Thomas Frank before, but I like the morbid glee with which he drills into the Democrats' failings, like some maniacal dentist tutting 'It'll have to come out' over pretty much every tooth, even while being careful to acknowledge that yes, obviously the Republicans are even worse. But that was the problem all along, wasn't it; here, as there, the party of the Left was so convinced its traditional base had nowhere else to go that it could make screwing them into a sign of its 'seriousness'. Bill Clinton's team even had a word for it, referring to deliberately picked fights with the unions or the civil rights lobby as 'counter-scheduling'. Despite which, despite presiding over massive (and racially imbalanced) increases in the prison population, despite the damage he did to social security programmes, he's still fondly remembered as somehow a man of the people. In reality, of course, he was a leading light of the very same tendency which sacrificed those people on the altar of big business and 'free trade' while making life so much easier and more lucrative for CEOs and their cronies (one particularly neat trick Frank uses with Bill is to substantiate these allegations not with quotes from Clinton's critics, but from his fans - biographers and columnists delighted at the distance he was putting between himself and the New Deal, say). But as Frank says, "There is really no contradiction between these. Lenience and forgiveness and joyous creativity for one group while the other gets a biblical-style beatdown - these things actually fit together quite nicely. Indeed, the ascendance of the first group requires that the second be lowered gradually into hell. When you take Clintonism all together, it makes sense, and the sense it makes has to do with social class."
This is, in short, a book which comes startlingly close to a Marxist analysis given its author was once a Republican student. Which only underscores how appalling the situation in the US has got, with deregulation for the rich, greater restriction and uncertainty for the poor, turning the latter into pretty much a helot class for the former. There's a bit of a misfiring passage early on where he describes the problem as the Democrats' capture by the professional class, essentially painting them as the bourgeoisie's party while the Republicans are capital's, and the proletariat have nobody. He then almost immediately has to row back from what he seems to realise is a bit close to the whole 'had enough of experts' line pedalled by the post-factual Right, admitting that he's quite happy to have his aeroplanes piloted only by professional pilots (while making no mention that, much like the blue-collar workers and the teachers, their profession has also been hollowed out by the mania for deregulation and 'competition' which only ever seems to benefit corporate profits, not the workers) and so forth. Really, it would be truer to say (as he later sort of does) that the Democrats are the party of new capital, the Republicans of old capital. But the overlapping point - that the new corporate-friendly Democrats appear enamoured with complexity in and of itself, perhaps exactly because it seems so very clever - is sound. He observes how complex and limited the Dodd-Frank legislation is compared to its much simpler and firmer predecessor in terms of keeping banks in line, Glass-Steagall (repealed, of course, by good old Bill Clinton). He notes how Obamacare, initially discussed in terms of something more statist and simple, gradually morphed into an incredibly convoluted system which, quelle surprise, left the insurance companies in an even stronger position. One of the most bitter chapters covers Hillary Clinton's beloved microfinance, how utterly ineffective it really is, and how it seems to serve mainly as a way of extending the banking system's tendrils to make sure they encompass every last Third World village. One thing which never becomes wholly clear is whether Frank thinks this is deliberate obfuscation by the headline lawmakers, or whether they're having the wool pulled over their eyes too by subordinates mindful of the revolving door between politics and big business.
