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Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People

Thomas Frank

4.18 · Rating details · 4,152 ratings · 669 reviews

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 rig ...more

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Hardcover, 320 pages

Published March 15th 2016 by Metropolitan Books

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Mar 12, 2016 Patrick rated it it was amazing

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.

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Feb 01, 2016 Brad rated it it was amazing

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 ac ...more

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Feb 10, 2017 Sebastien rated it it was amazing

Shelves: political-science, all-time-favorites

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 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. ...more

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Apr 08, 2016 Hana rated it it was amazing

Shelves: policy-politics, 2016-reads

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 tri ...more

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Mar 19, 2016 Dean rated it it was amazing

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. ...more

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Nov 28, 2016 Jason Pettus rated it liked it

Shelves: npr-worthy, politics, nonfiction, smart-nerdy, contemporary

(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 (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 ...more

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Mar 23, 2016 Ben rated it liked it

Shelves: united-states

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. 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.

...more

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Dec 02, 2016 Melora rated it really liked it

Shelves: listened

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 credibi
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. ...more

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Apr 19, 2017 Trish rated it liked it

Shelves: nonfiction, government, america, political-science, politics, finance

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.

"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 reve

"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. ...more

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Mar 23, 2016 Keith rated it it was amazing

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 Republican ...more

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May 16, 2016 Michael Perkins rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

They were not listening then (2016), they're not listening now (2020).

==========

This article (and the book) compliments Frank's book.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...

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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 lost because the party had drifted so far away from where it used to be.

I recently read this book, which has stories of how the Demo party lost t ...more

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Apr 28, 2016 Jeanette rated it liked it

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 des ...more

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Mar 15, 2016 Jamie Bradway rated it it was amazing

Despite the griping about liberals I've heard my whole life, I still haven't experienced a truly liberal presidential administration. I guess it's just a favorite slur of the right, mostly devoid of meaning.

Thomas Frank frequently rouses rabbles - I sometimes think that's his main goal, so I have been dismissive of his writing in the past. However, Listen, Liberal is a concise summation of how the Democratic Party abandoned the principles of leftist governing in order to win. At least, initiall ...more

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Mar 13, 2016 Heidi rated it it was amazing

Every Democrat needs to read this book. Period.

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May 17, 2017 Adam rated it really liked it

Shelves: essay-and-commentary

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 ...more

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Mar 04, 2017 Kristina rated it it was amazing

Shelves: current-events, non-fiction, politics, my-book

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 woul ...more

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Nov 17, 2016 Melissa rated it liked it

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 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. ...more

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May 28, 2017 Scott Rhee rated it it was amazing

Shelves: politics, nonfiction

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 anyon 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)” ...more

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Jan 22, 2017 Tanja Berg rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

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 wo 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. ...more

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Jul 03, 2016 Thomas Ray rated it it was amazing

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 " ...more

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Jul 04, 2016 Akin rated it liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, politics-and-government

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 th 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. ...more

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Apr 25, 2016 Karel Baloun rated it really liked it

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 ...more

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Aug 03, 2016 Alex Sarll added it · review of another edition

'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 '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.

...more

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Dec 25, 2017 Leftbanker rated it it was amazing

Shelves: economics-politics

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 d 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. ...more

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May 20, 2017 Andy rated it did not like it

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." Fran 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.

The Essential Bernie Sanders and His Vision for America by Jonathan Tasini

The New Jim Crow Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

...more

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Mar 27, 2016 Charlie rated it it was amazing

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 abandonm ...more

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Dec 30, 2016 Leonard Pierce rated it really liked it

