Spectres & Souls

天翻地覆慨而慷

 

Liberals had nine years to decipher Mr. Trump’s appeal — and they failed. The Democrats are a party of college graduates, as the whole world understands by now, of Ph.D.s and genius-grant winners and the best consultants money can buy. Mr. Trump is a con man straight out of Mark Twain; he will say anything, promise anything, do nothing. But his movement baffled the party of education and innovation. Their most brilliant minds couldn’t figure him out.

Thomas Frank, the author of this observation, has been an astute analyst of America culture and politics for decades. A co-founder of The Baffler in 1988, the motto of which was ‘the journal that blunts the cutting edge’, Frank has also edited and written important books, including:

• Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from The Baffler (1997)
• The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (1998)
• One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy (2001)

What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, published in 2004, was an incisive study of Thomas Frank’s home state and how its once proud leftist tradition had crumpled and how conservatives were successful in appropriating the language and passions of the left:

Out here the gravity of discontent pulls in only one direction: to the right, to the right, further to the right. Strip today’s Kansans of their job security, and they head out to become registered Republicans. Push them off their land, and next thing you know they’re protesting in front of abortion clinics. Squander their life savings on manicures for the CEO, and there’s a good chance they’ll join the John Birch Society. But ask them about the remedies their ancestors proposed (unions, antitrust, public ownership), and you might as well be referring to the days when knighthood was in flower.

Following the 2008 financial crisis, Frank published Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right (2011), an inquiry into how Republicans rather than Democrats had capitalised politically on the failure of the banks. As Nick Cohen wrote in The Guardian:

Genteel liberals have allowed American conservatives to all but monopolise political fury since the banks went down. Considering what conservatives allowed financial markets to do, the fact that the right could be furious with anyone but itself is an astonishing story and one that Thomas Frank was born to cover.

Months before Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral victory, Frank published Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, a prophetic analysis of late-Obama politics and a warning of what was to come.

Below, we reproduce an opinion piece that Thomas Frank published in The New York Times following the 5 November US elections. It is the sixth installment in our mini-series ‘Contra Trump 2024’, on the November 2024 US elections. See also:

• MAGADU — Kubla Khan, Xanadu & the 2024 American presidential election
• Waiting for the Barbarians in a Garbage Time of History
• Unless we ourselves are The Barbarians …
• What seeds can I plant in this muck?
• If you elect a cretin once, you’ve made a mistake. If you elect him twice, you’re the cretin.
• The Great Red Wall — A Remarkable Coalition of the Disgruntled
• A Political Monster Straight Out of Grendel
• Trump is cholera. His hate, his lies – it’s an infection that’s in the drinking water now.
• Trump Redux — Who Goes Nazi Now?

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I have followed Thomas Frank’s work for over three decades. I started reading The Baffler when I was living and working in Boston in the early 1990s and that journal, Commodify Your Dissent, a selection of articles published in 1997, along with Frank’s book The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (1998) were points of reference in my studies of contemporary Chinese culture. Supplementing my reading of Soviet, Russian and East European dissidents and thinkers, Frank’s jargon-free and clear-headed analyses featured in In the Red, my account of post-Mao China, published in 1999. I was sceptical about the presumed liberating potential of consumerism and globalisation in China, and focussed instead on the intermingling of ‘rebellion and co-option, attitude and accommodation’. Thomas Frank’s insights were helpful in framing that investigation, they also helped inform my years in the United States.

As a provincial voyeur, familiar with Chinese political culture and with a penchant for schadenfreude, henceforth I will be interested in new twists-and-turns in the Sino-American danse macabre, about which I’ve written in the past. Pressing issues of the moment will daresay occupy the attention of others but, for my part, I will enjoy the following Beijing-Washington doppelgängers:

• both capitals now have leaders with near imperial power;
• these leaders champion a philosophy summed up as Fight, Fight, Fight, or Struggle, Struggle, Struggle;
• they surround themselves with sycophants whose fealty to the Great Leader is a touchstone;
• by the capricious nature of their rule the capo di tutti i capi employ the overt and hidden drama of infighting and Court Politics, 宮鬥 gōng dòu, to pursue their goals; and,
• perhaps sooner rather than later, both paramount leaders must perforce face the vexatious problem of political succession.

In this tiresome new age of gerontocrats and oligarchs, I recall a quotation from The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Gárcia Márquez that I used to preface Deathwatch for a Chairman:

… the only thing that gave us security on earth was the certainty that he was there, invulnerable to plague and hurricane … invulnerable to time, dedicated to the messianic happiness of thinking for us, knowing that we knew that he would not take any decision for us that did not have our measure, for he had not survived everything because of his inconceivable courage or his infinite prudence but because he was the only one among us who knew the real size of our destiny.

Events indicate that the leaders both of the United Stares and of China do indeed have their people’s measure, one that is further circumscribed by their own pusillanimity.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
10 November 2024

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The Elites Had It Coming

9 November 2024

Thomas Frank

 

Everyone has a moment when they first realized that Donald Trump might well return, and here is mine. It was back in March, during a visit to the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, when I happened to read the explanatory text beside an old painting. This note described the westward advance of the United States in the 19th century as “settler colonialism.” I read it and I knew instantly where this nation was going.

My problem with this bit of academic jargon was not that it was wrong, per se, or that President Biden was somehow responsible for putting it there, but rather that it offered a glimpse of our poisoned class relations. Some curator at one of our most exalted institutions of public instruction had decided to use a currently fashionable, morally loaded academic keyword to address a visitor to the museum — say, a family from the Midwest, doing the round of national shrines — and teach them a lesson about American wickedness.