Aside from discussion of the USA's overseas initiatives and the odd quote from London papers, this is very much a book about America; in particular, the line "An art scene isn't something that springs up before a city becomes affluent; generally speaking, it follows the money" is likely to draw hollow laughs from British readers. But when America sneezes, the world catches a cold, and while the timings may not match up exactly it's queasy how much of this has been played out as a one-tenth scale puppet theatre reenactment in the UK - right down to the way that, as Frank observes, a supposedly leftwing party can engage in policies a rightwing party would never get away with, whether that be Bill's social security cuts or Tony's privatisation of stuff like air traffic control which even Thatcher hadn't dared touch. Though there are two odd omissions here: he doesn't mention the corollary, that a Democrat president would have got raked over the coals much more seriously for Dubya's serial massive failures in the traditionally Republican territory of intelligence and defence; and not once does he refer to the Overton window, exactly the sort of theoretical tool which could have turned this from a good book into a great one. Still. Obviously there were differences - benefits didn't really come under attack until fairly late in New Labour's term, and they never explicitly turned on the welfare state in the way Clinton and co. did on the New Deal. But you had the same insistence that learning and innovation were the way to address unemployment, despite the fact skilled jobs were getting screwed just as surely as manual or service ones; the same tendency to talk in terms of the changes to the economy as inevitable, something to be worked around and maybe slightly ameliorated rather than fought or redirected; the same alignment with bosses over unions, dressed up in hot air about 'innovation' despite much of it (whether financial or e-commerce) just being new ways to avoid regulation. The same belief in meritocracy from people who went to the best universities and are convinced anyone could have done it, unaware of how intensely lucky they've been (luck also being the only reason that Clinton's boneheaded economic policies coincided with, rather than causing, any kind of recovery). The same utter failure to use even existing tools to punish the parties responsible for the financial crash, never mind introducing new laws in the way governments can, and the same expectation that the poor and the state should take the pain while the rich bastards went straight back to bonus city because for some unclear reason we apparently needed them content. And of course, the same need for ever harder hits of rightward drift, because however 'tough' they prove themselves, it's never enough, and every defeat for an allegedly leftward party is met with the prescription that more technocratic, less liberal policies are needed, no matter how technocratic and illiberal their last manifesto was and no matter how much of the original base has now deserted them.
There's more, of course, much more. As with any current affairs book (and it's one reason I don't read more of them - I got this one for review despite not especially being after it), part of the problem is the way the material butts up against the present, so of course it's always going to be out of date. In discussing NAFTA, for instance, and the way in which it's been an utter disaster for everyone but the richest in both the US and Mexico, Frank goes on to say that the new-style Democrats are still massively in favour of free trade deals simply for being free trade deals and thus something they've learned to support regardless of the details. Which is true to an extent, but doesn't account for the much more widespread objection TTIP, CETA and their various equally ugly siblings have been picking up lately. Similarly, the book pretty much assumes a Clinton coronation for 2016's nomination, which yes, did turn out to be correct (and if I lacked enthusiasm for her as anything more than the slightly lesser evil before reading this, how much more so now). But the degree of challenge Bernie Sanders managed to mount despite everything doesn't really come through. So maybe things aren't quite as hopeless as they seemed to Frank when he wrote this? But after this degree of carefully deployed detail, it's hard to deny they're pretty damn bad.
This is, in short, a book which comes startlingly close to a Marxist analysis given its author was once a Republican student. Which only underscores how appalling the situation in the US has got, with deregulation for the rich, greater restriction and uncertainty for the poor, turning the latter into pretty much a helot class for the former. There's a bit of a misfiring passage early on where he describes the problem as the Democrats' capture by the professional class, essentially painting them as the bourgeoisie's party while the Republicans are capital's, and the proletariat have nobody. He then almost immediately has to row back from what he seems to realise is a bit close to the whole 'had enough of experts' line pedalled by the post-factual Right, admitting that he's quite happy to have his aeroplanes piloted only by professional pilots (while making no mention that, much like the blue-collar workers and the teachers, their profession has also been hollowed out by the mania for deregulation and 'competition' which only ever seems to benefit corporate profits, not the workers) and so forth. Really, it would be truer to say (as he later sort of does) that the Democrats are the party of new capital, the Republicans of old capital. But the overlapping point - that the new corporate-friendly Democrats appear enamoured with complexity in and of itself, perhaps exactly because it seems so very clever - is sound. He observes how complex and limited the Dodd-Frank legislation is compared to its much simpler and firmer predecessor in terms of keeping banks in line, Glass-Steagall (repealed, of course, by good old Bill Clinton). He notes how Obamacare, initially discussed in terms of something more statist and simple, gradually morphed into an incredibly convoluted system which, quelle surprise, left the insurance companies in an even stronger position. One of the most bitter chapters covers Hillary Clinton's beloved microfinance, how utterly ineffective it really is, and how it seems to serve mainly as a way of extending the banking system's tendrils to make sure they encompass every last Third World village. One thing which never becomes wholly clear is whether Frank thinks this is deliberate obfuscation by the headline lawmakers, or whether they're having the wool pulled over their eyes too by subordinates mindful of the revolving door between politics and big business.
