Thomas Frank, historian, journalist, and author of
What’s the Matter with Kansas? and
Listen, Liberal, joins us to dissect how Democrats abandoned populism, the rise of Trump’s faux-populism, and why the party refuses to embrace the working class. He also explores the path forward for authentic left-wing populism in the face of neoliberal failures. (Video version of this podcast is
here.)
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Nathan J. RobinsonPeople should pick up and buy your books because they never expire. But it is also depressing because it means that you are one of the most astute and least listened to people in the country.
But I've grown used to that. Nathan, when I was young, I had these ambitions that things might be otherwise. I used to feel bad about how nobody cared and nobody listened, but I don't care anymore.
Robinson But
Listen, Liberal even had the finger on the cover pointed straight at them, so they knew—
they knew—who it was that had to listen. And you couldn't have worded that more directly, and the liberals didn't listen. Let me read it here from the last page of
Listen, Liberal published in 2016, before the calamity of that year.
“Now all political parties are alliances of groups with disparate interests, but the contradictions of the Democratic Party coalition seem unusually sharp. The Democrats posture as the party of the people, even as they dedicate themselves everywhere, resolutely, to serving and glorifying the professional class. Worse, they combine self-righteousness and class privilege in a way that Americans find stomach turning. But every two years, they simply assume that being non-Republican is sufficient to rally the voters of the nation.”
FrankYes, and by the way, I wrote that before I even knew about Donald Trump.
Robinson
And here we go. You say, “this cannot go on,” but you make a prediction, and you say, “yet it will go on,” which I like, and it has gone on. As I say, you wrote this in 2016. That's a long time ago. And then we just saw a catastrophe that I think is partly caused by some of the problems that you identify in this book.
Frank
Yes, well, come on, this is the Democrats...What can I say? When I wrote that, it was a description of a life of disappointment at the hands of the Democratic Party, first Bill Clinton and then Barack Obama. I think Trump is mentioned once in the original version of the book. I later wrote an afterword, and I think I called him names or something. (...)
Robinson
Let's dive into what it was that you were identifying then more precisely. I read a paragraph that nicely summarizes it up, but let's go into a bit more detail about when you were pointing this finger directly into the face of the liberal and saying, listen, look, this is headed for catastrophe, and it's going to continue until you have a serious revelation. What would you describe as the revelation that was not had?
Frank
Well, this is a big question. What people often don't realize is that this is a long process. It's not just something that just happened. It's not Kamala Harris, it's not Hillary Clinton. They have a lot to answer for, but this is something that's been going on for a very long time. And steadily, but surely, the Democratic Party—they did this out in the open. It wasn't a conspiracy. They talked about it and boasted about it, gave speeches, wrote books and magazine articles about it, turned their back on what they used to be. When I was young, you would turn on the TV after each electoral disaster, like after Reagan had worked this incredible defeat. The one that really got me was when George Bush senior beat Michael Dukakis, where Dukakis had actually been in the lead in the polls. George Bush senior was this kind of awful man, and he won anyway.
And then you go on TV the day after, and the pundits would always say the same thing: the Democratic Party has to abandon the New Deal. They can no longer be the party of the New Deal. They would have these various terms for it, but one of the favorite ones was they have to become neoliberals. This was the big idea in the '70s and '80s. There are other names for it. They call themselves Atari Democrats. But the idea of it is they had to become the party of a social cohort, of a social class, that was identified with futureness. That sounds like bullshit, and nevertheless, it is true. They really did say these things in the '70s and '80s and into the '90s. And then finally they got their way. Here comes the New Democrats, Bill Clinton and his group, and he's speaking exactly the things that they've been describing, and lo and behold, hallelujah, he wins.
Robinson
It works. It's vindicated. It's true. They were right.
Frank
Yes, exactly. And that's how they take it. His election, and then especially his reelection, is our vindication from heaven that this is the right path, that this is the way to go. You identify yourself not with working people, but with the highly educated. They had these pet love names for them. They called them the learning class. I love that one because just so obnoxious. They called them the wired workers. These pet names for the group that they saw as a party of the left in a two-party system. What it has to do is to dedicate itself to this group of people. And they did what they did, and they did it deliberately. And you look at the works of Bill Clinton as president. He was a very consequential president. It's often forgotten nowadays, but he actually did things as president. It wasn't all just his chummy Arkansas— (...)
Robinson
...So, okay, Bill Clinton: how this all started with Bill Clinton?