Twenty years ago I published a book about politics in my home state of Kansas where white, working-class voters seemed to be drifting into the arms of right-wing movements. I attributed this, in large part, to the culture wars, which the right framed in terms of working-class agony. Look at how these powerful people insult our values!, went the plaint, whether they were talking about the theory of evolution or the war on Christmas.

This was worth pointing out because working people were once the heart and soul of left-wing parties all over the world. It may seem like a distant memory, but not long ago, the left was not a movement of college professors, bankers or high-ranking officers at Uber or Amazon. Working people: That’s what parties of the left were very largely about. The same folks who just expressed such remarkable support for Donald Trump.

My Kansas story was mainly about Republicans, but I also wrote about the way the Democrats were gradually turning away from working people and their concerns. Just think of all those ebullient Democratic proclamations in the ’90s about trade and tech and globalization and financial innovation. What a vision they had: All those manifestoes about futurific “wired workers” or the “learning class” … all those speeches about how Democrats had to leave the worker-centric populism of the 1930s behind them … all those brilliant triangulations and reaching out to the right. When I was young, it felt like every rising leader in the Democratic Party was making those points. That was the way to win voters in what they called “the center,” the well-educated suburbanites and computer-literate professionals whom everybody admired.

Well, those tech-minded Democrats got exactly what they set out to get, and now here we are. At the Republican convention in July, JD Vance described the ruination visited on his working-class town in Ohio by NAFTA and trade with China, both of which he blamed at least in part on Mr. Biden, and also the human toll taken by the Iraq War, which he also contrived to blame on Mr. Biden. Today Mr. Vance is the vice president-elect, and what I hope you will understand, what I want you to mull over and take to heart and remember for the rest of your life, is that he got there by mimicking the language that Americans used to associate with labor, with liberals, with Democrats.

By comparison, here is Barack Obama in 2016, describing to Bloomberg Businessweek his affinity for the private sector: “Just to bring things full circle about innovation — the conversations I have with Silicon Valley and with venture capital pull together my interests in science and organization in a way I find really satisfying.”

I hope Mr. Obama finds his silicon satisfaction. I hope the men of capital whose banks he bailed out during the financial crisis show a little gratitude and build him the biggest, most expensive, most innovative presidential library of them all. But his party is in ruins today, without a leader and without a purpose.

It would have been nice if the Democrats could have triangulated their way into the hearts of enough educated and affluent suburbanites to make up for the working class voters they’ve lost over the years, but somehow that strategy rarely works out. They could have gone from boasting about Dick Cheney’s endorsement to becoming a version of Mr. Cheney themselves, and it still wouldn’t have been enough. A party of the left that identifies with people like Mr. Cheney is a contradiction in terms, a walking corpse.

For a short time in the last few years, it looked as if the Democrats might actually have understood all this. What the Biden administration did on antitrust and manufacturing and union organizing was never really completed but it was inspiring. Framed the right way, it might have formed the nucleus of a strong appeal to the voters Mr. Trump has stolen away. Kamala Harris had the skills: She spoke powerfully at the Democratic convention about a woman’s right to choose and Mr. Trump’s unfitness for high office. Speaker after speaker at the gathering in Chicago blasted the Republicans for their hostility to working people. There was even a presentation about the meaning of the word “populism.” At times it felt like they were speaking to me personally.

At the same time, the convention featured lots of saber-rattling speeches hailing America’s awesome war-making abilities. The administration’s achievements on antitrust were barely mentioned. There was even a presentation by the governor of Illinois, an heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune, in which he boasted of being a real billionaire, not a fake one like Donald Trump supposedly is, and the assembled Democrats cheered their heads off for this fortunate son. Then, once Ms. Harris’s campaign got rolling, it largely dropped economic populism, wheeled out another billionaire and embraced Liz Cheney.

Mr. Trump, meanwhile, put together a remarkable coalition of the disgruntled. He reached out to everyone with a beef, from Robert Kennedy Jr. to Elon Musk. From free-speech guys to book-banners. From Muslims in Michigan to anti-immigration zealots everywhere. “Trump Will Fix It,” declared the signs they waved at his rallies, regardless of which “It” you had in mind.

Republicans spoke of Mr. Trump’s persecution by liberal prosecutors, of how he was censored by Twitter, of the incredible strength he showed after being shot. He was an “American Bad Ass,” in the words of Kid Rock. And clucking liberal pundits would sometimes respond to all this by mocking the very concept of “grievance,” as though discontent itself was the product of a diseased mind.

Liberals had nine years to decipher Mr. Trump’s appeal — and they failed. The Democrats are a party of college graduates, as the whole world understands by now, of Ph.D.s and genius-grant winners and the best consultants money can buy. Mr. Trump is a con man straight out of Mark Twain; he will say anything, promise anything, do nothing. But his movement baffled the party of education and innovation. Their most brilliant minds couldn’t figure him out.

I have been writing about these things for 20 years, and I have begun to doubt that any combination of financial disaster or electoral chastisement will ever turn on the lightbulb for the liberals. I fear that ’90s-style centrism will march on, by a sociological force of its own, until the parties have entirely switched their social positions and the world is given over to Trumpism.

Can anything reverse it? Only a resolute determination by the Democratic Party to rededicate itself to the majoritarian vision of old: a Great Society of broad, inclusive prosperity. This means universal health care and a higher minimum wage. It means robust financial regulation and antitrust enforcement. It means unions and a welfare state and higher taxes on billionaires, even the cool ones. It means, above all, liberalism as a social movement, as a coming-together of ordinary people — not a series of top-down reforms by well-meaning professionals.

That seems a long way away today. But the alternative is — what? To blame the voters? To scold the world for failing to see how noble we are? No. It will take the opposite sentiment — solidarity — to turn the world right-side up again.

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Source:

• Thomas Frank, The Elites Had it Coming, The New York Times, 9 November 2024

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