Thomas Frank, author of “What’s the Matter with Kansas,” explains in this interview how the Democratic party lost its way. It is suffering an “identity crisis,” he says.
In recent years, the Democrats have been consistently liberal on social issues, but indistinguishable from the Republicans on economic issues. They are as likely to be as hostile to unions as Republicans. Their unabashed support for free trade hurt the working class and exported the manufacturing sector. America used to be a country where a person without a college degree could get a good job, but now a college degree is priced beyond the reach of low-income and even middle-income students.
What happened to the Democrats? He says that they have been blinded by their Ivy League pedigrees, and they surround themselves with people just like themselves. Their class interests blind them to the needs of working-class Americans. They do not hear from people outside their social and economic class. He takes Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as examples of people who were plucked from obscurity and turned into superstars and came to believe that meritocracy would solve the nation’s problems. They were wrong. Meritocracy served to put them out of touch and to insulate them from different points of view.
Read the interview.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The entire American political system has lost its way, not just the Democratic party. Thanks Citizens U. and McCutcheon.
http://www.tcfrank.com He was interviewed on radio for 1 hour about his book
“Listen Liberals”… he explained the power and he also explained trade agreements like NAFTA (in the best way I have heard them described) …
“He says that they have been blinded by their Ivy League pedigrees, and they surround themselves with people just like themselves. Their class interests blind them to the needs of working-class Americans. They do not hear from people outside their social and economic class. ” he clarifies and EXPLAINS.
when these ideas get lumped into SLOGANS it is often anti-intellectual… Thomas Frank does not do that because he clarifies and describes. It is the same thing that elizabeth warren is saying about the current campaign… Bernie needs to be in there to CLARIFY….
I didn’t go to Ivy League schools; I don’t consider myself to be a neo-libreral… it is the “NEO” in the liberal that is bothering me the most when they absorb the idea that change is necessarily from God and it means “free markets” or it means that we should be hyper marketing technology in the school programs. There are essential conversations that need to take place … I am not a luddite and I am not a neo-liberal . Thomas Frank seems to capture that position at least for me and there are others (like Elizabeth Warren, Robert Reich etc) who have some real world experience and help us to define the differences. I have sent at least 4 messages to BATS to beware of the sloganeering because a lot of it is anti-intllecuatl. I have used standardized tests for over 50 years and it is the experimental nature of the tests that are hyper marketed as predictive (falsely and that is fraud). However, the backlash throws the baby out with the bath water when people deny the value of something like the achievement tests (for example Terra NOVA that has been used successfully by parochial schools )….. Thomas Frank helps me to understand the nuances. (He also remind me of Father Drinan who was active during the anti-war movements)
cx…. as a teacher I always considered myself to be “working class ” my friends would joke that we could always go and get a job “selling popcorn in Kresge’s” if our teaching careers failed. That is no joke. … the problem is that the middle class has been destroyed and teachers have been “forced down” into a proletariat that has been set aside into a caste system by people like Romney (for example, when he withheld necessary state funds from schools in cities and towns in MA and forced them to come up with more local funds when they don’t have the tax base in many of the less affluent districts)…. I have discussed the Romney policies with people here before (I think one was Chiara) …. that is the whole intent of the republican party but there are neo-liberals doing the same thing and a lot of them are in the “Commissioner’s Office” and the governor’s office. We recently had a study report in the Governor’s office that said that the cities in MA have existed long beyond their purpose and usefulness and this seems to be the current mantra when the budgets are built and priorities set.
In other countries (I’m thinking of Latin America, mainly), classism is an easier phenomenon to identify than in the U.S. In the U.S., it seems to be a more suppressed concept. But I that’s the issue. Perhaps what we’re seeing in this presidential campaign is a re-orientation of the political narrative to address class inequalities.
YES!
The rise of meritocracy has created the idea that separate and unequal schools are OK. It is not OK, and it is in opposition to the democratic ideals at the core of our nation and the hard fought battles of the civil rights era. A democracy must strive for opportunity for all, not just a select few.
I’m a big fan of Thomas Frank, and largely agree with his thesis in “Listen, Liberal” – a riff on and echo of C. Wright Mills, “Listen, Yankee!” – but he leaves out a crucial historical point about universities, and Ivy League/elite universities in particular: for most of their history, they have been incubators of and training academies for class warfare. The fact that these schools provide so much of the cover, ideology and “human capital” of so-called education reform should surprise no one. They have a long, long anti-labor bias, which continues to this day, via their exploitation of adjunct professors and the money and resources they devote to defeating unionization efforts on campus, whether by TAs or janitors.
