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Thomas Frank is done blaming Republicans.
Frank, 51, a columnist for Harper's and a founder of political magazine The Baffler, has tracked, mocked and exposed the language of capitalism for two decades—whether in Nike ads or TED talks. He's best known for his book What's the Matter With Kansas?, which asked why poor Kansans kept voting Republican against their own economic self-interest.
But lately, Frank is taking aim at Democrats. His newest book, Listen, Liberal, details how the Democratic Party has abandoned the working class to make wealthy lawyers and Google execs their main constituency. The book, written last year, predicts the populist rebellions of today's presidential primaries, as both sides abandon their parties for the appeals of Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) and Donald Trump.
As Frank drove across Kansas (where else?) on his way to an April 1 Powell's reading, we asked him about what Hillary Clinton gets wrong, what Donald Trump gets right, and why fancy doughnuts won't save Portland.
WW: Most of your books pick on the Republicans. Why are you taking aim at Democrats?
Thomas Frank: The Democrats are just as interesting in their own way. They don't have equal responsibility, but some. It's maddening to me that they can't figure out what to do about inequality, how to reach out to the alienated working class.
Your book seems to say the Democrats intentionally abandoned the working class.
The party of the left chose openly to transform themselves into the party of the professional class, the new-economy winners rather than the party of workers. When the party of the left does that, that's very naturally going to give you a situation like what we're in today—inequality, plutocracy, oligarchy.
Is there a pivotal moment you think the Democratic party failed working people?
There are a series of moments—the one that intrigued me was [presidential candidate George] McGovern in the early 1970s. One of the key members of his group was a guy named Fred Dutton. He more or less said it openly: Liberal white-collar people were the group to choose. Blue-collar workers, they were done as the leader of the progressive movement.
What's wrong with picking the winners?
They're the winners, right? You're supposed to choose the winners—it's a good idea, if that's all you're concerned about. The left is traditionally identified with working people. If that's [not] the identity of your party, you've made a tremendous change. It'll put issues of economic inequality off the table. Our politicians talk about it, they feel bad about it, they wring their hands about it, but they don't really get it, and they don't really care about it.
So the Democrats serve the rich. The Republicans serve the rich. What's the difference?
The Republicans serve the hierarchy of money. The Democrats serve the hierarchy of status. The hierarchy of money is business, the hierarchy of status is people whose achievement stems from education and professional achievements. Those people tend to be Democrats.
The culture of professionalism suffuses the Democratic party, both Obama and Clinton. In the case of Clinton's bank deregulation, it's like a meritocracy of failure. Take a guy like [Obama and Clinton cabinet member] Larry Summers. He was in charge of Clinton's worst policies, he was Harvard president—that didn't go well. He worked for a hedge fund, then comes back into government and he's running things? It's very talented people doing things that are really bad for the country.
You’re against experts?
I’m in favor of the idea of expertise in government, and the idea of expertise. People like me should not be allowed to fly 747s. [But] in the Obama administration there’s this amazing deference to people who work on Wall Street. It’s really striking—the reverence for these sophisticated, complex financial instruments. It’s people at the top of their profession who identify with and respect one another. That’s one of the rules of being a professional.
Isn’t financial sophistication often a marker of fraud?
It’s a red flag—undue complexity, this is something to look at deeper. But your modern Democrats look at it and say: Oooh, sophistication!
So what do the Democrats do? Return to labor? The unions?
That’s gonna be tough. Organized labor is so diminished since the ’60s and ’70s—just a shadow of its former self. I don’t know what the road back is. I think the first step is understanding what’s wrong. What Bernie is doing is a very healthy first step. They have to pay attention to workers. It’d be easy to get the labor unions to take off again. People are very upset. But the playing field is so tilted against workers it’s hard to do.
You voting Bernie?
Yes I am.
Bill Clinton is almost a villain in your book.
Bill Clinton is a hard man to dislike. His charm is legendary. I’m a big cynic about him. I went to the Clinton library, where he narrates the tour—in a device in your ear. I came out in love with the guy, thinking what a brilliant man, a charming man, a witty man who can see beneath the surface. Such an intelligent man. Took me days to shake that off.
But in the books that think he’s great—flattering books—there are five major achievements. NAFTA, the ’94 crime bill, bank deregulation, welfare reform, and balancing the budget. Every single one of those was a disaster, including balancing the budget. Every single one of them was a disaster for the traditional constituency of his party.
Which is the worst?
NAFTA was a new stage in the industrialization of this country. It permanently weakened organized labor. Academics have studied this. Management threatens to go to Mexico much more often now. This was all predictable at the time; it’s why most Democrats opposed it. And he did it anyway.
The ’94 crime bill has become notorious. It’s horrifying: building prisons, running up the people on federal death penalty from 60 to 360, three-strikes laws. This was a terrible time, kind of a nightmare. Clinton signed off on the crack vs. powdered cocaine sentencing disparity. This sentenced so many thousands of black kids to lives in prison.
Is Hillary Clinton answerable for any of that?
She’s written about how she supported welfare reform. You shouldn’t lay it at her feet, but she should be asked about it. Democrats were proud of that until recently.
In previous books you railed against the myth of the “creative economy.” That’s the dream of Portland.
I like yummy doughnuts. There was one flavored by NyQuil. I looked at a doughnut and there was bacon in it. A meat doughnut! I like good food and good coffee. The problem is when you organize a city around just appealing to the winners. What happens to everyone else? And it’s a really shitty way to organize the arts. If you do art to attract and flatter society’s winners, it’s a model for artistic production that’s straight out of the Middle Ages, the Gilded Age. It’s spectacular lifestyle experimentation in order to amuse the wealthy. I have a lot of memories of my family from Portland and Vancouver as a child—we’re talking back in the ’70s. It was kind of a blue-collar town. What happened?
I don’t know. We threw a party and everybody came.
Your city has made this transition successfully. Other places really haven’t. I was startled to see in The New York Times a list of cities that voted heavily for Donald Trump in the primaries. They were these heavily deindustrialized, economic disaster zones. Fall River, Mass. Big Trump country.
You’re one of the few commenters who doesn’t chalk up the Trump phenomenon to mass insanity.
I don’t like Trump. Everything about him rubs me the wrong way. But the focus of the media is on the outrage, the insults, the racism. I wondered if there was anything more. I sat and watched his speeches. I was sort of surprised he had actual content in them that wasn’t stupid, [wasn’t] particularly racist. It was issues a lot of people I know agree with, especially trade. He talked about competitive bidding for prescription drugs, which is a weird thing for a Republican, a crazy thing. He talked about waste in the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex. But he kept going back to trade, watching companies move manufacturing overseas.
So you gonna vote Trump if Bernie doesn’t work out?
He’s completely unacceptable. If he doesn’t even know the Ku Klux Klan is bad, that’s a deal-breaker.
Hillary is very intelligent. She actually will make a decent president. If you’re happy with the way things are going, she will continue that—and she’ll do a good job at it. But she’s openly running as the complacency candidate, saying America is already great. It’s sort of a peculiar position for a liberal candidate. She’s actually been saying a lot of good things, but she’s only saying them because she needs to stop Bernie. That’s my suspicion. What would be awesome is if she had a change of heart.
GO: Thomas Frank reads from Listen, Liberal at Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651, on Friday, April 1. 7:30 pm. Free.
Willamette Week