Listen Liberal & a (Bad) 2020 Dem Primary Prediction

 

Thomas Frank’s Listen Liberal & Bernie’s Path to Victory

 

 

A Brief Look at Listen Liberal:

Today’s quoted passage comes from the 2017 updated paperback edition of Thomas Frank’s “Listen Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People” – a book about which I have many complicated feelings and opinions.

First and foremost I should say that this book is quite frankly an excellent study of the how and why behind the US Democratic Party’s abandonment of the labor class and subsequent marriage to the far more affluent and influential professional class. As those of you who read my theory work are no doubt aware, this is a subject near and dear to my heart and as such I’m inclined to view Frank’s illuminating tome in a very favorable light.

As the author himself notes, “Listen, Liberal” is primarily an autopsy of the Democratic Party’s historic failure to reconnect with the labor class in the post Bush era, despite the existence of optimal conditions for success in doing so and the obvious tangible benefits that strategy would have presented. Frank also devotes multiple chapters to exposing how the idiosyncrasies, arrogant assumptions and open blind spots inherent to the rarely-discussed professional class – which now represents the “soul” of the Democratic Party (such as it is) – have acted as a driving force behind this failure. This identification and discussion of what Frank calls “the professional class” is to my knowledge, wholly unique in current mainstream literature and after reading “Listen, Liberal” I found it impossible to ignore the connections between the dominant beliefs of this professional class and the disastrous campaign run by Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US election.

On both of these fronts, it is unreasonable to regard this book as anything less than a smashing success and within the confines of those two discussions, this is quite literally “must read” material. Indeed, if America had anything resembling a “free and democratic press“ Frank would probably be lauded as a brilliant soothsayer who effectively predicted Clinton’s 2016 election loss in March of that year – before she’d even sew up the Democratic Party nomination.

So, what’s the problem? Fundamentally, Thomas Frank is himself a professional class liberal; albeit a reformist – but certainly not a radical. While this naturally makes his analysis of what’s wrong with the liberal professional class more incisive and accurate, it has the downside of clouding his understanding of the very working/labor class people he’s arguing the Dem Party needs to return to representing.

In fact, I’d go so far as to argue that the author’s very conception of class is rendered at least somewhat inaccurate by the sheer number of comfortable mainstream “truths” he adopts without question in “Listen, Liberal” – things like the standard (and incorrect) North American conception of “the middle class” or his belief and insistence that the Democratic Party has a long history of supporting and representing this same “middle class.”

Truthfully, the so-called “New Dealers” that came to power in the post-war, anticommunist era after the death of FDR (who himself represented a desperate compromise by elite liberals to retain power in the face of a labor class revolt) were just as married to capital and the professional class as the corporate, center-right party Frank derides today. Even if you ignore the Democratic Party’s violent, authoritarian attempts to shatter labor on behalf of American capital from the end of the Civil War, all the way up to Woodrow Wilson’s “Red Scare” – there is almost no historical record of the Party as a whole supporting labor over capital, with the exception of FDR’s four term Presidency. Whereas Frank identifies the betrayal of the working class as something that largely begun under Bill Clinton, any history student worth their salt will tell you that Truman’s post-war, anti-Communist crusade effectively destroyed organized labor in America and eventually ushered in the modern neoliberal era the author correctly identifies as being toxic for the labor class.

In short, while Frank does a magnificent job of identifying what’s wrong with the Democratic Party today – his ideas about how to address those problems are fundamentally rooted in a reformist fantasy that at some point in the past, the Democratic Party ever stood with labor when the working class didn’t have a knife at their throat. This is simply not accurate, and as such it distorts some of Frank’s theories about where we go from here; after all, if you can’t even properly identify the “labor class” it’s hard to see how you’re going to restore political power to them. This problem isn’t big enough to seriously impact the value of “Listen, Liberal” for those looking to understand the professional class or why the modern Democratic Party is completely out of touch, but it also makes it impossible to recommend the work to readers without noting that Frank’s reformist tendencies and nostalgia for a party that probably never existed, occasionally cause him to get the wrong answer. In the final analysis this makes “Listen, Liberal” an unquestionably important, if imperfect addition to “the discourse.”

