Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? — a Book Review

31 March 2016

Worthwhile, but with flaws that may occasionally irritate

Thomas Frank’s sometimes too impressionistically reasoned — Listen, Liberal: or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (Metropolitan Books, 2016) —probably will not persuade self-satisfied Democrats that their political party has abandoned all but pretense of being the common person’s party. But the book is historically accurate and provides a plausible description of the Democratic Party’s retreat from New Deal and labor principles.

Dr. Frank (PhD, history) argues that the Party has devolved into:

(i) unalloyed worship of the Educated and Risen Elite (my term — religious connotation intended),

(ii) that group’s essentially predatory governing practices,

and

(iii) an implied (unapologetic) justification for our society’s increasingly gross economic inequalities.

On the way to supporting his reasoning, Frank treats readers to a laugh at some of the silliness that Democratic bigwigs, including President Barack Obama, have spouted about Innovation and Entrepreneurship’s ability to save our souls.

By the end of Listen, Liberal, readers will recognize why there may be no stupidity greater and more vicious than the one represented by supposedly intelligent people, who have willingly and self-interestedly abandoned full and fair use of their brains.

A problem with theme

Dr. Frank never succinctly, completely or conveniently describes his theme. His readers have to flesh its scope out for him.

Frank’s argument appears to be anchored in a comparison of 2016’s Democratic philosophy as compared to the New Deal social rationale of the 1930s.

The book’s theme boils down to Frank’s well-supported observations that the Democratic Party has been taken over by a group of academically credentialed Merit-o-Crats (my word), who protect their elite power and financial status at the Party’s traditional, working class base’s expense.

For example, the author points out that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administrators were uncredentialed pragmatists with a shared fix-what’s-wrong-for-the-common-man mentality. (See Listen, Liberal’s page 39.)

In contrast, President Obama’s have been almost exclusively drawn from an Ivy League-ish educated elite that cares virtually not at all about the working class or the poor. This degree-wielding group also shares inseparable ties to the nation’s oligarchs, as well as to the corporate structures that the Plutonomy has set up to fuel its fortunes. (See Listen, Liberal’s page 32 and following.)

In their minds, says Frank, these Merit-o-Crats (my word) — being smarter and more capable than everyone else on the planet — deserve to rise to top of the social pyramid. The Meritocracy’s unspoken “we are better than you” prescription for social and economic inequality has become the defining stamp of the new Democratic Party.

Dr. Frank’s (mostly implied) counter-perspective is that a just society is comprised of more than just a rich, self-satisfied, greedy and grasping elite that extracts riches from the lower 99 (or so) percent of humanity. Consequently, he thinks that the Democratic Party’s abandonment of New Deal-like (working class-aimed) social principles is unfortunate.

Instead of having just one Plutocracy Party, he says, we now have two.

Dr. Frank capably makes his point by the end of the book

He is especially and succinctly competent in describing how President Bill Clinton reversed the Party’s core principles.

Clinton disingenuously deregulated the financial sector, eagerly embraced unregulated capital flight and industry-destroying free trade — as well as inequitably changing drug and criminal law, so as to incarcerate astonishing numbers of African-Americans in creating a modern version of Slave and Police State-ism.

After a good analytical start, however, author Frank inexplicably descends into thematically disconnected blather while describing President Barack Obama’s exacerbations of the same things.

I had the reading impression that Listen, Liberal may have been written at two widely separated times or moods. Beginning with Chapter 6, Frank’s formerly cogent analysis partially goes off the rails. Readers become dependent on tolerant good will to stay with Frank long enough to figure out what he is (somewhat chaotically) driving at.

Chapter 6 on — concerning the post-Clinton Democratic Party elite’s infatuation with snob education, innovation, and everywhere-sprouting entrepreneurship — do not thematically hang together very well. It is as if critical transitional topic sentences are missing.

Nevertheless, these arguably too loosely assembled examples of Democratic Party stupidity are ultimately persuasively drawn. (Sometimes, in life, the volume of evidence overcomes the scattered and initially incomprehensible way in which it is presented.)

Is Dr. Frank, in this intellectually sloppy authorial regard, a typical liberal? (I ask this with a lightly sardonic wink.)

Writing Sample 1

Regarding Bill Clinton’s reversal into the equivalent of Republican Party-ism

On the financiers, the real Clinton legacy came down to four words: Grab what you can. For them, there were bailouts and trade deals that protected their interests and tax cuts and a timely shot of “liquidity” whenever stock markets seemed to be flagging. And a little deregulation should the laws of the land not meet with their favor.

But the poor needed to learn discipline. That seems to have been one of the ideas behind NAFTA [see Wikipedia entry here]: People employed in manufacturing had to accept working harder for less or else watch their jobs depart for Mexico.

Discipline was the point of the ’94 crime bill, too: The poor were to live in a state of constant supervision where there was “zero tolerance” for those who stepped out of line.