Frank
Well, it started before him. There were predecessors. So it goes back, actually, to the McGovern years, when in '72, the Democratic Party deliberately wrote organized labor out of the party. They reorganized the way that the Party chose its presidential nominee, and along the way, they basically contrived to take all the power from organized labor, which used to be very closely associated with the Democratic Party. If you're old enough to remember, they were basically their party, and the McGovern people contrived to kick them out. They did it with the best of motives, let's put it that way. They did it with the best of motives, but they also did it with some pretty shitty motives.
And you go back and look at the literature of that campaign and of that moment, and they were already saying, we cannot be this party of labor. We have to be the party of enlightened professionals, of the kids coming out of Yale Law School. People were actually saying things like this at the time, and the Party has been working out of that theory ever since. What's funny is, I don't know too many people that have critiqued that theory. I think I can count them. This is me, I'm one of them. Listen, Liberal is one of those books. But there's maybe five others. It’s like it happened and nobody paid any attention to it, even though it was on TV. You had guys saying this nonsense on TV after every election. You had Bill Clinton boasting about it, but there were very few critiques of it. And now here we are. It's been allowed to run for 50 years.
Robinson
Like we were saying, Clinton seemed to prove that the theory worked electorally.
Frank
That was his promise. That was his magic. That's why they loved him. So the Wall Street Journal had this story like two days ago reminiscing about Clinton, and it's entirely about his manners, and he's a homey Arkansas folksy guy who can connect us with working people. And I'm like, wait, are we talking about the same guy that deregulated the banks? Are we talking about that guy? Is that the one? The friend of the working man who allowed Wall Street to become what it is today? That guy? And that is what they mean. It's funny how nobody can talk about the two things at the same time, his manners and what he actually did. Bill Clinton, who screwed working people in this monumental way with NAFTA and PNTR China and also the Bill Clinton who had that soft southern accent and was so lovable and liked to go to McDonald's.
Robinson
So I take it that you see the Trump victories as the culmination of a decades-long process whereby the Democrats abandoned the New Deal as the kind of exemplar of democratic aspirations, abandoned labor, and became something else that is often called neoliberalism or corporate liberalism.
Frank
Yes, they did that. This is what happened. And now, if you ask me, we're at the end of the road for this thing. You look at whose votes they win now, and it's entirely affluent people. (...)
But that's who the Democrats are. That's who they have wanted to be all these years. That's what they talked about becoming, and they got their wish. And here's the thing, Nathan, I don't know what power, what rebuke, what form of chastisement can convince them that this is a mistake. I don't know if anything can. Because it's such a self-flattering form of politics to believe that you're these wonderful people who are so enlightened and so tasteful. And what do you do when you lose? You scold. You scold the world.
Robinson
On the one hand, you can say clearly they're making a terrible mistake by not pushing policies that are going to help ordinary people. Clearly, ordinary people understand that Democrats are not pushing policies that will help them. They understand that they're out of touch. But also, there are structural reasons now why it's very hard for them to change. On the Kamala Harris campaign, it was interesting. She came out with this anti-price gouging policy that was kind of—
Frank
It was kind of good. And I never heard another word about it after the convention.
Robinson
Well, I have read that what happened is that her Uber executive brother-in-law gave her a phone call and said, Wall Street doesn't like this, you need to back off on it. And so they altered the policy, and they said, it's actually just groceries, and it's just an emergency, and it doesn't mean anything. So one of the problems here is that they can't listen. Because now, when you have to satisfy the donors, it doesn't matter if you know that what you're doing is wrong, and you're going to lose. They are now so dependent upon big money.
Frank
Yes, it's part of the machine. And that's an excellent point, and it makes it an even more depressing story. So I've been talking to different people over the last couple of days, and we argue about what they should do. All of those arguments are exactly, as you say, kind of moot, because they're not allowed to do the things that they need to do basically. For them to do these things would require some kind of political earthquake. Now, arguably, we just had that. But it can get worse for them. They can screw this up even more. (...)
Robinson
I'm trying to understand the distinction between the things that are mistakes and the things that are built into the party as it is, because of the process that you describe in terms of the changes in their constituencies.
Frank
Maybe I am totally wrong about this, but I think that their allergy to an open convention tells us something really important about these guys. I think their desire to avoid primaries tells us something really important about these guys, that they are desperate to stop certain voices from having a say in the way that candidates are chosen at all.
Robinson
When they had an open primary, Bernie terrified them, and they all had to come together and find someone to stop Bernie.
Frank
He might have a chance. If they had an open convention, they might choose someone like Elizabeth Warren. Who the hell knows? That might happen. Anything could happen. One of the really fascinating things about the Democratic Party is that, over the years, they have managed to keep a lid on it. The same bunch always wins. This is the Clinton/Obama faction that always comes out on top, and has, since Walter Mondale, always been the nominee, and they are determined to keep it that way. In some ways, it is their party. They own it in the same way that organized labor used to own it in the old days. It is their party. They're not going to give up. They're not going to surrender it. You can go and ask them for it. You can ask them very politely, Mr. Nathan Robinson, and they're not going to give it to you.
