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A review by rick2
Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People by Thomas Frank
3.0
I mostly like this book, but it does raise a few red flags as far as general truthines. In the book ‘good economics for hard times’ there’s a throw a line about how anyone who says there’s a cut and dry answer to the growth of south east Asia is trying to sell you something or is flat out ignorant. I think the same can be said for this trend of “tempting to understand where the left has gone wrong.”
I need to get out of this loop. At some point, every year or so, I get drawn into political books. They’re interesting and give you this artificial feeling that you understand the world better. I’m realizing now, that they really don’t. It’s just hashing and rehashing a bunch of the same events. Trying to sound clever and whatnot with their analysis, but without ever really contributing anything. It’s tough, because I like to read a lot of different stuff, from psychology to history to entrepreneurship and technology. So inevitably someone recommends me a poly sci book and away we go. And all these books have a wide variety of methodological rigor. But I think the PoliSci is the worst. People will look at an event and just level their unfounded opinions at it.
Now that digression aside, I think this book tiptoes that line between nonsense and interesting analysis. Some of it steps into nonsense. But it does seem like a good chunk of it is good. The demographic shifts of the Democratic Party seems spot on. The criticism of tech and “startup culture” is spot on. For all the “innovative” talk, it’s tremendously impressive how most of the startups I see in Austin are rough templates of pretty safe businesses “but with tech!”
Worth a read. Not taking any of it as gospel.
I need to get out of this loop. At some point, every year or so, I get drawn into political books. They’re interesting and give you this artificial feeling that you understand the world better. I’m realizing now, that they really don’t. It’s just hashing and rehashing a bunch of the same events. Trying to sound clever and whatnot with their analysis, but without ever really contributing anything. It’s tough, because I like to read a lot of different stuff, from psychology to history to entrepreneurship and technology. So inevitably someone recommends me a poly sci book and away we go. And all these books have a wide variety of methodological rigor. But I think the PoliSci is the worst. People will look at an event and just level their unfounded opinions at it.
Now that digression aside, I think this book tiptoes that line between nonsense and interesting analysis. Some of it steps into nonsense. But it does seem like a good chunk of it is good. The demographic shifts of the Democratic Party seems spot on. The criticism of tech and “startup culture” is spot on. For all the “innovative” talk, it’s tremendously impressive how most of the startups I see in Austin are rough templates of pretty safe businesses “but with tech!”
Worth a read. Not taking any of it as gospel.