Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism had a good post on politics and political reform, taking off on a talk by Thomas Frank.
In a nutshell, successful political reform in the United States has been the product of alliances between progressives and populists.
I define progressives as middle-class idealists who want a better world for everyone, and populists as have-nots who want a more just world for themselves.
The progressive agenda is, as defined in a 2011 article by a writer named Richard Kline quoted by Smith, is as follows:
Anti-colonialism Anti-militarism Abolition Universal, secular education End to child labor Universal suffrage Female legal equality Consumer protections Civil rights Conservation/environmentalism
The populist agenda is:
Call off the cops (and thugs) Eight hour day and work place safety Right to organize Anti-discrimination in housing and hiring Unemployment dole Public pensions Public educational scholarships Tax the rich Anti-trust and anti-corporate Anti-imperialism
Broadly speaking, the Democrats are fake progressives and the Republicans are fake populists. Until we the people can find an alternative to the two-party system, or change the power structure in one or both major parties, we’re stuck.
Thomas Frank had a good interview last week on the Breaking Points TV show. It’s worth watching.
He talked about how failure to control the spread of the COVID-19 virus, instead of being blamed on the failed health care system, is instead blamed on people who are skeptical of established authority.
The problem is that there are good reasons to be skeptical of authority. It was Anthony Fauci, who is nowadays considered to the voice of science, who in the early days of the pandemic said that it was not to be taken seriously, it was just like the ‘flu, and that masks were useless.
It was the Centers for DIsease Control that, in the early days, advised the U.S. government not to screen air travelers coming in from China.
Established authority nowadays tells us that vaccination will prevent the spread of the disease, when, so far as is known, it merely suppresses the symptoms and does little or nothing to stop the spread.
Nobody is being called to account for this. The bulk of the press, the political establishment and the medical establishment say that everything that has gone wrong, and everything that is predictably going to go wrong, is the fault of right-wingers who refuse to get vaccinated.
There are all kinds of reasons why people don’t get vaccinated. There are medical reasons. There are economic reasons. There are religious reasons.
And of course there are conspiracy theorists who think the pandemic is a Democratic hoax. I don’t share their views, of course, but conspiracy theories flourish in times like these, when established authority can’t be trusted.
Whatever the reasons people have for not getting vaccinated, ridicule and scapegoating are not good methods for bringing them around. They are, however, good tactics for diverting blame for failure from the people in charge.
Thomas Frank, writing in Le Monde diplomatique, points out that the hard core Trump haters are just as authoritarian as President Trump himself.
I remember, back in the 1950s, that the conventional wisdom among college-educated liberals was that if you wanted to fight Communism, you had to understand and address the reasons why poor and down-trodden people saw Communism as an answer.
Those liberals also perceived that threats to liberty could come in many forms: not just fascism, but Communism; not just Communism, but the followers of Joe McCarthy and the Ku Klux Klan.
In the era of Donald Trump, establishment liberals lack this insight. They do not look at the reasons why ordinary people might turn to someone like Donald Trump, and they fight dissent by trying to silence dissenters.
Here’s how Thomas Frank puts it—
….. Millions of ordinary Americans despise the well educated elite. Why?
Look at the opioid epidemic that raged through middle America in the years before 2016 — a gift of Big Pharma and the medical profession.
Look at the de-industrialization that afflicted the same geographic areas — a product of our brilliant free trade deals.
Look at the global financial crisis and the bailouts — the deeds of America’s greatest math and financial geniuses, who faced almost no consequences for their actions.
Look at the Iraq War — the toast of the foreign policy establishment.
Look at the incredible fact that American life expectancy was actually declining in the years before 2017 rather than increasing.
Trump did nothing to solve any of these problems. But everyone knows they exist.
One side talks, lectures, scolds and instructs, and the other side — silent by definition these days — seethes with resentment.
Everyone knows this awful dynamic had a role in elevating the racist demagogue Trump to the presidency. Everyone also knows this country is primed to explode. [snip]
His focus is on Minnesota rather than Kansas, and he provides a lot of interesting information about Scandinavian-American cooperatives,, the thought of Thorstein Veblen and the rise and fall of the Farmer-Labor Party.
This history should not be forgotten. Click on this to read the review.
