Listen, Liberal
Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?
by Thomas Frank
It took a decade and a half of political reporting, Barack Obama’s presidency, and a presidential run by Hillary Clinton to make Thomas Frank get serious.
This is not to suggest that Frank, famously the author of
What’s The Matter With Kansas? and other works of political analysis, has never taken his subject seriously. But previous iterations of the author’s work have included healthy doses of incisive wit sprinkled within the cogent political analysis.
Not so much with
Listen, Liberal. Frank’s writing remains top-notch, and his deconstruction of the dissolution of what used to be the Democratic Party is smart, convincing, and frankly—no pun intended—more than a bit depressing.
Perhaps Frank himself was getting that same vibe as he was crafting his prose. Even though his previous works covered a lot of the same ground, Frank’s earlier texts always included more than a few laugh out loud moments—either through the author’s exposition on the true absurdity of his subject, or simply via his own clever turn of phrase. But here, as Frank recites the laundry list of charges against today’s allegedly liberal political actors, nothing in the writing ever really comes across as funny.
That should be a minor defect when you’re reading a work of political analysis, but Frank has previously set his bar so high that anything less than a complete reading experience comes across as at least a minor failure.
That critique would be unfair as a total analysis of Frank’s tome, since in all other aspects
Listen, Liberal succeeds at its task. Frank presents a powerful case—an indictment, really--that the modern so-called Democratic Party has succumbed to narcissism, rationalization, and just plain bullshit instead of sticking to its guns and truly doing the work of being the “party of the people.”
Frank argues that, through fetishizing “innovation” and that concept’s assorted empty promises, the Democrats of the last twenty or so years—particularly the ones carrying around the surname Clinton—performed a pantomime of the traditional party’s platform. Instead of fighting for working people—labor as a political subunit in particular, but in general everyone who falls below the top 20th percentile in earnings—modern Democrats sold out the poor and the middle class in order to cater to the desires of wealthy donors. In other words, they behaved just like their presumed adversaries in the Republican party, with the exception of preferring to kowtow to tech moguls versus the bigwigs of the extraction industries. Regardless of that minor difference, as Frank makes perfectly clear, the nation found itself deprived of two legitimately separate parties—a real monkey wrench for a political system supposedly built around a “two-party system”—which meant that that bottom 80% wound up deprived of pretty much everything that could have made their lives better. No wonder, given Frank’s analysis, that everyone with a keyboard must now type the improbable phrase “President Trump.”
If there is any real failing of
Listen, Liberal, it is that Frank’s personal voice sometimes come through a little too stridently. The author clearly takes sides in this political exegesis; not to say that he’s on the wrong side, but Frank certainly veers away from the traditional standard of objectivity that used to be the gold standard of political journalism. If that blatantly biased viewpoint is a failing, it is certainly an understandable one, given the times and political milieu in which a reporter must work today. As with Hunter S. Thompson back in the early ‘70s—when the great Gonzo journalist famously declared that objectivity was a vice when reporting on that time’s largest political actors, that one needed to report subjectively in order to truly see what a monster Richard Nixon was—Frank finds himself faced with characters who also demand a subjective treatment in order to expose their true natures. It is a greater indictment of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and their various political satellites, that they have sunk to such Nixonian depths that make such a subjective viewpoint necessary, than it could ever be of a journalist as worthy as Tom Frank.
All things considered,
Listen, Liberal overcomes its weaknesses to stand as a welcome addition to the author’s title list. Frank remains an essential guide to the political movements of our times, and this latest work earns its place within Frank’s impressive canon. What will raise
Listen, Liberal up from a good to a great work of political journalism will be if its readers—hopefully including big names within the ostensible “people’s party”—take Frank’s lessons to heart and stop caring so much about obeying the right billionaires, and start caring much more about helping the millions who need good, fair, and equitable government.
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