Robinson
Well, in a certain sense, then, Listen, Liberal looks like it's intended for the people who are causing the problem, but actually, it's intended for those of us who need to throw those people out of power.
Let me ask you how Joe Biden fits into the picture. There is a certain narrative that suggests that the Biden presidency was a sharp break from the neoliberal Democratic Party that you describe. Joe Biden obviously made a big effort to appear more pro union. He declared, I'm going to be the most pro-union president. In the first year, he said he wanted to be the next FDR, etc. Do you see that as entirely a fraud? Or is there something to that?
Frank
There is something to it. I think now everything that you and I are talking about has started to dawn on them. But back in the day, when I wrote Listen Liberal, I would say you could count the number of Democrats who agreed with me on one hand. There's like five of them. I could probably list them for you. Bernie is one. Sherrod Brown was one. But I think to a certain degree, Biden actually got it and did take the initial steps that you would take if you were going to try to put the party on a different course. He did. So look what he did on antitrust. That's probably the brightest spot of his administration. He did inspiring things. And this is stuff that I had once called for. I used to write articles about this back in the day, about how the Democratic Party needs to break with the sort of Clinton legacy on antitrust, and they need to get tough on this again because it's one tool where you don't need Congress. The laws were passed over 100 years ago. You just have to start enforcing them. And I'll be goddamned, he did it. I was very excited about that.
You mentioned Lina Khan earlier. I think she's exactly the kind of person that they should have running federal agencies. That is exactly what they should have been doing. Now, that said, with everything you described, these are tiny, tiny steps in the right direction, but they're massively overshadowed by the other things: by the Gaza disaster, by inflation, by Biden's age issue. In some ways, I think the Biden years are a kind of tragedy. This is a guy who seemed to understand it to some degree, and then who the hell knows what happened? Well, we still don't know.
Robinson
There's something very strange to me where you're indicating there that Biden started to get some hint that maybe you should do these things that actually deliver for people. Bernie Sanders understands this intuitively and has understood it forever, and it strikes me every time I see—I like looking at the comments section. And comment sections are a cesspool, but they give you an interesting indication of how people respond to things. And so when you watch Bernie Sanders on Joe Rogan or on Fox News, and you look at the comments section of the people who are the typical audience for those kinds of things, and when you go out and talk to normal people, and you say, what do you think of Bernie Sanders? They say, well, I'm a Republican, but I always respect Bernie. He tells it to you straight, every single time. The Bernie Sanders theory of how you reach people and what a social democrat should look like, and all of this stuff you're saying about how you just need to be like an honest, plainspoken New Deal Democrat who offers to help people and doesn't lie to them, is really intuitive.
Frank
In some ways, Bernie is this reassuring figure from long ago. He's selling politics from the 1940s in a 1940s accent. I really like that guy. (...)
Robinson You recently wrote this op-ed for the
New York Times after the election. You've been writing about these things for 20 years, and you say,
“I began to doubt that any combination of financial disaster or electoral chastisement will ever turn on the light bulb for liberals. I fear that '90s style centrism will march on.”
And in this election, we saw a worsening of the tendencies that you describe, where it's even more rich people voting for Democrats and even more working-class people going into the Trump coalition. But of course, ultimately, Trump is a fraudster. You write about the history of populism, and left and right populism are not the same thing.
Frank
You asked three different things there. So first of all, about the idea that centrism is not really centrism at all but this sort of Clintonism that we were talking about at the beginning of the show, this philosophy that the Democrats developed through the '70s, '80s, and '90s, that absolutely and utterly controls the party now. And I said in the article—I think the Times cut this line out because, obviously, they have house style, and you're not allowed to say certain things. But I said this philosophy will go on because it makes too much pundit sense. It's too obviously true to the professional elite of our world, the people who control our world. It's too obviously true even though it's false. Even though it's completely wrong, it's too flattering to the kind of people who write columns in the New York Times, to the kind of people that are on MSNBC, the kind of people who run American universities, foundations, and Wall Street firms. It makes too much sense. They're like, yes, the learning class should be in charge. Yes, the intellectuals, the elites, or the people who have advanced degrees should be in charge. That's why they call it an advanced degree. That's why they call it Yale.