Thomas Frank wrote a good article on universal health care as an example of the battle between populists and professionals.
In both the United States and Canada, the organized medical profession bitterly opposed all attempts by the public to take control of the administration of health care, either through government or voluntary co-operative organization.
But in Canada, the province of Saskatchewan in 1962, led by populist Premier Tommy Douglas, instituted Medicare for all. The province’s medical profession responded with a general strike, which failed.
In the end, many Canadian physicians admitted they were wrong. Evidently they were motivated by mistaken opinions, not greed. The system was rolled out nationwide in steps in 1966. Some polls indicate that Tommy Douglas is the most admired Canadian.
President Truman proposed a universal health care system in 1948, but his plan was defeated. So was every universal health care proposal since then. The task force appointed by Joe Biden, this year’s presumed Democratic candidate, rejected Medicare for all.
The American Medical Association no longer wields power. Control of medical practice has been taken over by bureaucracies, just as physicians feared. But they are controlled not by patients or the general public, but by health insurance companies and health maintenance organizations, who are the anti-populists of today.
Frank emphasized that the original Populists and their successors in fact valued education and knowledge. The question was and is who benefits from education and knowledge.
It is interesting that Frank’s writings do not appear on the Op Ed pages of the New York Times or Washington Post, although they deserve to be. Frank used to be published regularly in The Guardian, but his most recent two articles appeared in the English edition of Le Monde diplomatique. I’m not sure of the significance of that.
Populism: a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups. [Google Dictionary]
Frank set the record straight in his new book, THE PEOPLE, NO: A Brief History ofAnti-Populism, which is just out. He begins with the original Populists, members of a radical farmer-labor party in the 1890s that briefly threatened the rule of bankers, railroad barons and grain and cotton merchants..
Naturally the plutocrats feared and hated the Populists, Frank wrote. They said Populism was mob rule, the second coming of the French Revolution. They said Populism was hatred by the failures and losers of the successful and capable, who deserved to be on top. In the end, through the power of money, they won.
The core of the opposition to populism was opposition to democracy itself—what Frank called the “democracy scare.” In The People, No, he traced the history of this opposition.
Frank wrote an excellent book. It is short, it is easy to read and it covers a lot of ground. What he wrote is true, important and largely ignored. He also had a few blind spots and omissions, which I’ll get to.
Right now the USA is on the brink of an economic crisis as great as the ones in the 1890s and 1930s, and today’s economic, political and intellectual elites are failing just as badly as their predecessors did.
There is just as great a need now as there was then for a movement of the common people to take back control of the political and economic system, and just as much of fear of democracy.
The world “populist” is Latin for “of the people.” The Constitution, the USA’s founding document, begins with the words “We, the people…” President Abraham Lincoln said the USA stood for “government of the people, for the people and by the people.” So why does the word “populism” have such a bad name?
Thomas Frank was recently interviewed by one John Siman, whom I’m not familiar with. This part of the interview stands out for me.
TCF: …… I had met Barack Obama. He was a professor at the University of Chicago, and I’d been a student there. And he was super smart. Anyhow, I met him and was really impressed by him. All the liberals in Hyde Park — that’s the neighborhood we lived in — loved him, and I was one of them, and I loved him too.
Barack Obama
And I was so happy when he got elected. Anyhow, I knew one thing he would do for sure, and that is he would end the reign of cronyism and incompetence that marked the Bush administration and before them the Reagan administration. These were administrations that actively promoted incompetent people. And I knew Obama wouldn’t do that, and I knew Obama would bring in the smartest people, and he’d get the best economists.
Remember, when he got elected we were in the pit of the crisis — we were at this terrible moment — and here comes exactly the right man to solve the problem. He did exactly what I just described: He brought in [pause] Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard, considered the greatest economist of his generation — and, you know, go down the list: He had Nobel Prize winners, he had people who’d won genius grants, he had The Best and the Brightest.
And they didn’t really deal with the problem. They let the Wall Street perpetrators off the hook — in a catastrophic way, I would argue. They come up with a health care system that was half-baked.
Anyhow, the question becomes — after watching the great disappointments of the Obama years — the question becomes: Why did government-by-expert fail?
Thomas Frank is one of my favorite writers. I like his books. I like his magazine articles. I enjoy watching videos of his speeches and interviews. But there is one thing he doesn’t quite get.