 

Bernie, Biden and the 2020 Democratic Party Nomination

So, if Frank is right and the Democratic Party has not only abandoned the labor class, but actually no longer even has any real contact with the roughly eighty-nine percent of the population who ultimately comprise the labor class – what does this mean for the 2020 Democratic Party nomination contest currently being waged across America? What does it mean if the Democratic Party establishment has lost touch with most of its base? Good things, if you’re a fan of Vermont’s democratic socialist Senator, Bernie Sanders.

In my February article, we examined the eerie similarities between the quietly shattered mainstream Republican leadership in the wake of losing the 2012 election, and their counterparts in the Democratic Party after their shameful elevation of, and eventually defeat to, a reality TV host, billionaire fascist. The crux of my argument then was that the leadership of both parties had expended all of their political capital to force through an unpopular (and ultimately unsuccessful) candidate against the wishes of growing insurgent forces within their own base. When these candidates then failed to deliver victory, the power structure behind these failures was left shattered, and wholly inadequate for the purposes of opposing those same insurgent forces during the next election cycle.

In the case of the Republicans, we already know how that story ends because Trump was indeed propelled to the nomination by a revanchist, reactionary base he easily pried away from mainstream GOP candidates, simply by being a better fascist than anyone else up on the stage. Whether or not that effect will be repeated on the Democratic side of the equation with a wholly different type of insurgency, is a question we won’t be able to answer until the end of the 2020 nomination contest – but as you can read, I’m betting that answer is “yes.”

Now that the nomination race has more fully shaken out, let’s take a look at the structural similarities between the nomination races themselves. How does the 2016 GOP contest that ultimately served up Donald Trump resemble the crowded 2020 Dem nomination race and what can that tell us about who will eventually emerge to run against the swine emperor?

The first and most obvious similarity between the two nomination contests is the sheer size of the field; the 2016 Republican nomination fight began as a seventeen candidate “clown car” battle while there are currently twenty-two officially declared candidates (Rolling Stone forgot to count Mike Gravel) for the 2020 Democratic Party nomination. Furthermore, although Biden’s supporters would undoubtedly deny it, there are a number of strong similarities between Palooka Joe and presumed 2016 Republican front-runner Jeb Bush – neither is a particularly strong campaigner, neither of them has met a banker or wealthy donor they didn’t love and both men advocate for policies and positions that are fundamentally out of step with their own party’s base. Finally of course, there’s the breakdown of the field into the various “lanes” that you would expect in each primary. In both cases, there is really only one viable insurgent candidate and very little tangible policy differences between the rest of the field – with apologies to Tulsi Gabbard (not viable) and Liz Warren (not insurgent enough.)

For perhaps the first time in his life, being left of and therefore outside of, the mainstream liberal orthodoxy is working in Bernie’s favor here – just as Trump’s open fascist tendencies worked to differentiate Herr Donald from the rest of the 2016  GOP field, and galvanize insurgent support around him for a revolt against the mainstream GOP leadership and their chosen candidate. More to the point however, the ace up Bernie’s sleeve is the fact that his policy platform and long-held public positions actually cleave far, far closer to those of the voting public than those of Joe Biden or the rest of the neoliberal passengers on the 2020 Dem Nomination fail-bus do.

Why does this matter? There’s a clue if you remember that when the 2016 GOP nomination began, the vast majority of the Republican establishment (and their candidates) were united in their opposition to Trump – mainstream “conservative media” in particular regarded him as a crude, hopeless outsider who would be dispatched quickly; even Fox News opposed Trump until it was clear he’d win the nomination for example. Of course, that’s not what happened is it? Why?