Shelves: politics

This will be my last entry of 2016. Next year will begin, barring some unexpected act of fate, with the ascension to the presidency of Donald Trump, as dim-witted, incurious, crass, and crooked human being that has ever held public office in America. Trump has spent the hours since the election staffing his White House with the greatest collection of grifters and cranks this side of Tammany Hall, and trolling the country he is meant to be leading on Twitter. The primary occupation of politically This will be my last entry of 2016. Next year will begin, barring some unexpected act of fate, with the ascension to the presidency of Donald Trump, as dim-witted, incurious, crass, and crooked human being that has ever held public office in America. Trump has spent the hours since the election staffing his White House with the greatest collection of grifters and cranks this side of Tammany Hall, and trolling the country he is meant to be leading on Twitter. The primary occupation of politically-minded Americans these days has been predicting whether Trump will be world-historically bad — Adolf Hitler with nuclear weapons, essentially — or merely a repeat of some of our worst former presidents, an aggressive huckster on the scale of George W. Bush. Whatever flavor of bad he will be, he will certainly be bad, which brings us to a crucial question: what are the Democrats, America’s current party of opposition, going to do about it?

Thomas Frank, one of our most insightful and fearless political critics for the last three decades, thinks he has an answer, and that answer is, not a fucking lot. Years ago, Frank identified the Democrats — then led by Bill Clinton, whose approach has come to define the party in its current incarnation — as “an opposition that has ceased to oppose”. He wrote his current book, Listen, Liberal, or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, when it still seemed pretty obvious that Clinton’s wife Hillary was the heir apparent to his throne, and that she would be taking her place as President despite her egregious flaws as a candidate. Although history has made fools of those of us who thought she had the race in the bag (a failure increasingly attributable, despite postmortem conspiracy theories about Russian cyber-war, to the fact that she ran a campaign far more incompetent than anyone suspected), there is no reason to doubt his overall conclusion: that the Democratic Party, as currently constituted, long ago ceased to be an opposition party to the Republicans on many significant issues and has instead become merely the more socially acceptable face of neoliberalism, the ideology that teaches all issues have a market solution, all problems can be solved with the proper application of imperialist force, and all politics should flow from the minds of an elite professional class who truly know, by virtue of their education and expertise, what is best for everyone.

Frank lays out his argument with ruthless efficiency. His prose can be cutting, but he doesn’t need fancy language to present his case: he simply marshals quote after quote, document after document, statistic after statistic to illustrate the essential truth that the American people have not had a political party that fairly represents its interests for a good 40 years, and that the Democrats have not only failed to oppose the Republicans on many critical issues that have led directly to the impoverishment and immiseration of huge numbers of the citizens they are charged to govern, but have aided and abetted them and even led the charge towards neoliberalism themselves. It’s an argument familiar to anyone who’s been playing close attention since the 1990s, or even who listened to stump speeches by Bernie Sanders in the early days of the campaign: the Democrats have surrounded themselves with elite Ivy League professionals who govern by means of the spreadsheet and the push poll, ignoring the actual needs of their constituencies; they have become just as beholden or more so as the Republicans to a wealthy class of ultra-rich donors, to whose advantage they remake the law; they have become addicted to free trade and foreign oil, leading them down a disastrous path of hostile foreign policy; they have abandoned their traditional supporters among unions, rural voters, and the urban poor in favor of decorating the elite inner circles of power with ‘representative’ minorities; and they have turned ever further to the center right, hoping foolishly to capture the votes of Republican professionals in the suburbs while abandoning the working class to either turn to the G.O.P.’s cynical manipulations or stop voting altogether.

What is fascinating about Frank’s discussion of all this is its depth and thoroughness of historical detail. Abandoning the common but insufficient narrative that this all began with Reagan, he takes us back to the early 1970s, when cultural and economic upheavals led to a near civil war among the Democrats. He calls attention to such turning points as the McGovern Commission, Frederick Dutton’s Changing Sources of Power, and the rise of the Democratic Leadership Council, who produced leaders like Gary Hart and Bill Clinton whose primary goal was to rid the liberal party of any connection to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal — the greatest president America ever had and the greatest legacy he left it. Having won the culture wars, this breed of liberal discovered that it actually liked the comforts of vast wealth, and set about marrying its politics to a freewheeling big-tent social agenda that appeared to promote opportunity for gays, women, and minorities, while sponsoring legislation that choked the life out of those very groups unless they happened to be rich. The rise of the carceral state, the vast explosion of militarism into the civilian sphere, and the abandonment of the welfare state in favor of an austerity program drawn directly from management theory was the inevitable result of this transformation.