His basic idea is that the Democratic Party is losing because it has abandoned the American working class and the policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. The leaves them vulnerable to the fake populism of Donald Trump and the right wing of the Republican Party.
Democrats rely on African-Americans, Hispanics and educated professionals of all races reacting against President Trump’s appeal to prejudice against African-Americans and immigrants.
That’s not enough, Frank writes. Democrats need to stand up for working people of all races—provide free college tuition and Medicare for all, enforce the anti-trust laws and renegotiate NAFTA and other pro-corporate trade treaties.
All this is true and important.
Frank’s mistake is to think that the reason top Democrats are pro-corporate is that they fail to understand their situation.
Shortly after the 36th minute in the video above. he says that the reason the Clintons and their allies have abandoned American labor is that the signature achievement of their generation was to their successful revolt against the New Deal, and nobody will disavow their generation’s signature achievement.
If they really don’t understand, it is because, as Upton Sinclair once put it, “it is hard to make a man understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
The wealth and power of the Clintons, like that of the Obamas, is based on their allegiance to Wall Street and the corporate elite. If they had advocated breaking up the “too big to fail” banks or prosecuting financial fraud, they wouldn’t get six-figure lecture fees from bankers and hedge fund managers.
On a lower levels of government, there is the revolving door between Congress and regulatory agencies on the one hand and Washington lobbyists, law firms and regulated industries on the others. Neil Barofsky, whose job was oversight of the TARP bailout program, was warned that if he did his job too zealously, he would lose the chance of a good post-government job. He’s not the only one.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee supports a whole ecology of fund-raisers, pollsters, media specialists and campaign consultants who depend on a system whereby candidates concentrate on raising money and spending it on designated funds.
So it’s not just a matter of waking up to what’s really going on. It’s a matter of people knowing which side their bread is buttered on. Or, as the Japanese might say, nobody willingly lets their rice bowl be broken.
Thomas Frank has a new book out, an essay collection called Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports from a Sinking Society. The videos above and below consist of interviews he gave about it. Here’s how he introduced it.
The essays collected here scan over many diverse aspects of American life, but they all aim to tell one essential story: This is what a society looks like when the glue that holds it together starts to dissolve. This is the way ordinary citizens react when they learn the structure beneath them is crumbling. This is the thrill that pulses through the veins of the well-to-do when they discover there is no longer any limit on their power to accumulate.
In headline terms, these essays cover the years of the Barack Obama presidency and the populist explosion that marked its end. It was a time when liberal hopes were sinking and the newly invigorated right was proceeding from triumph to triumph. When I wrote the earliest installment in the collection, Democrats still technically controlled both houses of Congress in addition to the presidency; when I finished these essays, Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office and Republicans had assumed a position of almost unprecedented power over the nation’s political system.
For a few, these were times of great personal satisfaction. The effects of what was called the Great Recession were receding, and affluence had returned to smile once again on the tasteful and the fortunate. The lucky ones resumed their fascinating inquiries into the art of the cocktail and the science of the grandiose suburban home. For them, things transpired reassuringly as before.
But for the many, this was a period when reassurance was in short supply. Ordinary Americans began to understand that, recovery or not, things would probably never be the same in their town or neighborhood. For them, this was a time of cascading collapse, with one trusted institution after another visibly deteriorating.
It was a golden age of corruption. By this I do not mean that our top political leaders were on the take—they weren’t—but rather that America’s guardian class had been subverted or put to sleep. Human intellect no longer served the interests of the public; it served money—or else it ceased to serve at all. That was the theme of the era, whether the locale was Washington, D.C., or the college your kids attended, or the city desk of your rapidly shrinking local newspaper. No one was watching out for the interests of the people, and increasingly the people could see that this was the case.
Russia Collusion: Hillary Clinton, DNC & FBI are the real stars by Michael Doran for National Review. [Added 3/15/2018] A plausible account of how Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson created and sold the Russiagate story. Long but interesting.
Even outspoken progressive Democrats such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and the authors of Daring Democracy hold back from doing two things.
They don’t talk about the U.S. state of permanent war, and they don’t criticize the record of Barack Obama.