Aside from discussion of the USA's overseas initiatives and the odd quote from London papers, this is very much a book about America; in particular, the line "An art scene isn't something that springs up before a city becomes affluent; generally speaking, it follows the money" is likely to draw hollow laughs from British readers. But when America sneezes, the world catches a cold, and while the timings may not match up exactly it's queasy how much of this has been played out as a one-tenth scale puppet theatre reenactment in the UK - right down to the way that, as Frank observes, a supposedly leftwing party can engage in policies a rightwing party would never get away with, whether that be Bill's social security cuts or Tony's privatisation of stuff like air traffic control which even Thatcher hadn't dared touch. Though there are two odd omissions here: he doesn't mention the corollary, that a Democrat president would have got raked over the coals much more seriously for Dubya's serial massive failures in the traditionally Republican territory of intelligence and defence; and not once does he refer to the Overton window, exactly the sort of theoretical tool which could have turned this from a good book into a great one. Still. Obviously there were differences - benefits didn't really come under attack until fairly late in New Labour's term, and they never explicitly turned on the welfare state in the way Clinton and co. did on the New Deal. But you had the same insistence that learning and innovation were the way to address unemployment, despite the fact skilled jobs were getting screwed just as surely as manual or service ones; the same tendency to talk in terms of the changes to the economy as inevitable, something to be worked around and maybe slightly ameliorated rather than fought or redirected; the same alignment with bosses over unions, dressed up in hot air about 'innovation' despite much of it (whether financial or e-commerce) just being new ways to avoid regulation. The same belief in meritocracy from people who went to the best universities and are convinced anyone could have done it, unaware of how intensely lucky they've been (luck also being the only reason that Clinton's boneheaded economic policies coincided with, rather than causing, any kind of recovery). The same utter failure to use even existing tools to punish the parties responsible for the financial crash, never mind introducing new laws in the way governments can, and the same expectation that the poor and the state should take the pain while the rich bastards went straight back to bonus city because for some unclear reason we apparently needed them content. And of course, the same need for ever harder hits of rightward drift, because however 'tough' they prove themselves, it's never enough, and every defeat for an allegedly leftward party is met with the prescription that more technocratic, less liberal policies are needed, no matter how technocratic and illiberal their last manifesto was and no matter how much of the original base has now deserted them.
There's more, of course, much more. As with any current affairs book (and it's one reason I don't read more of them - I got this one for review despite not especially being after it), part of the problem is the way the material butts up against the present, so of course it's always going to be out of date. In discussing NAFTA, for instance, and the way in which it's been an utter disaster for everyone but the richest in both the US and Mexico, Frank goes on to say that the new-style Democrats are still massively in favour of free trade deals simply for being free trade deals and thus something they've learned to support regardless of the details. Which is true to an extent, but doesn't account for the much more widespread objection TTIP, CETA and their various equally ugly siblings have been picking up lately. Similarly, the book pretty much assumes a Clinton coronation for 2016's nomination, which yes, did turn out to be correct (and if I lacked enthusiasm for her as anything more than the slightly lesser evil before reading this, how much more so now). But the degree of challenge Bernie Sanders managed to mount despite everything doesn't really come through. So maybe things aren't quite as hopeless as they seemed to Frank when he wrote this? But after this degree of carefully deployed detail, it's hard to deny they're pretty damn bad.
December 26, 2017
Just as easily I could have given this 1 star as he misses a lot of very salient points, the most important of which is this: every single job in a society is necessary. We need people to build supercomputers as well as sweep the streets and collect the trash. If we aren't giving everyone a living wage for their work then we are basically living in a slave state. Attention: We Are Living in a Slave State!