Robinson
We are seeing this class realignment. You point out the neighborhood that you grew up in went from Republican to Democrat, and people who used to be Democrats and working class are now Republicans. Even Latinos in South Texas are starting to vote for Donald Trump in larger numbers. But it's not like we're going to see the Republicans embracing New Deal style, authentic populism.
Frank
Well, they talk about it, don't they? They make those noises.
Robinson
Right. But then Trump gets into office, and everyone's anti-labor.
Frank
And he cuts your taxes and puts the oil man in charge of the EPA, or whatever the hell it is. Nathan, we talked about how much fun it is to write and everything. You've sort of teased me because it's very frustrating that nobody listens. And this is one where I am just banging my head against a wall. I'm from Kansas. Populism means something there. It was a movement that we had in Kansas. It's a well-known thing. Even if people don't know the details, they know that it existed. They know what it was, roughly. It was a left-wing farmer labor movement a long time ago that swept over the state and then disappeared. Everybody knows those basic facts. When I was in graduate school, I decided it would be my subject. I would study it, and I did. I studied it for several years, and then I gave up on it because everybody was writing about populism back then.
This is in the '80s. Everybody was writing about populism. It just felt pointless to add another monograph on top of this already gigantic pile of essays and books about American populism, but it's always been the motif of my political writing. In addition to it being important because I come from Kansas, populism is also important because it's the beginning of the modern left in American life. This is literally where it starts, with the Populist Party. They're the first ones to actually start calling for a regulated economy, nationalization of things, votes for women, among other things. To basically formulate economic policy in the interests of ordinary people rather than in the interest of big business. That was unthinkable at the time. That was revolutionary. It was absolutely new, and it was shocking, and they were more or less beaten down.
But it was also the beginning, and it later grew and flowered into what we know as the New Deal and the Roosevelt administration. And this became what the Democratic Party was about, up to Lyndon Johnson. Johnson's grandfather, by the way, was an actual uppercase “P” Populist in the Texas Legislature. It's neither here nor there, but this is the backdrop of everything that I know about American politics. In What's the Matter with Kansas?, I was describing the people who were once the rank-and-file of populism being drawn over to the other side, and that it was being done with language that sounded populist.
So this is an important distinction. It feels like I've lost it here, but it's fake populism. So the Republicans use populist language all the time. You go back to Reagan. They did it with George W. Bush, and this is one of the reasons he annoyed me so much. They did it all the time, but they always did it in a cultural sense. You might remember George W. Bush with his pork rinds and touring the country with the country singers. This crap. And Reagan was very good at doing this act as well, but it's always an act. At some point, I lost control of this, and people just started calling it right-wing populism, and they started using the word populist as a synonym for racist, and then they started using the word populist as a synonym for fascist. (...)
There are consequences for it, and the consequences are what we see around us. When you say that populism is actually fascism and racism, you have made this whole species of politics off limits to yourself. And it's a species of politics, frankly, that we have to have if we're ever going to get out of this. (...)
Robinson
... You have a passage in your New York Times op-ed where you say, “can anything reverse it?”
And you say, “only a resolute determination by the Democratic Party to rededicate itself to the majoritarian vision of old, a great society of broad, inclusive prosperity. That means universal health care, higher minimum wage, robust financial regulation, antitrust enforcement, unions, welfare state, higher taxes on billionaires, even the cool ones. And it means, above all, liberalism as a social movement, as a coming together of ordinary people,” not, as you've just said, a series of top-down reforms by well-meaning professionals. (...)
Frank
Okay, let's look at these people in Listen, Liberal: “New Democrats,” the neoliberals before them. They did it. They conquered the party. The party is a site of contestation, as we were saying earlier. This is one of the reasons they always stave off the contest. They always manage to suppress the contest or to rig it in some way. You look at what happened to Bernie Sanders in 2020 or in 2016. With an open convention, no thanks.
But parties are contested, and it has been done in our lifetimes. There has been a group that took over the Democratic Party and remade it in their own image. Now they've clung very tightly to the levers of power ever since, and nobody has a plan for how to get them out of there. But that doesn't mean you couldn't dream one up. You could do it.
The other way is economic catastrophe in the manner of the New Deal. Nobody knew what Franklin Roosevelt was going to do. They just knew that he was the man of the moment, and he was able to completely remake the world as he saw fit. Now, the problem with this theory is we had that chance. That was 2008. That actually happened. And we did that, and we elected a man. If you're anything like I was, drinking the hope Kool-Aid back then—I went for Obama in a big way. I thought he was the man for the moment. I thought he was our generation's Franklin Roosevelt. I was completely wrong. And instead, he proceeded to enshrine this sort of neoliberal agenda.
by Nathan J. Robinson and Thomas Frank, Current Affairs |
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