Thomas Frank, who recently did three more interviews for the Real News Network, doesn’t talk about war and peace either, but he is at least willing to take an honest look at the Obama record and the record of Bill Clinton before him.
I have the three interviews on YouTube, with links that should take you to transcripts.
The Democratic Party historically was opposed to big banks, going back to Franklin Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan and Andrew Jackson. That was almost a defining characteristic.
It was golden-tongued Bill Clinton who made the Democrats a second party of Wall Street, and persuaded the Democratic rank and file to accept it. His argument was that Democrats couldn’t win unless they matched Republicans dollar-for-dollar in campaign spending, which they could not do if they were anti-Wall Street.
I voted for Clinton reluctantly. In those days I thought that Democrats, however flawed, were better for working people than Republicans.
I disliked Clinton, not because of the sex scandals or his policies, but because of his treatment of employees of the White House travel office, which arranged accommodations for White House staff and the White House press corps accompanying the President on his travels. He and Hillary Clinton wanted to close the travel office and turn its functions over to cronies of theirs, which they had a legal right to do.
When this became an issue in Congress, Clinton ordered a FBI investigation of the travel office employees to see if any of them were guilty of criminal wrongdoing. He was willing to destroy the careers and ruin the lives of people who did not intend him any harm, but were merely in the way of something he wanted to do.
I did not fully realize until later the harm that Clinton’s signature policies did—the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement, the end of welfare for mothers with dependent children, the crime bill leading to mass incarceration and the deregulation of the banking industry. As Thomas Frank noted in the video, all four of these things were long-time Republican goals.
Clinton even toyed with a bipartisan agreement with Newt Gingrich to cut Social Security.
Scroll down for links to six recent Thomas Frank interviews on the Real News Network
Thomas Frank, who understands American politics as well or better than anyone else I know of, is giving a series of interviews on the state of the Democratic Party to the Real News Network. I link to them below.
Most of my friends are liberal Democrats, like me, and they can’t understand why a working person would go against their own interests by supporting Donald Trump. But then they themselves go against their own interests by supporting Hillary Clinton.
The problem is not Clinton as an individual. As an individual, she is much more qualified to hold public office than Trump.
The problem is that the Democratic Party has come to depend on wealthy donors to finance its campaigns and it looks to well-to-do salaried professionals as its core voters. Working people are coming to realize that the Democratic Party does not represent them.
It is not that large numbers working people are turning to Donald Trump. The GOP is even worse than the Democrats. It is that increasing numbers of working people—black, white and brown—see no point in voting for either party.
Paul Jay of the Real News Network did a good interview with Thomas Frank, one of my three or four favorite political writers, on why Hillary Clinton is attacking Bernie Sanders at this late date. The interview starts about five minutes into the video.
Frank says Clinton has no just reason to hate Sanders personally. He conducted a relatively gentlemanly primary election campaign, and supported her loyally during the general election. She should be grateful that he decided to run within the Democratic Party in the first place, and not as a third-party candidate, like Ralph Nader in 2000.
But what Sanders represents, which is the pro-labor New Deal tradition of the Democratic Party, is deeply threatening to the power of the corporate wing of the party, which is what Clinton and her husband have represented through their political careers.
I think the reason the Democratic Party has done so little to fight voter disenfranchisement and to register voters is that disenfranchised and unregistered voters are mainly in demographic groups that corporate Democrats don’t care about.
They would rather seek the votes of culturally liberal suburban Republicans, whose votes, as Frank noted in the interview, Clinton actually won in the 2016 election.
The argument of the corporate Democrats is that (1) the Republican leaders are so reactionary and dangerous that nothing else matters except defeating them, (2) this can’t be done without matching the Republicans dollar for dollar and so (3) Democrats can’t afford to advocate policies contrary to the interests of their big-money contributors.
This is why they found that Sanders campaign so threatening, Frank said. Sanders showed it was possible to conduct a political campaign based on small donations. As far as that goes, Clinton outspent Trump two to one, and she still lost.
Sanders and Clinton are both getting on in years, and I don’t think either has a future as a national political candidate. But I think there will be a long struggle between Sanders and Clinton factions under different names. The struggle will be bitter because the stakes are high—whether the U.S. government will be accountable to the common people or to a corporate and political elite.