To put it simply, establishment Republicans either forgot about, or simply had no real connection anymore, to their own base. After a solid three decades of pushing the party further right, employing revanchist ideas to consolidate power and openly inviting extremist elements into the party, GOP leadership found itself facing down a voting base that agreed with and admired Trump’s open fascism, more than they agreed with anything Jeb Bush or the other fifteen candidates in the race had to offer. Republican primary voters wanted a crude, bigoted, anti-establishment candidate; they wanted to punish liberals and leftists, they did in fact like fascism, they did in fact like racism, etc. This in turn made Downmarket Mussolini largely unassailable because attacking the things that made Trump different from the rest of the field, also explicitly meant attacking the voting base and the ideas or values they shared with Trump!

Well, all of that took basically one primary contest for GOP mainstream candidates and their campaign advisors to figure out. Once they could no longer afford to attack Trump, the rest of the candidates predictably turned their attention on Jeb Bush (and each other) – resulting in a truly spectacular level of chaos, carnage and cannibalism. At various points the mainstream Republican leadership tried to rally the party around a single, “Trump-slayer” candidate (Bush, Rubio, Kasich and eventually Cruz) but because the party was no longer strong enough to force candidates out of the field, the result was always the same – the candidates who weren’t favored by the establishment at that moment would largely ignore Trump and tear down the presumed “unity” candidate, just to stay alive in the race.

Frankly, if you think about it from the perspective of the candidates, such behavior was perfectly rational – after all, attacking Trump not only brought the ire of the base, but also helped someone else get closer to the nomination; at that point you might as well just drop out unless you’re prepared to wrestle away the title of chosen unity candidate from whichever stiff the GOP establishment picked to rally behind at that time. The rest is as they say, “history.”

Turning our attention back to the 2020 Democratic Party nomination race, it’s impossible not to notice how similar the contest appears to the one that ultimately destroyed the RNC and surrendered control of the party to an insurgent candidate more in line with their own voting base; namely Donald Trump.

Although the issues that drive the democratic socialist movement behind Sanders are entirely different than the issues that drive Trump Nation, the dynamics of the struggle that propelled the swine emperor to victory are clearly being replicated on the Democratic side, with Bernie Sanders (and to a lesser degree, perhaps Elizabeth Warren.) Any policy or ideology based attack on Sanders, is effectively going to be an attack on the base – and in the meantime, every vote a candidate can snatch away from Sanders is going to help Joe Biden as much, or more, than any other candidate on the stage.

In light of all this, I believe there’s really only one more question you have to ask yourself – do you believe that the roughly nineteen other mainstream neoliberal candidates are in this race to make Creepy Uncle Joe Biden the President of the United States?

Before you answer I want you to think about who these people really are for a moment; Senators, members of Congress, government officials – many of whom have never lost an election in their entire lives. They each have their own donors, their own campaign war-chests, their own in-pocket media minions and supporters. These are people from the right families, and the right educational background who believe they have been overachieving their entire lives. They’re the success stories of capitalism, the best and the brightest; valedictorians, doctorate holders, egomaniacs who think they’re “the smartest people in the room” no matter what room they walk into.

Do you believe that these folks are going to lay down for the oldest, slowest, fattest antelope on the plains, in Palooka Joe – just because Tom f*cking Perez says so? If the Democratic Party establishment actually had the power and influence necessary to force them out of the race to prop-up an anti-Sanders coalition, don’t you think it would have happened already? The polls have pointed to a Biden versus Sanders race for months and months now, with no variation whatsoever on that front – shouldn’t neoliberals be dropping out and supporting Biden already if there is to be a united anti-Sanders resistance from the party?

When the rubber hits the road, do you sincerely think the other nineteen candidates are going to help the Democratic Party take out Bernie, even if it helps Joe Biden get further out in front of the rest of the pack?

Yeah, neither do I.