Mercy was to be a luxury item now, a thing reserved for those who could make big donations to the Clinton presidential library.

Writing Sample 2

Regarding the Obama Era Democratic Party’s cultish infatuation with “innovation” — befitting their self-image of being the cream of humanity’s brains

As the tech writer Evgeny Morozov points out in To Save Everything, Click Here, the cult of innovation holds every info-age novelty to be “inherently good in itself, regardless of its social or political consequences.”

Sure enough . . . few of the people who write or talk about innovation even acknowledge the possibility that innovations might be harmful instead of noble and productive. And yet recent history is littered with exactly such stuff:

Innovations that allow terrorist groups to recruit online. Innovations that allowed Enron to do all the fine things it used to do.

Come to think of it, the whole economic debacle of the last ten years owes its existence to the financial innovations of the Nineties and the Aughts — the credit default swaps, or the algorithms companies used to hand out mortgage loans — innovations that were celebrated in their day in the same mindlessly positive way we celebrate tech today.

Frank eventually makes the point that these alleged innovations often amount to nothing more than allowing The Greedy to circumvent existing law, so as to enrich themselves and thumb their noses at arguably justly more equitable societal restraints.

Amazon dot com’s pseudo-invented ability to avoid paying most state taxes is one of Frank’s (poorly explained) examples. There was nothing arguably society-enhancing in Amazon’s creativity in that and many other competition-crushing regards.

The Amazon tax ruse (in my view) just served to undercut local businesses and further weaken individual state budgets. States were now not only losing (a) tax income from business that fled to Amazon, but (b) were receiving even fewer taxes from local owners’ subsequently reduced incomes. This double whammy serves only to enrich Jeff Bezos.

Innovation this may have been, but society-nurturing it very arguably is not.

Frank’s point — about the Party’s law and society-shredding innovation theme — is that today’s Democratic Party Elite vapidly lauds this drivel (meaning nonsense, twaddle, and bullshit), even though the alleged “creativity” has not been economically widely enhancing at all.

The book’s examples of the silly aspects of creative innovation — especially as foolishly touted by loot-grabbing politicians — are cynically amusing. At least to readers with a shared penchant for dark humor. Brainlessness in self-acclaimed “genius” people is funny, when it is not even more infuriating.

What does Frank recommend doing, so as to counter the anti-common-person metamorphosis of the Democratic Party?

His suggestion is ironically “liberal” — given his excoriation of the New Democratic Party’s unworkable emphasis on education as a cure for all economic ills.

Frank says that:

What we can do is strip away the Democrats’ precious sense of their own moral probity . . . . It is that sensibility . . . that prevents so many good-hearted rank-and-file Democrats from understanding how starkly and how deliberately their political leaders contradict their values.

The course of the party and the course of the country can both be changed, but only after we understand that the problem is us.

I doubt that Frank’s fix-it prescription goes far enough

Sure, a lot of us are abysmally ignorant regarding how the Elites hoodwink us. But many of us are not.

The core problem goes beyond awareness. It goes to the Elites’ entrenched grasp of all aspects of economic, political and military power.

Frank seems to share the classically liberal-democratic idea that an enraged populace can peacefully re-grasp the levers of societal power. My reading of my own elderly life — and of much broader and deeper History generally — doubts that.

Chairman Mao’s 1927 aphorism — “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” — remains true. He said this while similarly confronted with a power elite that impregnably took riches from the backs of poverty-stricken peasants and laborers.

See the Mao quotation in:

Problems of War and Strategy, § II (entitled The War History of the Kuomintang), Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, Volume II (Foreign Languages Press, Peking, China, 2004) (online at Marxists Internet Archive)

For those who are Mao-averse, the same idea is core to Thomas Jefferson’s much earlier democracy-embracing idea that:

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Stephens Smith, November 13, 1787, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (1955) (volume 12, at page 356) [see Bartleby.com, here]

It is only when Grasping Elites get the idea that they might be physically and terminally punted from Power that they will wield back their arguably unfair share.

Such is not going to happen in the United States foreseeably soon. Most of us are too deeply averse to the violence that Thomas Jefferson evidently thought was our historically-conferred obligation to Liberty in our capacity as republican democrats. Pun intended.

The moral? — Listen, Liberal will appeal to readers seeking a partial explanation of how (and when) democracy failed in the United States

Despite the book’s sometimes disorganized and wandering argument, it capably supplements other volumes arguing essentially the same thing (but in usually less insightful terms). Thomas Frank, as he usually does, capably drills in the more absurd social aspects of American politics.

Primary among these absurdities is the manner in which politically manipulated Americans pretty consistently vote against their own interests. Nobody I have read exposes this tendency as well as Dr. Frank does. His footnotes, unusually competent in a non-academic political book of this kind, are also helpful.

Recommended, with the above described caveats.

PeteFree.com

Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? — a Book Review