Passages from Thomas Frank's "The People, No"

From The People, No, Chapter 8

[p.320] Lawrence Goodwyn, the great historian of mass democratic uprisings [e.g. The Populist Moment] once wrote that to build a movement like the People's Party of the 1890s or the labor movement of the 1930s, one must "connect with people as they are in society, that is to say, in a state that sophisticated modern observers are included to regard as one of 'inadequate consciousness.'"

Goodwyn also warned against a politics of "individual righteousness," a tendency toward "celebrating the purity" of one's so-called radicalism. If you wish to democratize the country's economic structure, he argued, you must practice "ideological patience," a suspension of moral judgment of ordinary Americans. Only then can you start to build a movement that is hopeful and powerful and that changes society forever.

If you're not interested in democratizing the country's economic structure, however, individual righteousness might be just the thing for you. This model deals with ordinary citizens by judging and purging; by canceling and scolding. It's not about building; it's about purity, about stainless moral virtue. It's favorite math is subtraction; its most cherished rhetorical form is denunciation; its goal is to bring the corps of the righteous into a tight orbit around the most righteous one of all.

What swept over huge parts of American liberalism after the disaster of November 8, 2016, was the opposite of Goodwyn's "ideological patience." It was a paroxysm of scolding, a furor for informing Trump voters what inadequate and indeed rotten people they were. The elitist trend that had been building among liberals for decades hurried to its loud and carping consummation....

[p.324-5] One story of the Trump years that sticks with me was related to me by a high school student who went to a discussion of political issues with a group of progressive teenagers in an affluent part of the Washington D.C. metro area. The group's leader went around the room asking the students what issues they considered significant and then getting a show of hands on the importance of each one. Racism was mentioned, and sexism, and LGBTQ issues, and gun control, and the environment. The student raised her hand and said, "Labor." It was, she told me, the only suggestion that drew no support at all.

...[Which] brings us to a revealing political fact of our time: the disappearance of class from the mainstream liberal agenda. ...

The prophets of reproach who make up the modern Left aren't particularly interested in that...And once you start looking for this erasure--for this peculiar lacuna in the worldview of a certain type of liberal--you notice it everywhere. Social class is the glaring, zillion-watt absence, for example, in those anti-Trump yard signs that have become so popular in nice suburban neighborhoods and that strain for inclusiveness--

In this house, we believe
Black lives matter
Women's rights are human rights
No human is illegal
Love is love
And kindness is everything

--but that say nothing abou the right to organize or to earn a living wage.

[Note: Neoliberal French president Macron attempted to raise the retirement age for France's version of Social Security. The French unions declared a general strike and shut the country down...until Macron relented. No such strike or labor cooperation is evident in the U.S.]

....

[p. 337-8] What is certain is that the liberalism of scolding  will never give rise to the kind of mass movement that this country needs. It is almost entirely a politics of individual righteousness, and angry refusal of Goodwyn's "ideological patience." Its appeal comes not from the prospect of democratizing the economy but from the psychic satisfaction of wagging a finger in some stupid proletarian's face, forever.

        *    *    *

What these examples show us is a generation of centrist liberals collectively despairing over democracy itself. After turning their backs on working-class issues, traditionally one of the core concerns of left parties, Democrats stood by while right-wing demagoguery took root and thrived. Then after the people absorbed a fifty-year blizzard of fake populist propaganda, Democrats turned against the idea of "the people" altogether.

....The liberal establishment I am describing in this chapter is anti-populist not merely because it dislikes Donald Trump--who is in no way a genuine populist--but because it is populism's opposite in nearly every particular. Its political ambition of the people is not to bring them together in a reform movement but to scold them, to shame them, and to teach them to defer to their superiors. It doesn't seek to punish Wall Street or Silicon Valley; indeed, the same bunch that  now rebukes and cancels and blacklists could not find a way to punish elite bankers after the global financial crisis back in 2009. This liberalism desires to merge with these instituions of private privilege, to enlist their power for what it imagines to be "good." The wealthy liberal neighborhoods of America have become utopias of scolding because scolding is how this kind of concentrated power relates to ordinary citizens. This isn't "working-class authoritarianism"; it's the opposite. These people on top, this kind of liberalism says: They have more than you because they deserve to have more than you. Those fine people dominate you because they are better than you.

From "Conclusion: The Question" (final chapter, p.343-346):

The story of populism and anti-populism is a dialective of hope and cynicism. We have seen now a party of democratic inclusion chose to remodel itself as the expression of an elite consensus, and how a party of concentrated private power started passing itself off as a down-home friend of ordinary Americans. This historic inversion--so bizarre when you step back and think about it--has had precisely the effects that you would expect it to have. The legatees of Thomas Jefferson, lukewarm in all things, no longer really believe their own founding philosophy; the hard-eyed heirs of the robber barons, meanwhile, have swiped the democratic vocabulary of their enemies; and between these two parties the greatest democracy in the world has become a paradise for the privileged.

....The disappointing experience of the Obama years made it clear that the ruling clique of the Democratic Party lacks the fortitude to confront the plutocratic onslaught of the last few decades. Even the most high-scoring meritocrats, we learned, will not take on the hierarchy to which they owe their exalted status.

The technocratic faction's other selling point--that they alone can check the rightward charging Republicans--lies in a million pieces on the floor after 2016. Not even when the GOP backed the least competent and most unpopular presidential candidate of all time could the Democrats' consensus-minded leaders defeat him.

A joyless politics of reprimand is all that centrism has left: a politics of individual righteousness that regards the public not as a force to be organize but as a threat to be scolded and disciplined.

....you can't really have...the war on concentrated economic power--without the...broad-minded acceptance of average people. ...

The demand for economic democracy is how you build a mass movement of ordinary people. And a mass movement of ordinary people, in turn, is how you achieve economic democracy. Which is to say that the answer both to Trumpist fraud and to liberal elitism must come from us--from the democratic public itself.

[p.353-354] ...populism wins. Not only is populism the classic, all-American response to hierarchy and plutocracy, but it is also the naturally dominant rhetorical element in our political tradition.

I make this claim even though the Populists themselves didn't get what they were after for many decades, even though the labor movement in the thirties never organized the South, even though Martin Luther King never saw the Freedom Budget enacted into law.

Still, populism has a power that technocracy and liberal scolding and Trumpist bullshit do not because populism is deep in the grain of the democratic personality. Americans do not defer to their social superiors; we are natural-born egalitarians. Populism is the word that gets at our incurable itch to deflate the pretentiousness of every description....

....Another reason we know that anti-elitism works is because we have seen it working against us for fifty years. The Republican Party owes its successful hold on power to adopting...the anti-elitist themes.... From the days of Nixon to those of Trump, the conservative revolution happened not because Americans love polluters and disease but because Republicans sold themselves as the party of protest aggainst the elite...the prideful people who make moves and write newspapers; who love blasphemy but hate the flag. 

....

[p.357-8] The populism I am describing is not formless anger that might lash out in any direction. It is not racism. It is not resentment. ... It is, instead, to ask the most profound question of them all: "For Whom does America exist?"....Its billionaires? Its celebrities? Its tech companies? Are we the people just a laboring, sweating instrument for the bonanza paydays of our betters? Are we just glorified security guards, obeying orders to protect their holdings? Are we nothing more than a vast test market to be tracked and probed and hopefully sold on airline tickets, fast food, or Hollywood movies featuring some awesome new animation technology?

Or is it the other way around--are they supposed to serve us?

Let us resolve to ask that far reaching quesiton again: For whom does America exist? This time around,there can be only one possible answer.