I’m also sick and fucking tired of people blaming liberals for losing the 2016 election. I didn’t vote for this asshole in the White House, so don’t blame me. I’m not to blame that most Americans know almost nothing of economics and the forces shaping our society for the worse. I’m not to blame for the ever-widening income gap that will soon tear our nation to pieces (spoiler alert; it already is).
The people in European social democracies get the idea that all jobs are necessary and should be valued. Contrary to what right wingers tell us, minimum wage jobs aren’t stepping stones, or only for kids living at home; to see this any other way is just acquiescing to the far right’s plan of divide and conquer.
When you read about Spain’s high unemployment rate you have to remember that the people who do have jobs make a living wage and they have health care, which is more than you can say for many people who work at Wal-mart—America’s top employer.
Another thing he doesn’t address is the fascist propaganda being spewed out to the public 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year long. I never use the word “fascist” lightly and I mean what I say in the previous sentence. How can liberals make any sort of headway in a society where at least 50% of people are stooges to the corporate message they are being force-fed every day? Fox News and far-right talk radio don’t exist in Europe, at least not yet and not on any sort of grand scale.
I couldn’t agree more with Frank’s analysis of the Democratic Party and how they have turned their back on working class Americans. The more I study the Bill Clinton administration the more I realize that he did a lot of damage to working Americans, mostly just to gain his second election and to raise a lot of campaign money from corporate donors. Clinton’s welfare reform, NAFTA, and repeal of banking laws set the stage for the horrors of what happened in 2003 and then again on an even grander scale in 2008. Still, compared to the GW Bush administration and Trump both Clinton and Obama were infinitely better for the American people.
I’m also sick and fucking tired of people blaming liberals for losing the 2016 election. I didn’t vote for this asshole in the White House, so don’t blame me. I’m not to blame that most Americans know almost nothing of economics and the forces shaping our society for the worse. I’m not to blame for the ever-widening income gap that will soon tear our nation to pieces (spoiler alert; it already is).
The people in European social democracies get the idea that all jobs are necessary and should be valued. Contrary to what right wingers tell us, minimum wage jobs aren’t stepping stones, or only for kids living at home; to see this any other way is just acquiescing to the far right’s plan of divide and conquer.
When you read about Spain’s high unemployment rate you have to remember that the people who do have jobs make a living wage and they have health care, which is more than you can say for many people who work at Wal-mart—America’s top employer.
Another thing he doesn’t address is the fascist propaganda being spewed out to the public 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year long. I never use the word “fascist” lightly and I mean what I say in the previous sentence. How can liberals make any sort of headway in a society where at least 50% of people are stooges to the corporate message they are being force-fed every day? Fox News and far-right talk radio don’t exist in Europe, at least not yet and not on any sort of grand scale.
I couldn’t agree more with Frank’s analysis of the Democratic Party and how they have turned their back on working class Americans. The more I study the Bill Clinton administration the more I realize that he did a lot of damage to working Americans, mostly just to gain his second election and to raise a lot of campaign money from corporate donors. Clinton’s welfare reform, NAFTA, and repeal of banking laws set the stage for the horrors of what happened in 2003 and then again on an even grander scale in 2008. Still, compared to the GW Bush administration and Trump both Clinton and Obama were infinitely better for the American people.
April 6, 2017
Blame for the widening gap between rich and poor and America is typically laid at the feet of the Republican Party, chiefly through the actions of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Without question, these two men, and their right-wing collaborators in Congress, bear a lot of responsibility for the dire circumstances under which millions of Americans now eke out a living. But Thomas Frank, an historian and widely read liberal commentator, forcefully argues that many of the policies at the heart of today’s economic dysfunction were shaped under Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. “It is time to face the obvious,” he writes, “that the direction the Democrats have chosen to follow for the last few decades has been a failure both for the nation and for their own partisan health.” He lays out the case in his eye-opening new book, Listen, Liberal: What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?
