A review by almartin
Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People by Thomas Frank
3.0
Frank's big thesis, that the democratic party's interests and agenda has been captured by an economic and educational elite, was worth the kindle deals deals deals deals price of admission.
unfortunately Listen Liberal is much stronger at diagnosis than it is at cure - while it's very clear that Frank is Real Mad about the end of the New Deal, it's not totally clear what the path not taken was. He has some valid critiques of the 2009 stimulus (lots of it funneled through the tax code; long on highway repairs, short on monumental public buildings), but the arc he charts from FDR to Obama is pretty thin.
"Carter turned out to be a sort of archetype, the first in a series of passionless Democratic technocrats" ... that includes Walter Mondale (!). Frank's reading of "budget-balancing Walter Mondale"'s 523-13 electoral vote loss to Reagan is, apparently, that the party failed to nominate a true liberal. Right.
At the same time, his insight that Democratic leaders had completely lost touch with the working-class roots of the party - while claiming to represent their interests in Washington - sounds pretty damn insightful, especially considering that the bulk of the book seems to have been written in 2015, before the election was even underway.
professionals are the ones whose technocratic outlook tends to prevail. It is their tastes that are celebrated by liberal newspapers and it is their particular way of regarding the world that is taken for granted by liberals as being objectively true. Professionals dominate liberalism and the Democratic Party in the same way that Ivy Leaguers dominate the Obama cabinet. In fact, it is not going too far to say that the views of the modern-day Democratic Party reflect, in virtually every detail, the ideological idiosyncrasies of the professional-managerial class.
unfortunately Listen Liberal is much stronger at diagnosis than it is at cure - while it's very clear that Frank is Real Mad about the end of the New Deal, it's not totally clear what the path not taken was. He has some valid critiques of the 2009 stimulus (lots of it funneled through the tax code; long on highway repairs, short on monumental public buildings), but the arc he charts from FDR to Obama is pretty thin.
"Carter turned out to be a sort of archetype, the first in a series of passionless Democratic technocrats" ... that includes Walter Mondale (!). Frank's reading of "budget-balancing Walter Mondale"'s 523-13 electoral vote loss to Reagan is, apparently, that the party failed to nominate a true liberal. Right.
At the same time, his insight that Democratic leaders had completely lost touch with the working-class roots of the party - while claiming to represent their interests in Washington - sounds pretty damn insightful, especially considering that the bulk of the book seems to have been written in 2015, before the election was even underway.