Listen, Liberal makes the airtight case that the Democratic leadership has pursued this center-right, pro-market position not because they have been forced to by the strength of the G.O.P., but because they want to — because these are the things they truly believe. He illustrates this principle again and again, most forcefully when he talks about how beloved outgoing President Barack Obama — raised now to sainthood by virtue of having been replaced by the Devil — wasted one opportunity after another: handed enormous political clout, a public mandate from justly outraged voters, and a widely hated Republican Party, he turned to the center again and again instead of handing out the kind of bold reform that was so desperately needed. The result was eight years of failures and compromises, the false sense of security that this was what everyone wanted, and, ultimately, loss after loss that crammed the House and Senate with right-wing ideologues and set the stage for a Trump victory. Frank didn’t get a chance to update the book to show what Obama and the rest of the party has done since their historic disintegration, but it’s hard to imagine he’d be very surprised.

Why is all this important? What does Frank hope to gain by illuminating the pathways of the past? As usual, it’s because what’s past is prologue. We are at a moment of importance on the American left whose importance cannot be overstated: the incoming Republican administration will at best be a disaster and at worst an apocalypse. The Democratic Party is in disarray, while record numbers of young people are attracted to socialism and a senator from Vermont who isn’t even really a Democrat has become the party’s standard-bearer of resistance to the G.O.P. Without question, what is needed now is unity and solidarity, and a determination to abandon the circular firing squad that usually characterizes progressive politics. But the question is, around what kind of program will this solidarity coalesce? Will it be around a truly left liberalism, a progressivism that represents the vast majority of Americans against the billionaire class that has robbed them blind for the last two decades unhindered? Or will it be around the liberalism of the past, against the billionaires’ co-conspirators, the party that lost an un-losable election, the party that Thomas Frank builds a case against as the one that killed the working class once and for all? Stay tuned We’ll find out. ...more

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Jun 16, 2018 Leo Walsh rated it really liked it

Part of me wants to give LISTEN, LIBERAL by Thomas Frank 3-stars. because it's, in essence, a long rant against the Democratic party's failure to support the downtrodden, it's historical role. By embracing conservative, neoliberal (free market) economics under Bill Clinton, Frank points out this has left working-class voters feeling abandoned. This leaves the Republicans an opening, where they employ populist rhetoric to rile working-class whites, and then pass policies that hurth their voters.

F Part of me wants to give LISTEN, LIBERAL by Thomas Frank 3-stars. because it's, in essence, a long rant against the Democratic party's failure to support the downtrodden, it's historical role. By embracing conservative, neoliberal (free market) economics under Bill Clinton, Frank points out this has left working-class voters feeling abandoned. This leaves the Republicans an opening, where they employ populist rhetoric to rile working-class whites, and then pass policies that hurth their voters.

Frank traces these trends through history in a way, though, that is thought-provoking. How instead of fighting ala FDR (or Bernie Sanders) for the poor and working people in America, the Dems have been courting college-educated professionals, like teachers, accountants, and engineers. Those people believe in "meritocracy." They believe that they've gotten where they are by hard work and education. So they advocate "worker re-training" and "college is a ladder from poverty" as a panacea to everything. Frank maintains (and it seems reasonable to me) that this is "punting." Since instead of, say, working to increase the minimum wage to $15/ hour and pushing other social programs that will help the poor (ala FDR and LBJ), new-breed Democrats settle for weak-tea.

For all it's thought-provoking strengths, though. Frank's take here seems far from balanced. For instance, he rails against innovations that help the super-poor, like cell phone technology and bank accounts that allow workers in third-world countries to get paid and transact business WITHOUT THE FEAR OF GETTING ROBBED. He also dismisses many advances we have made in the past decades as meaningless, even though they have improved our lives. Because for all of our societal inequality, it really is better for people to live in 2018 than in 1998 or 1978. There are fewer Americans starving, our crime rates are lower, and our food supply more varied and stable.