The conservative roots of today’s liberal politics
Economic inequality in America today is all around us. The income of all except those at the very top of the pyramid has been stagnant for decades. A single family (the Waltons of Wal-Mart fame) possesses more wealth than 42% of American families combined. And 91% of all the economic gains over the past decade have gone to the “one percent.” The causes are reasonably easy to see. In contrast to the period from 1945 to 1980, when the country’s prosperity was broadly based and the middle class was the envy of the world, changes in labor, law enforcement, tax, social welfare, and trade policies have shifted the balance of power to the uppermost ranks of bankers, corporate executives, and the heirs to large fortunes.
Though he points to the growing rejection of New Deal values and policies within the Democratic Party of the 1970s, Frank traces the ideological rationale for many of these changes to the neoliberal Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). Founded in 1985, the DLC successfully moved the Democratic Party to the right, adopting traditionally Republican policies to broadcast its claim to the center of American politics. Among these were deregulation of finance and industry, “law and order,” deficit reduction, “entitlements reform,” lower taxes on the rich, and ending welfare — in other words, a shopping list of goals advanced by conservatives since the 1970s. Bill Clinton, who served as DLC Chair in the year before he announced his candidacy for President, took steps toward all these objectives during the eight years of his Administration. He enacted laws toward these ends in partnership with Congressional Republicans: witness, for example, his expansion of the War on Drugs, NAFTA, “welfare reform,” and the repeal of Glass-Steagall (the signature banking reform of the New Deal). Less well known were his secret negotiations in 1997 with Newt Gingrich to privatize Social Security. As Frank points out, “the deal [with Gingrich] evaded Bill Clinton’s grasp, but only barely” — because the Monica Lewinsky affair blew up in his face.
What is the difference between Democrats and Republicans?
The groundswell of support for the candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders this year dramatizes the conviction among many, especially young Americans, that there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans. While it’s true that both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have staked out many positions that in other advanced countries might be considered conservative, the sad reality is that the Democratic Party is not alone in drifting to the right since the 1970s. Today’s Republican Party advances policies that might have embarrassed Ronald Reagan — positions that can no longer be legitimately described as conservative. What the news media refer to as the Tea Party wing that dominates the Republican Party today represents a perspective that ignores reality and defies rational thought. Regrettably, then, even the most “moderate,” middle-of-the-road Democrat is a paragon of logic, common sense, and compassion by comparison. Unfortunately, Frank merely pays lip service to this all-important distinction.
An indictment of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama
In Listen, Liberal, Frank spells out the many ways in which Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have betrayed the Democratic commitment to progressive principles. The case against Clinton is solid, encompassing a litany of policies that still raise the hackles of activist Democrats, as enumerated above. His indictment of Obama, while difficult to contest on economic issues, is less convincing overall.
Frank acknowledges some of the progressive accomplishments of both men. “Clinton raised the minimum wage and expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit,” he writes. “He secured a modest tax increase on the wealthy.” And under his presidency the country achieved nearly full employment. But in Frank’s view these modest accomplishments paled against Clinton’s signature achievements, such as NAFTA, welfare reform, and the repeal of Glass Steagall. In the final analysis, Frank contends, “Clinton made the problems of working people materially worse. . . To judge by what he actually accomplished, Bill Clinton was not the lesser of two evils, as people on the left always say about Democrats at election time; he was the greater of the two. What he did as president was beyond the reach of even the most diabolical Republican.”
Frank concedes the importance of Obama’s Affordable Care Act, but in his single-minded focus on economic inequality he dwells at length on the many ways that Obama continued to champion the same Wall Street-friendly economic and trade policies as Clinton. However, he largely ignores what the Obama Administration has sought to achieve in other areas, notably immigration policy and climate change. Frank would have been on solider ground had he limited his indictment to Clinton, whom historians are certain to regard as a conservative President. It would be difficult to render the same judgment about Obama without considerable qualification.
The root of the problem, as Frank sees it
For decades following the Great Depression, the Democratic Party’s success at the polls rested on what political historians have called the New Deal coalition, which found its greatest strength in trade unions, racial minorities, and white Southerners. This assemblage of forces began to unravel quickly with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which drove many working class whites out of the Party, not just in the South but nationwide.