We tend to think of universities as sites of rebellion and reform as a result of an historical outlier: the student anti-war and civil rights rebellions of the 1960’s and early 1970’s. Outside of that anomalous period, however, universities for the most part have been institutions that support and seek to replicate the status quo, in almost every way possible.
In the early twentieth century, it was common for college students to be used as strikebreakers, and they were lauded by their university presidents and the press for doing so.
For proof, Google “Lawrence, 1912-The Bread and Roses Strike/Ralph Fasanella.” In that painting Ralph Fasanella, who lived in Lawrence for months doing research and oral histories among strike participants, shows three little boys holding up signs in the lower left center of the work, directed at the armed state militia marching down Main Street attempting to break the strike.The signs collectively say, “Go To School.”
This is because, unlike today when the militia would be composed of predominantly working class people, the militia sent in to break that strike, and others of the era, was composed almost entirely of Harvard students. Strikebreaking by college students was very common before the Depression and the rise of the CIO, with numerous references to it in working class journalism and literature of the time. Norbert Weiner, the mathematician and cyberneticist – he coined the term “cybernetics” – wrote many years later of his participation in these strikebreaking activities, for which he felt ashamed.
This reality may have intentionally been thrown down a black historical hole, but the fact is that the “Best and Brightest” have a long and inglorious history of engaging in class warfare; TFA’s arrogant and clueless foot soldiers for the Overclass are nothing new, they just have modern media technology on their side, and are far more engaged with marketing, brand development and the “engineering of consent” than their Ivy League antecedents, who were more direct, and brought “free markets” at the point of a bayonet.
America’s liberal class has much to answer for, given its complicity in and enrichment via the many crises we face, but Thomas Frank would have further improved his already excellent book if he had spent a little more time telling us why this is nothing new.
For those interested in the topic, almost six years ago I wrote a more detailed blog post about it, which can probably be found if you Google, “NYC Educator/Ivy League Union Busters, Then and Now.”
Interesting.
Every person who claims to be a Democrat should read the book by America’s favorite humorist, Garrison Keillor, Proud to be a Democrat, published in 2004. He begins his story with, “I am a Democrat, which was nothing I decided for myself but simply the way I was brought up, starting with the idea of ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,’ which is the basis of the simple social compact by which we live.” Other salient sentences by Mr. Keillor are, “This is the difference between Republicans and Democrats. We Democrats don’t let people lie in the ditch and drive past and pretend not to see them dying. Most Americans are not willing to let people die or go hungry. Democrats aren’t, that’s for sure. This is the spirit of social welfare, and the government programs with long names are all very uninteresting to you until you suddenly need one and turn into a Democrat. This is the social contract by which people pledge comfort and support to each other in time of need, which each of us will sooner or later come to.” I wonder what revisions Mr. Keillor would make today, knowing what we all know has happened to the Democratic Party since Bill Clinton, if he were to publish a new edition of Proud to be a Democrat?
“He takes Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as examples of people who were plucked from obscurity and turned into superstars and came to believe that meritocracy would solve the nation’s problems.”
am not certain who is doing the plucking out of obscurity and who is turning these people into superstars. Fame is a function of publicity.
Judging from the brief interview, Frank’s conversational speech gives “guys” a lot of power…the guys were doing this or that for other guys–and old boys network, especially one developed during a collegiate education of the right kind, in highly selective universities–fraternity guys, you scratch my back I will scratch yours, and if you cannot endure the hazing rituals, well too bad for you. Whistle-blowers not allowed in these clubs, secret societies.
Class distinctions run deep. My grandparents and parents spoke of the lace-curtain Irish, versus shanty-Irish, good people versus the intelligencia (the latter not to be trusted with practical knowledge of anything) and so on.
I can recall John W. Gardner’s trying to address the issue of meritocracy and social class issues. Gardner was Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under President Lyndon Johnson—pushing those Great Society programs. Here are some quotes from Gardner…the patrician. Notice the dates.
“The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.” From Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too? (1961).
“More and more Americans feel threatened by runaway technology, by large-scale organization, by overcrowding. More and more Americans are appalled by the ravages of industrial progress, by the defacement of nature, by man-made ugliness. If our society continues at its present rate to become less livable as it becomes more affluent, we promise all to end up in sumptuous misery.” From No Easy Victories, ed. Helen Rowan (1968), p. 57.