Nobody alive has a better grasp of American politics than Thomas Frank.
Above is a video I came across of a talk he gave in April at the Kansas City Public Library. It’s a bit long, especially to watch on a computer screen, but Frank is an entertaining speaker, as he is a writer, and I recommend listening to him if you have time. His talk ends a little short of an hour and a question-and-answer period runs for about 30 minutes.
Frank sees Donald Trump as the latest of a line of Republican nationalist populists—his predecessors being Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush and the leaders of the Tea Party.
A populist is someone who claims to speak in the name of the people against the elite. The old Populist Party, which dominated Kansas politics in the 1890s, represented farmers and laborers and fought against bankers and railroad CEOs.
The Democratic Party used to be this kind of populist party, Frank said, but it no longer is. Instead it represents a professional class defined by educational credentials.
In the days of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, Democrats spoke in the name of the common people against greedy Wall Street bankers and power-hungry corporate CEOs. But the present generation of Democratic leaders regards bankers and CEOs as classmates—members of the same college classes and same social class.
This has given an opening to nationalist populists who claim to speak for the common people against meddling bureaucrats, unpatriotic intellectuals and out-of-touch journalists.
The vast majority of Americans are either treading water economically or going under. They are justifiably angry, and right-wing talk radio tells them a story that explains their plight and channels their anger.
The Republican populists offer no real solution, but Democrats no longer offer an alternative story. That’s why they’ve been in decline for 50 years. They will have a hard time coming back, Frank said, even if Donald Trump self-destructs.
I found Frank’s whole talk interesting. Maybe you will, too.
People say that a vote for a third-party candidate such as Jill Stein is a vote for Donald Trump. But in reality, a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote to empower future candidates such as Donald Trump.
Thomas Frank, author of Listen, Liberal, and Robert Scheer, editor-in-chief of Truthdig, talk about how the candidacy of Donald Trump is a product of the failures of Democratic leaders such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
For the past 20 or so years, as Frank points out, the leaders of the Democratic Party have turned their backs on working people on the theory that such people have nowhere else to go.
Now Donald Trump has come along and given them somewhere else to go. He doesn’t have good answers, but he is the only one of the two major-party candidates who is an alternative to the status quo.
If Hillary Clinton is elected, she will pursue the same policies, and, four years from now, there will be another Donald Trump—but one more self-disciplined, less openly racist and less obviously foolish and ignorant. And that Donald Trump will likely be elected.
The video above is 47 minutes long, but worth watching. Thomas Frank is an entertaining talker and he knows what he is talking about.
I looked forward to reading Thomas Frank’s LISTEN, LIBERAL -or- What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? I finished reading it over the weekend, and it’s as good as I thought it would be.
It is an explanation of how the Democratic Party ceased to be an advocate for the interests of working people and organized labor, and instead became the party of the credentialed professional class, as exemplified by Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Thomas Frank is best known for his book, What’s the Matter With Kansas? which is about how a once-radical state became a stronghold of the right wing. In this book, he explains how the party of the New Deal became the party of bank bailouts and pro-corporate international trade deals.
Thomas Frank
The change began with the split between college-educated idealists and blue collar union workers in the late 1960s. Young radicals thought that the New Deal was yesterday’s news and that labor leaders such as the AFL-CIO’s George Meany were obstacles to peace in Vietnam and justice for minorities and women.
The young radicals triumphed in 1972 when they nominated George McGovern for President, under convention rules written so as to guarantee representation for minorities, women and youth, but not for union members.
When McGovern went down in humiliating defeat, the party leaders rewrote the rules so as to prevent another McGovern from arising again. They did not, however, return to their New Deal roots. Instead they started to bid against the Republicans for support of the business class.
These two factions of the Democratic Party – social liberals and the business conservatives – eventually came together.
Their common ground was belief that the world should be run by an elite of smart people. Their liberalism consisted of belief that there should be equal opportunity to enter this class based on educational credentials and professional achievement.
The idea was not to raise the material standard of living poor people and the working class in general, as in New Deal days. It was to give everybody, through access to education, an equal chance to be part of the elite, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or social or economic class.
Then, if you still couldn’t succeed, it would be your own fault. Maybe you didn’t study hard enough in the fifth grade.
This is not to say that Democrats became the same as Republicans.
