Excerpts from “Seymour Hersh [interviewing Thomas Frank]: Ordinary People by the Millions”
A conversation on current US politics with [highly-respected political writer] Thomas Frank.
Scheerpost
In 2016, the sweet-faced [Thomas] Frank put a shiv into the heart of the Democratic establishment in Listen, Liberal, a devastating account of the failures of the party. In 2020 he broadened his canvas to tell the story of populism in the US and its failure to take hold of the nation’s institutions, framed as a critique of its enemies, in The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism. His message is more relevant than ever, as we and the world face a most uncertain immediate future. We got into it over lunch a few weeks ago and he agreed to answer my questions in an edited version presented here.
SEYMOUR HERSH: How did we get to the political fault line that gave us a Donald Trump? When did it all start?
THOMAS FRANK: I sometimes feel like it’s the story of my life, because it all began shortly after I was born in 1965, during the Vietnam era. Within a few years came the beginning of the culture wars and the eclipsing of the old liberal consensus. It’s important to remember two facts about it all: First, that every single battle in the culture wars has been presented to us over the years as a kind of substitute class war, as an uprising of ordinary people with their humble values, against the highbrow elite.
The other fact is that, at the same time the Republicans were perfecting the culture-war formula, the Democrats were announcing that they no longer wanted to be the party of blue-collar workers. They said this more or less openly in the early 1970s. They envisioned a more idealistic, more noble constituency out there in the form of the young people then coming off the college campuses plus the enlightened white-collar elite. In other words, the Democrats were abandoning the old working-class agenda at the same moment that the Nixon Republicans were figuring out how to reach out to those voters.
Put both of those strategies in effect for fifty years with slight evolutionary changes (The New Democrats! The War on Christmas!), drag the nation through various disasters for working people and endless triumphs for the white-collar elite, and you get the politics we have today.
. . .
But the larger question—why do the upside-down politics of the last 50 years keep going?—is fairly easy to answer. It keeps going because it works for both sides. The Democrats now inhabit a world where they are moral superstars, people of incredibly exalted goodness. The media is aligned with them like we’ve never seen before, so are the most powerful knowledge industries, so is academia, so is the national security establishment. And so are, increasingly, the affluent and highly educated neighborhoods of this country. The Democrats are now frequently competitive with the Republicans in terms of fundraising, sometimes outraising and outspending the GOP, which is new and intoxicating for them.
. . .
And beneath it all, the economy keeps going in the same directions it has since the late 1970s. More and more inequality, heaven on earth for the rich and the highly educated, plus the destruction of basically every locale that’s not a creative-class redoubt, and now American life expectancy itself is going in reverse. This is a formula for social breakdown, not healthy politics.
SEYMOUR HERSH
: Was a Trump or someone like him inevitable? Other candidates seem to be replicating his style to various degrees in the 2024 campaign. THOMAS FRANK: First of all, consider what makes Trumpism different from the culture-war game the Republicans have been playing for decades. Part of it is his enhanced vulgarity, his outrageous bigotry, his flaming contempt for insiders, his absurd hyper-masculinity, but these were always present before in some lesser form. What really distinguishes Trumpism is that he swiped certain traditional liberal positions—on trade and war, for example—to make his appeal to white working-class voters much, much more convincing.
Trump’s success was made possible by Democratic betrayal of those same voters. Every time some Democrat went before an audience of industrial workers and told them they had to get a college degree or learn to code, they brought this shit on. And while Biden has worked hard to reposition the Democrats with his middle-class-Joe persona, I doubt it will be enough. So, yes, Trumpism will continue. You will see more and more of it in the years to come. The old Republican Party is not coming back.
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THOMAS FRANK: I think Bill Clinton was the pivotal figure of our times. Before he came along, the market-based reforms of Reaganism were controversial; after Clinton, they were accepted consensus wisdom. Clinton was the leader of the group that promised to end the Democrats’ old-style Rooseveltian politics, that hoped to make the Democrats into a party of white-collar winners, and he actually pulled that revolution off. He completed the Reagan agenda in a way the Republicans could not have dreamed of doing—signing trade agreements, deregulating Wall Street, getting the balanced budget, the ’94 crime bill, welfare reform. He almost got Social Security partially privatized, too. A near miss on that one.
. . .
THOMAS FRANK: Look, I’ve been writing about these things since the early 2000s, with little effect. This is not because I’ve got the story wrong or something—everybody knows that the Republicans use workerist rhetoric and that the Democrats identify with the professional white-collar elite. These things may be unpleasant to consider, but they are undeniably true. The evidence for them is abundant and overwhelming.
. . .
[Third parties?]
...[T]here hasn’t been a really competitive national third party since the Populists of the 1890s. The Populists, who were a left-wing farmer-labor party, frightened the establishment of their day, and in the aftermath all sorts of measures were taken to ensure something like that never happened again. So there are now all sorts of structural barriers to a third party, like laws against fusion voting. Yes, we have seen third parties at the state level and also individuals who run for president like Ross Perot or Ralph Nader. But building a real third party is effectively impossible today. And I say this as a guy who is extremely sentimental about the 1890s Populists. (Building a social movement is different. That is eminently possible.) . . .
What I mean is this: All our great historical moments of progressive reform have been due to huge social movements, movements that enlisted ordinary people by the millions, not just the professionals in DC. I’m thinking of the farmers’ movement in the 1890s, the labor movement in the 1930s, and the civil rights movement and then the antiwar movement in the 1960s. Social movements succeed. They build and they change the intellectual climate and then, when the crisis comes, they make possible things like agrarian reform or the New Deal or the Civil Rights acts of the 1960s.
We need that kind of mass mobilization today. And we have had inklings of such a thing. Black Lives Matter seemed at first like it might become such a movement. And look at the union organizing and the strikes that are going on today. It is totally possible to imagine a kind of mass social movement that brings ordinary people together behind some larger vision of economic reform.
. . .
SEYMOUR HERSH: Is the media, and its lack of investigative reporting, also at fault?
THOMAS FRANK: Yes, but that’s a huge subject on its own. The only thing I’ll say on that now is that, as newspapers shrivel and die all over America, the handful of surviving news organizations have become increasingly similar to one another, staffed with the same kind of well-graduated people who see everything the same way. Naturally enough, they read like propaganda. The whole professional-class revolution in the Democratic Party, for example, is something they see as obviously correct and wholesome. Instead of examining how that might have been a mistake, they enthusiastically police incorrect opinion about national events. This, even as vast parts of America now have almost no news coverage at all. It’s a strange feeling to be in a place like Kansas City, where you can look at Twitter and read all about whatever is riling the media set in DC, watch them try to get one another in trouble for saying the wrong thing, but at the same time encounter huge difficulties when you try to find out what is actually going on in the city around you. What I am describing is a recipe for disaffection and mistrust and breakdown....
