“Listen, Liberal” is not a very good book. The author, Thomas Frank, a freelance journalist, doesn’t have the gift of gab. But I forced myself to read it because it’s remarkable in its own way. It’s a political analysis written by a liberal for liberals, during the second Obama administration, well before Donald Trump took his now-infamous escalator ride down to the lobby of Trump Tower. It’s an admonition by Frank to his fellow Democrats that they’re not perceiving what’s right in front of them: the steady alienation of the working class away from the Democratic Party, toward Republicans.
Trump, in fact, appears only once in the book, near the end, with a single reference: “It is true that Donald Trump seems outrageous.” Yet less than two years later, Trump was President, and we know the rest. So how did Democrats not see the train that was headed at them?
The years immediately after Obama’s first election and then his re-election were heady for Democrats. In addition to the presidency, they controlled the Senate and, for a while, the House. It looked like Dems might constitute a permanent majority, especially with impending demographic shifts in America’s population.
But then came the 2010 and 2014 Congressional elections. Republicans won the House in landslides, giving them their biggest majorities in that chamber since 1928. The Tea Party was ascendent. Then Trump took his escalator ride, and we’re still sorting things out.
Thomas Frank puts the blame for these election fiascos squarely on Obama, who he claims failed to take advantage of a favorable political situation early in his first term, when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. He doesn’t make clear just what Obama should or could have done. But what Frank does show is that Democrats were already out of touch with working people of the lower and middle classes; having invested all their energy since Bill Clinton’s day in the professional classes (doctors, lawyers, engineers, computer scientists, Silicon Valley types, media creatives, academics, journalists, and so on: people we now call “elites”), they turned their backs on the people of flyover country. The results were inevitable, and drastic.
Should Democrats have seen the situation more clearly? The party always had progressives, but the more moderate wing made sure they remained marginal. It was Democrats, as a national party, who turned a blind eye to what was happening to working people, with whom the professionals had nothing in common. Things like NAFTA had cost them their manufacturing jobs. The failure to enact meaningful tax reform widened the grotesque split between the super-wealthy and everybody else. Lobbyists controlled Congress’s agenda, and those lobbyists could only be afforded by the self-serving rich. Even Obama, whose popularity was always high, came to be seen as an “elite,” whose Cabinet members and friends were dominated by Ivy League men, while he, himself, was a Harvard prince.
I have to admit that, as a Democrat, I also failed to see what was happening in the years 2012-2016. I thought Democrats were on an historic run, and that we could finally crush the evangelicals and homophobes that constituted the new Republican Party. I truly believed Hillary would win. But I was wrong, as was the great majority of my party, the Democrats.
Still, it’s not clear what Dems could have done to prevent the disasters of 2016 and, later, 2024. The damage to working people already had been done. Democrats could and should have done a better job controlling the worst excesses of their progressive/woke elements, but that might have caused a civil war within the party, which is something the party professionals feared and worked hard to avoid. Instead, Democratic strategists decided to be a little woke where they could, to satisfy the progressives, but not too woke. This “middle way” did not work. When Obama’s Chicago pastor, Jeremiah Wright, made his notorious anti-American speech, Obama was compelled to ditch him. This symbolic gesture proved to be unsatisfying for an electorate that really hated people like Wright, including me. Democrats had been put into an impossible position, from which there was no workable escape.
It may well be that Americans needed to experience the twin horrors of Donald Trump and wokeism, in order to be shocked back to their senses and return to their more reasonable roots. And to learn, the hard way, that luridities like Trump and Wright are best confined to their putrid little puddles.
Steve Heimoff