Republican leaders wanted to be governed by an elite of tough, successful competitors. Democratic leaders want to be governed by an elite of enlightened thinkers.
Republican leaders embrace economic inequality because they believe the laws of the free market are moral values. Democratic leaders accept economic inequality because they believe the laws of the free market are scientific laws. Republicans despise losers. Democrats sympathize with losers, but do not think it is feasible to help them.
Republicans govern in the interests of the top 1 percent of income earners. Democrats, as Frank wrote, govern in the interests of the top 10 percent. [1]
It is Bernie Sanders who is the incremental reformer. Hillary Clinton is a defender of the status quo. Too many people are fooled into thinking their disagreement is about the pace of change.
It is not.
Their disagreement is about whether there should be any change at all and, if so, in what direction.
He wants to limit corporate power. She depends on corporate power, both for her campaign and her personal income.
Nothing Bernie Sanders advocates is radical. Everything he proposes has been tried and worked, either in the USA or abroad.
He wants to enforce anti-trust laws and laws against financial frauds. He wants to restore worker protections and corporate regulations that worked well in the late 20th century. He wants to adopt a version of Canada’s popular and successful Medicare-for-all plan.
He does not—for better or worse—advocate drastic redistribution of wealth and power, only a halt to the growing concentration of wealth. He is not a peace candidate nor a civil liberties candidate, although I think he would be less eager than Clinton to go to war or hunt down whistle-blowers.
Even though the reforms Sanders proposes are popular, Hillary Clinton says they are impossible. She says Sanders is doing people a disservice by encouraging them to hope for the impossible.
Universal health care is “never, ever” going to happen, she says; restoring free tuition at state universities is an example of foolish “free this and free that”, and young people who hope for something better haven’t done the research.
Clinton depends for her income and her campaign funds on the corporate establishment. That establishment is so dead set against even minor reforms that pushing them through will require the equivalent of a political revolution.
In American politics today, there are three main factions and only two parties to represent them. One faction has to lose and, if Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are nominated, it will be the Bernie Sanders progressives.
Donald Trump speaks to the concerns of working people—especially pro-corporate trade deals and deindustrialization—but he has no real solution.
His economic nationalism, while not a complete answer to U.S. economic problems, is preferable to the corporate trade deals of the Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.
But by pitting white working men against Hispanics, blacks, immigrants and feminists, he prevents the working class as a whole from ever having enough clout to defend their interests.
Thomas Frank wrote an excellent book about how the Republicans may be the party of the wealthy elite, representing the upper 1 percent of American income earners, but the Democrats are the party of the educated professional elite, representing the rest of the upper 10 percent.
This year’s political realignment may change this, as he himself implicitly acknowledged in a new article in Vanity Fair. Under Hillary Clinton, Democrats are becoming the party of the upper 1 percent as well. Here is the meat of what Frank wrote.
Rich Americans still have it pretty good. I don’t mean everything’s perfect: business regulations can be burdensome; Manhattan zoning can prevent the addition of a town-house floor; estate taxes kick in at over $5 million. But life is acceptable. Barack Obama has not imposed much hardship, and neither will Hillary Clinton.
And what about Donald Trump? Will rich people suffer if he is elected president? Well, yes. Yes, they will. Because we all will. But that’s a pat answer, because Trump and Trumpism are different things. Trump is an erratic candidate who brings chaos to everything. Trumpism, on the other hand, is the doctrine of a different Republican Party, one that would cater not to the donor class, but rather to the white working class. Rich people do not like that idea.
I can hardly wait to read Thomas Frank’s new book.
Here’s another excerpt.
A while ago I spoke at a firefighters convention in the Pacific Northwest, talking as I always do about the ways we have rationalized these changes to ourselves.
Firefighters are the sort of people we honor for their bravery, but they also happen to be blue-collar workers, and they have watched with increasing alarm what has been happening to folks like them for the last few decades . . . watched as the people formerly known as the heart and soul of this country had their lives taken apart bone by bone.
They themselves still make a decent living, I was told—they are some of the last unionized blue-collar workers who do—but they can see the inferno coming their way now, as their colleagues in other parts of the country get their contracts voided and their pensions reduced.
