Thomas Frank on the Election: The Elites Had It Coming

The Elites Had It Coming

Thomas Frank [New York Times, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-13-2024]

"...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….

“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….

"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....”


"The overturning of the New Deal Democrats, the Great Society Democrats was a generational story. I don’t know if there’s a social science term for it but people never betray their betrayals. Once you do something like that, once you turn the Democratic party, which these guys did in the 1970s, once you turn on the Democratic party and say we’ve had enough of organized labor, and we’ve had enough of the party of the New Deal and all that, you’re never going back. That is what you did as a generation. It is your accomplishment. They’re psychologically incapable of saying “Oh, we were wrong, our great moment as a generation was a mistake.” No human can do that.”