Beginning in the 1970s, Democratic intellectuals began to search for a new formulation that would reliably return a Democratic majority. Eventually, they found what they thought was the answer in the New Economy. Frank’s prose drips with sarcasm in describing this shaky concept: “Postindustrialism! Globalization! The information superhighway! These were gods before whom everyone bowed back then, deities who made their will known to the country’s opinion columnists and management theorists.” And the gods demanded that the Democratic Party turn its back on the unions, adopt free trade policies such as NAFTA, deregulate industry, lower taxes on the rich, and set its sights on Innovation and the so-called Creative Class.
Instead of poor people and the working class, the Democratic Party came to identify itself with “the upper 10 percent of the population — the country’s financiers, managers, and professionals.” Frank refers to this diverse group as a “professional class” defined by graduate degrees and specialized white-collar work. At the apex of this class sit the exalted products of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and other elite universities — the sort of people who have dominated both the Clinton and Obama Administrations. Supposedly, “[p]rofessionals are the people who know what ails us and who dispense valuable diagnoses.” In Frank’s view, they have proven to be the crux of the problem, not the solution.
About the author
Listen, Liberal is Thomas Frank‘s ninth book. He’s best known for What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, a bestseller a decade ago. Frank is a columnist for Harper’s Magazine.
The conservative roots of today’s liberal politics
Economic inequality in America today is all around us. The income of all except those at the very top of the pyramid has been stagnant for decades. A single family (the Waltons of Wal-Mart fame) possesses more wealth than 42% of American families combined. And 91% of all the economic gains over the past decade have gone to the “one percent.” The causes are reasonably easy to see. In contrast to the period from 1945 to 1980, when the country’s prosperity was broadly based and the middle class was the envy of the world, changes in labor, law enforcement, tax, social welfare, and trade policies have shifted the balance of power to the uppermost ranks of bankers, corporate executives, and the heirs to large fortunes.
Though he points to the growing rejection of New Deal values and policies within the Democratic Party of the 1970s, Frank traces the ideological rationale for many of these changes to the neoliberal Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). Founded in 1985, the DLC successfully moved the Democratic Party to the right, adopting traditionally Republican policies to broadcast its claim to the center of American politics. Among these were deregulation of finance and industry, “law and order,” deficit reduction, “entitlements reform,” lower taxes on the rich, and ending welfare — in other words, a shopping list of goals advanced by conservatives since the 1970s. Bill Clinton, who served as DLC Chair in the year before he announced his candidacy for President, took steps toward all these objectives during the eight years of his Administration. He enacted laws toward these ends in partnership with Congressional Republicans: witness, for example, his expansion of the War on Drugs, NAFTA, “welfare reform,” and the repeal of Glass-Steagall (the signature banking reform of the New Deal). Less well known were his secret negotiations in 1997 with Newt Gingrich to privatize Social Security. As Frank points out, “the deal [with Gingrich] evaded Bill Clinton’s grasp, but only barely” — because the Monica Lewinsky affair blew up in his face.
What is the difference between Democrats and Republicans?
The groundswell of support for the candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders this year dramatizes the conviction among many, especially young Americans, that there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans. While it’s true that both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have staked out many positions that in other advanced countries might be considered conservative, the sad reality is that the Democratic Party is not alone in drifting to the right since the 1970s. Today’s Republican Party advances policies that might have embarrassed Ronald Reagan — positions that can no longer be legitimately described as conservative. What the news media refer to as the Tea Party wing that dominates the Republican Party today represents a perspective that ignores reality and defies rational thought. Regrettably, then, even the most “moderate,” middle-of-the-road Democrat is a paragon of logic, common sense, and compassion by comparison. Unfortunately, Frank merely pays lip service to this all-important distinction.
An indictment of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama
In Listen, Liberal, Frank spells out the many ways in which Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have betrayed the Democratic commitment to progressive principles. The case against Clinton is solid, encompassing a litany of policies that still raise the hackles of activist Democrats, as enumerated above. His indictment of Obama, while difficult to contest on economic issues, is less convincing overall.
