Listen, Liberal

Listen, Liberal
Author	Thomas Frank
Published	2016 (Metropolitan Books)
Media type	Print
Pages	320
ISBN	978-1-62779-539-5

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? is a 2016 book by American author Thomas Frank. In the book, Frank argues that the American Democratic Party has changed over time to support elitism in the form of a professional class instead of the working class, facilitating the growth of what he considers deleterious economic inequality.^[1] Frank was one of the few analysts who foresaw that Donald Trump could win the 2016 United States presidential election.^[2]

Summary

Frank argues that the Democratic Party has represented the interests of the upper middle class, specifically professionals with high educational attainment. As a cohort, professionals transitioned from showing heavy political support for the Republican Party in the 1950s to heavy support for the Democrats four decades later. Most American adults do not have college degrees; Frank refers to them as the working class. Frank argues that professionals have views associated with technocracy and fiscal conservatism, especially opposition to trade union activity. Professionals are also characterized by instinctive deference to "expert opinion", ready forgiveness of those experts even if they make regular or major errors, willful ignorance of "predatory behavior if it comes cloaked in the signifiers of professionalism", and "obsessive pining for consensus" among themselves.

After the McGovern–Fraser Commission reformed the Democratic National Committee's process to nominate presidential candidates in 1971, it failed to secure representation for working-class people as such among the party's delegates. Further, following the failure of George McGovern's own presidential campaign in 1972, Democrats began to reject liberalism of the New Deal school and pursue center-right politics, especially becoming economic neoliberals. The neoliberal ginger group, the Democratic Leadership Council, argued that Democratic presidential candidates Jimmy Carter (in 1980, when he ran for re-election as president), Walter Mondale (in 1984), and Michael Dukakis (in 1988) lost national elections because they were too close to the New Deal to succeed in an increasingly conservative country. Frank, however, describes Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis as having all taken steps towards neoliberalism.

Frank criticizes Democratic presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama throughout the book for what he considers their subscription to the conventional wisdom of the "free market" age. Both Clinton and Obama relied on advice from people who had worked or later would work in investment banking. In practice their political triangulation led to solidification of economic conservatism as the federal government's policy. Clinton was elected president in 1992 on an economically populist platform. He governed as a "New Democrat", however, enacting such measures as the North American Free Trade Agreement (1993), the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (1994), and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (1996). Frank contends that these and other laws passed during the Clinton administration worsened conditions for many Americans of middling or lower economic status. Due to widespread Democratic opposition to these changes, Clinton worked extensively with congressional Republicans to pass them. Frank describes Clinton's presidential activity as "capitulation" to a radical free market agenda, a step that was as necessary for that agenda's triumph as arguments in its favor and political events like the electoral victories of Republican president Ronald Reagan. Obama triangulated in a slightly different way: the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010), and the Affordable Care Act (2010), which Frank describes as being his three greatest legislative victories, were deliberately written to be complex. In Frank's words, this practice "diminishes their effectiveness but allows Democrats to pursue the professional consensus they crave."

Frank does not believe that national Democrats pursued the economic policies they did simply because of Republican pressure: he says that in states like Delaware, New York, Rhode Island, and especially Massachusetts, where the Democratic Party is much more powerful and influential than the Republican Party, Democratic officials enacted similar measures. Massachusetts is one of the most unequal states in the United States: while Boston, a major city rich in professional work, flourishes, the small, deindustrialized city of Fall River languishes. Entrepreneurship and technology are touted as inherently beneficial to the point that they become part of policy in Democratic states. He finishes by commenting on Democratic connections with Silicon Valley, the global philanthropy sector, and Hillary Clinton.

The afterword to the paperback edition discusses the 2016 presidential election. Frank describes Hillary Clinton's campaign as an exemplar of professionalism. He writes of Trump's victory: "This was a catastrophic failure for the professional-class ideology."

References

^ Nicholas Lemann (October 13, 2016). "Can We Have a 'Party of the People'?". nybooks.com. The New York Review of Books. Retrieved October 4, 2016. review of Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century
^ Taibbi, Matt (August 2, 2020). "Kansas Should Go F--- Itself". Substack. Retrieved November 8, 2020.

External links

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[1] Nicholas Lemann (October 13, 2016). "Can We Have a 'Party of the People'?". nybooks.com. The New York Review of Books. Retrieved October 4, 2016. review of Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century

[2] Taibbi, Matt (August 2, 2020). "Kansas Should Go F--- Itself". Substack. Retrieved November 8, 2020.

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