Examples. In 1978, you needed to buy a paper to keep up with the news. In 2018, I have a Google news feed that gets me news from dozens of sources. In 1978, most cars got 10-15 MPG. In 2018, my car gets 35+ MPG, lasts longer and is far safer. In 1978, if I wanted a salad it would have been iceberg lettuce. Our local grocery sold nothing but iceberg. In 2018, I have a choice of several varieties of salad greens. These are examples that Frank dismisses. Because, I suppose, he forgets.

Even Walmart, the bugaboo of progressives (I myself have been guilty) has also had a mixed impact on American lives. Sure, it sells goods made in China and thus has been instrumental in killing our manufacturing jobs. And Walmart has driven thousands of locally-owned mom & pop stores out of business. And yet, Walmart prices are lower than the competition. Working people appreciate this. They need to save every penny they can. Seen in this light, Walmart has also helped America's poor at a time when our middle class is shrinking.

Unlike Frank, I'm more nuanced about Walmart. Sure, they suck. They underpay their workers and buy from cheap foreign factories. But if you're honest, they've co-evolved with the America our "ruling classes" have built for us.

Gripes aside, Frank's book is refreshing. I'm used to reading books dogging the GOP for going hard-right and fact-free. They have become crazy, anti-science and anti-fact. That's troubling. But Frank turns the tables and takes a cold, hard look at Democrats. And in many ways, he is correct. in 2018, Americans have no major party dedicated to helping poor people, the function of left-wing parties the world over. Instead, the Dems, the more left of our parties, is elbows-deep in Wall Street and Silicon Valley kick-backs.

Because this perspective is important and novel, I'm giving it 4-stars. ...more

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May 22, 2016 Todd N rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: audio

I really liked this book, though I accidentally bought the Kindle version and the Audible version not realizing that there was no Whispersync keeping the two in sync. I thought that all Kindle-Audible combinations had this feature, so I’m a little wiser and sadder from that experience. I stuck with the Audible version, which is actually read by Mr. Frank himself.

Mr. Frank takes the elites of the Democratic party out behind the woodshed and basically beats them with a rhetorical stick for eight a ...more

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Jun 06, 2016 Cameron rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Read this book before the 2016 election. This book was very enlightening and raised many more questions that I hope to dialogue about with those around me. Frank's book has a real call to live out a fight against our current system.

Frank scathes the current Democratic party for its choice to forget that it is "the party of the people." Instead, the moves of the key figures of the past 30 years, the Clinton's and Obama, have done more to contribute to economic inequality by their continual obsequ ...more

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About Thomas Frank

Thomas Frank

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Thomas 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. ...more

Books by Thomas Frank

What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule

Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right

The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism

One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy

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“Regardless of who leads it, the professional-class liberalism I have been describing in these pages seems to be forever traveling on a quest for some place of greater righteousness. It is always engaged in a search for some subject of overwhelming, noncontroversial goodness with which it can identify itself and under whose umbrella of virtue it can put across its self-interested class program.

There have been many other virtue-objects over the years: people and ideas whose surplus goodness could be extracted for deployment elsewhere. The great virtue-rush of the 1990s, for example, was focused on children, then thought to be the last word in overwhelming, noncontroversial goodness. Who could be against kids? No one, of course, and so the race was on to justify whatever your program happened to be in their name. In the course of Hillary Clinton’s 1996 book, It Takes a Village, the favorite rationale of the day—think of the children!—was deployed to explain her husband’s crime bill as well as more directly child-related causes like charter schools.

You can find dozens of examples of this kind of liberal-class virtue-quest if you try, but instead of listing them, let me go straight to the point: This is not politics. It’s an imitation 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 putting across a policy program while 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.” — 9 likes

“When the left party in a system severs its bonds to working people—when it dedicates itself to the concerns of a particular slice of high-achieving affluent people—issues of work and income inequality will inevitably fade from its list of concerns.” — 8 likes

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