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

by Thomas Frank

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. Only smiling Bill Clinton, well-known friend of working families, could commit such betrayals.

the transformation of San Francisco, hometown of the counterculture, into an upscale suburb of Silicon Valley.

in the age of creativity it was supposed to be your town’s theatrical performances and its carefully handmade cupcakes that truly opened the door to prosperity.

The confident days of the free-market consensus seemed to be shuddering to a close. The promise of a universally affluent postindustrial era now looked as empty and forlorn as a row of abandoned McMansions on some lonely cul-de-sac in the Nevada desert.

In a 2012 speech, the head of Obama’s Criminal Division, Lanny Breuer, announced that he was sometimes persuaded when banks and corporations asked him not to prosecute on the grounds that it might cause the company in question to fail and thus hurt the economy. “We must take into account the effect of an indictment on innocent employees and shareholders,” Breuer said, describing a courtesy that American prosecutors extend to no other group and that, by its nature, makes a joke of the idea of equality before the law.21

The true problem, liberal thinkers concluded, were the whining, unrealistic idealists who expected so much from Obama—and of course those diabolical Republicans in Congress, constantly outmaneuvering the poor, powerless man in the Oval Office.

The Commanding Heights: The Battle Between Government and the Marketplace That Is Remaking the Modern World (Simon & Schuster, 1998), p. 381. This book was later made into a PBS documentary with the same title.