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A review by lindsirae
Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank
2.0
What in incredibly frustrating read!! Having heard about this author from a leftist podcast, I assumed Frank was a socialist or at least some kind of materialist. Not at all. He is, in fact, one of the idealist liberals he claims to despise.
Frank tells us that the Democratic Party leadership made a conscious decision in the years between 1968-1972 to abandon their historic base of working class voters in favor of the emerging professional class. Before this point, the Democrats were good liberals. Now they are bad liberals. There is no material analysis of the broader socioeconomic trends that led the Party to make this transition, and no hint of self-awareness of the irony in mourning the period of time in the past that directly led to the current undesirable situation. Instead, Frank nostalgically longs for the past in which the “right” kind of liberalism reigned.
Even more maddening still, he tells us that “there is little the rest of us can do to build a vital third-party movement or to revive organized labor,” and instead advocates that we somehow reverse the economic trends of the past forty years by “strip[ping] away the Democrats’ precious sense of their own moral probity.” Apparently wagging our fingers and telling Democratic leadership that they aren’t very nice is the best We the People can do. This is inane idealist thinking through-and-through, the exact type of inane idealism that Frank claims to so despise.
I also take great issue with Frank’s habitual conflation of white working class union men with the working class as a whole. According to Frank, the Democratic party has historically “sided with the weak and the downtrodden” - this right after acknowledging that they were, also, historically the party of slavery and the Klan. He reconciled this by claiming that when viewed through a *class* lens, the Democrats usually got it right. Evidently race does not factor into Frank’s analysis or understanding of class. Repeatedly he makes assertions about the working class as a whole that are only true about white working class men belonging to unions. While white working class history is of course a worthwhile topic to explore, it is beyond frustrating when this specific group of people is conflated with the whole of the working class. It is simply inaccurate and, quite frankly, highly insulting to claim that the Democrats have historically protected and empowered workers as a whole. Such a falsehood erases the lives of Black workers, undocumented workers, migrant workers, and women in domestic labor - many of whom overlap with the larger group of un-unionized labor.
I am still awarding the book two stars because the Introduction and Chapter 1 have some interesting insight about the growth and consolidation of the professional class as a voting block. Had the entire work been equally enlightening, this would have been a valuable read. Given the reality that it was mostly extremely shallow analysis and many chapters were no more than recaps of historical events in chronological order, I feel that 2 stars is generous. Perhaps the Biden-loving boomers in your family will get something out of this, but for anyone to the left of that, it will be 70% dull and 30% incredibly aggravating.
Frank tells us that the Democratic Party leadership made a conscious decision in the years between 1968-1972 to abandon their historic base of working class voters in favor of the emerging professional class. Before this point, the Democrats were good liberals. Now they are bad liberals. There is no material analysis of the broader socioeconomic trends that led the Party to make this transition, and no hint of self-awareness of the irony in mourning the period of time in the past that directly led to the current undesirable situation. Instead, Frank nostalgically longs for the past in which the “right” kind of liberalism reigned.
Even more maddening still, he tells us that “there is little the rest of us can do to build a vital third-party movement or to revive organized labor,” and instead advocates that we somehow reverse the economic trends of the past forty years by “strip[ping] away the Democrats’ precious sense of their own moral probity.” Apparently wagging our fingers and telling Democratic leadership that they aren’t very nice is the best We the People can do. This is inane idealist thinking through-and-through, the exact type of inane idealism that Frank claims to so despise.
I also take great issue with Frank’s habitual conflation of white working class union men with the working class as a whole. According to Frank, the Democratic party has historically “sided with the weak and the downtrodden” - this right after acknowledging that they were, also, historically the party of slavery and the Klan. He reconciled this by claiming that when viewed through a *class* lens, the Democrats usually got it right. Evidently race does not factor into Frank’s analysis or understanding of class. Repeatedly he makes assertions about the working class as a whole that are only true about white working class men belonging to unions. While white working class history is of course a worthwhile topic to explore, it is beyond frustrating when this specific group of people is conflated with the whole of the working class. It is simply inaccurate and, quite frankly, highly insulting to claim that the Democrats have historically protected and empowered workers as a whole. Such a falsehood erases the lives of Black workers, undocumented workers, migrant workers, and women in domestic labor - many of whom overlap with the larger group of un-unionized labor.
I am still awarding the book two stars because the Introduction and Chapter 1 have some interesting insight about the growth and consolidation of the professional class as a voting block. Had the entire work been equally enlightening, this would have been a valuable read. Given the reality that it was mostly extremely shallow analysis and many chapters were no more than recaps of historical events in chronological order, I feel that 2 stars is generous. Perhaps the Biden-loving boomers in your family will get something out of this, but for anyone to the left of that, it will be 70% dull and 30% incredibly aggravating.