Tax reduction has an almost irresistible appeal to the politician, and it is no doubt also gratifying to the citizen. It means more dollars in his pocket, dollars that he can spend if inflation doesn’t consume them first. But dollars in his pocket won’t buy him clean streets or an adequate police force or good schools or clear air and water. Handing money back to the private sector in tax cuts and starving the public sector is a formula for producing richer and richer consumers in filthier and filthier communities. If we stick to that formula we shall end up in affluent misery. From The Recovery of Confidence (1970), p. 152.
My all time favorite from John W. Gardner is:
“Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.” That is a saying well suited for every school in thrall of college and career readiness as if that is the unimpeachable path to “success.”
Quoted in Matthew M. Radmanesh, Cracking the Code of Our Physical Universe, p. 269.
“He says that they have been blinded by their Ivy League pedigrees, and they surround themselves with people just like themselves.”
Amen! I see this all the time as I shuttle between the elite liberal bubble –Berkeley, Oakland and SF –and the Trump-country exurb where I work. The Berkeley-ites have NO CLUE how the other side lives and thinks. Obama himself is the epitome of this aloofness and cluelessness. In fact, I think it’s worse that simple ignorance. On some level I think the white elites want the white working class to suffer because they despise them and, unconsciously, think having racist whites suffer helps atone for America’s history of racial injustice. Conveniently, it’s only the tasteless and dumb whites who have to pay the price for white guilt. The Google class gets to discuss white privilege on the beaches of the Maldives.
It’s is not just the pedigree that is at fault. It is the idea that money gives some individuals more “merit” in the eyes of the law and politics. Billionaires want to reshape our country to suit them while they step on the democratic rights of others.
It is time to reframe public discussion about persistent poverty, racism, and inequality… Progressives- and in fact, all people of good will- need to reassert and embrace the political, social and economic case for, “An injury to one is an injury to all.” We need to explicitly and loudly embrace a movement across the divides of race, religion, ethnicity, gender and sexual identity against hate and greed. Immediately. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arthur-camins/an-injury-to-one-is-still_b_9556976.html
Privileged progressives need to quit thinking of “progress” as being the invasion of schools in order to make everybody equal…as in EVERYONE BE JUST LIKE ME?
Here is a comment from the link:
Here is the beautiful expression/ comment from the link:
http://billmoyers.com/story/author-thomas-frank-talks-hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-and-his-new-book-listen-liberal/
[start quote]
microsrfr • 13 days ago
The dominant forces driving our local and global economies toward’s crisis — the information technology revolution and, under Koch influence, re-formation of monopolies, the undermining of workers’ labor rights and citizens’ ecological rights.
Look at the simple case of McDonalds replacing the person taking drive-through orders with someone in a lower labor cost state. This action reduces the total wages paid in the US and globally. Next they might move that labor to Bangaladesh. That would reduce US employment and further reduce US and global wages. Finally, they would replace that person with a Siri-like automated function. Now global employment is reduced along with further reduction in global wages.
McDonalds, being part of a cartel of monopoly fast food providers, has no reason to pass these labor savings on to its customers and diverts these savings to increase their profit.
Repeat this process of outsourcing and automation thousands of times a day and you arrive at our current situation with abnormally high corporate profits and executive compensation along with depressed wages and employment and sluggish demand.
https://research.stlouisfed.or…
Compared to 1972, wages have dropped by 7% of GDP or $1.2 trillion/yr which is being “redistributed” upward to business owners and executives.
This means that the typical full-time worker’s paycheck is now short by $1,000/month.
Drive US workers into economic crisis and you induce the fear and tribalism that is ripe for the first effective demagogue that comes along. We desperately need fundamental change to restore wages to around 50% of GDP.
Otherwise technology and corporatocracy will destroy political/economic systems around the globe.
See http://www.middlerising.org
[end quote]
I agree with the above commenter. Back2basic
As far as actual governance, no difference between left and right. Ideologies, a big difference, but only on paper, never in implementation. And foreign policy, always a NeoCons dream, no matter who is in the oval office.
Hillary wins, the bankers win. Cruz wins, the bankers win. Trump or Sanders are the only real options if you want real change.
I’m going to try and read this book. I like the premise of his argument.