After I spoke, a firefighter from the Seattle area picked up the microphone. Workers had been watching their standard of living get whittled away for decades, he said, and up till now they had always been able to come up with ways to get by.
The first adjustment they made, he recalled, was when women entered the workforce. Families “added that income, you got to keep your boat, or your second car, or your vacation, and everything was OK.” Next, people ran up debt on their credit cards. Then, in the last decade, people began “pulling home equity out,” borrowing against their houses.
“All three of those things have kept the middle class from having to sink down into abject poverty,” he said. But now all three coping mechanisms were at an end. There were no more family members to send to work, the expiration date had passed for the home-equityMasterCard, and still wages sank. His question was this: “Is there a fourth economic savior out there, or do you think that maybe we have reached the end?”
Thomas Frank has published another excerpt from his new book, Listen, Liberal., which I look forward to reading. This one is about Bill Clinton, and why he is still so popular among working people and minorities despite having done so little for them when in the White House.
I would periodically ask my liberal friends if they could recall the progressive laws he got passed, the high-minded policies he fought for—you know, the good things Bill Clinton got done while he was president. Why was it, I wondered, that we were supposed to think so highly of him—apart from his obvious personal charm, I mean?
Bill Clinton in 1992
It proved difficult for my libs. People mentioned the obvious things: Clinton once raised the minimum wage and expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit. He balanced the budget. He secured a modest tax increase on the rich. And he did propose a national health program, although it didn’t get very far and was in fact so poorly designed it could be a model of how not to do big policy initiatives.
Other than that, not much. No one could think of any great but hopeless Clintonian stands on principle; after all, this is the guy who once took a poll to decide where to go on vacation. His presidency was all about campaign donations, not personal bravery—he basically rented out the Lincoln Bedroom, for chrissake, and at the end of his time in office he even appeared to sell a presidential pardon.
Donald Trump is a conman, a racist and a bully. The record is clear. But the world is full of confidence men, racists and bullies. What sets him apart?
Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter With Kansas?and other great political books, took the trouble to listen for himself to several hours of Trump speeches (which I confess I have never done).
I saw the man ramble and boast and threaten and even seem to gloat when protesters were ejected from the arenas in which he spoke. I was disgusted by these things, as I have been disgusted by Trump for 20 years.
But I also noticed something surprising. In each of the speeches I watched, Trump spent a good part of his time talking about an entirely legitimate issue, one that could even be called left-wing.
Yes, Donald Trump talked about trade. In fact, to judge by how much time he spent talking about it, trade may be his single biggest concern – not white supremacy. Not even his plan to build a wall along the Mexican border, the issue that first won him political fame. He did it again during the debate on 3 March: asked about his political excommunication by Mitt Romney, he chose to pivot and talk about … trade.
It seems to obsess him: the destructive free-trade deals our leaders have made, the many companies that have moved their production facilities to other lands, the phone calls he will make to those companies’ CEOs in order to threaten them with steep tariffs unless they move back to the US.
Trump embellished this vision with another favorite left-wing idea: under his leadership, the government would “start competitive bidding in the drug industry”. (“We don’t competitively bid!” he marveled – another true fact, a legendary boondoggle brought to you by the George W Bush administration.)
Thomas Frank, with his usual incisiveness, explains in the current issue of Harpers why so many rich liberals such as Hillary Clinton and Melinda Gates endorse micro-lending.
It is a way of identifying the interests of American women who aspire to be corporate executives or partners in law firms with Third World women basket-makers and market-place vendors.
Merely by providing impoverished individuals with a tiny loan of fifty or a hundred dollars, it was thought, you could put them on the road to entrepreneurial self-sufficiency, you could make entire countries prosper, you could bring about economic development itself.
What was most attractive about micro-lending was what it was not, what it made unnecessary: any sort of collective action by poor people coming together in governments or unions.
Hillary Clinton represents the Washington and Wall Street elite, committed to perpetual war and crony capitalism. 
They themselves still make a decent living, I was told—they are some of the last unionized blue-collar workers who do—but they can see the inferno coming their way now, as their colleagues in other parts of the country get their contracts voided and their pensions reduced.
But I also noticed something surprising. In each of the speeches I watched, Trump spent a good part of his time talking about an entirely legitimate issue, one that could even be called left-wing. 
Phil Ebersole's Blog 