Frank acknowledges some of the progressive accomplishments of both men. “Clinton raised the minimum wage and expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit,” he writes. “He secured a modest tax increase on the wealthy.” And under his presidency the country achieved nearly full employment. But in Frank’s view these modest accomplishments paled against Clinton’s signature achievements, such as NAFTA, welfare reform, and the repeal of Glass Steagall. In the final analysis, Frank contends, “Clinton made the problems of working people materially worse. . . To judge by what he actually accomplished, Bill Clinton was not the lesser of two evils, as people on the left always say about Democrats at election time; he was the greater of the two. What he did as president was beyond the reach of even the most diabolical Republican.”
Frank concedes the importance of Obama’s Affordable Care Act, but in his single-minded focus on economic inequality he dwells at length on the many ways that Obama continued to champion the same Wall Street-friendly economic and trade policies as Clinton. However, he largely ignores what the Obama Administration has sought to achieve in other areas, notably immigration policy and climate change. Frank would have been on solider ground had he limited his indictment to Clinton, whom historians are certain to regard as a conservative President. It would be difficult to render the same judgment about Obama without considerable qualification.
The root of the problem, as Frank sees it
For decades following the Great Depression, the Democratic Party’s success at the polls rested on what political historians have called the New Deal coalition, which found its greatest strength in trade unions, racial minorities, and white Southerners. This assemblage of forces began to unravel quickly with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which drove many working class whites out of the Party, not just in the South but nationwide.
Beginning in the 1970s, Democratic intellectuals began to search for a new formulation that would reliably return a Democratic majority. Eventually, they found what they thought was the answer in the New Economy. Frank’s prose drips with sarcasm in describing this shaky concept: “Postindustrialism! Globalization! The information superhighway! These were gods before whom everyone bowed back then, deities who made their will known to the country’s opinion columnists and management theorists.” And the gods demanded that the Democratic Party turn its back on the unions, adopt free trade policies such as NAFTA, deregulate industry, lower taxes on the rich, and set its sights on Innovation and the so-called Creative Class.
Instead of poor people and the working class, the Democratic Party came to identify itself with “the upper 10 percent of the population — the country’s financiers, managers, and professionals.” Frank refers to this diverse group as a “professional class” defined by graduate degrees and specialized white-collar work. At the apex of this class sit the exalted products of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and other elite universities — the sort of people who have dominated both the Clinton and Obama Administrations. Supposedly, “[p]rofessionals are the people who know what ails us and who dispense valuable diagnoses.” In Frank’s view, they have proven to be the crux of the problem, not the solution.
About the author
Listen, Liberal is Thomas Frank‘s ninth book. He’s best known for What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, a bestseller a decade ago. Frank is a columnist for Harper’s Magazine.
July 30, 2016
I've been a long time reader of Thomas Frank, dating back to his "Conquest of Cool" and his editorial stint at "The Baffler" of which he was a founder. He is consistently thought provoking and willing to attack the complacency of the liberal class as he so effectively does in this book. The book itself is very reminiscent of Christopher Lasch's "Revolt of the Elites" which similarly attacked the then developing meritocracy twenty years ago for both its overweening self adulation and its abandonment of the working class.
Listen Liberal, coming out as it has at the height of Trump-mania and the elite's total dismissal of the Bernie Sanders phenomenon, provides a framework to understand just what is going on -- the spectacle of a supposedly left party which abandons its working class constituency to cater to the needs of a rising elite, while assuming that its natural constituency, the working class, will have no place else to go. Unfortunately, egged on by an irresponsible, rating obsessed media, that constituency seems to have found one, and its not a pretty one.
Read this book and then read some Lasch, but only if you want some real perspective on current events.
Listen Liberal, coming out as it has at the height of Trump-mania and the elite's total dismissal of the Bernie Sanders phenomenon, provides a framework to understand just what is going on -- the spectacle of a supposedly left party which abandons its working class constituency to cater to the needs of a rising elite, while assuming that its natural constituency, the working class, will have no place else to go. Unfortunately, egged on by an irresponsible, rating obsessed media, that constituency seems to have found one, and its not a pretty one.
Read this book and then read some Lasch, but only if you want some real perspective on current events.
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