Books: Rendezvous with Oblivion by Thomas Frank

Editor’s note: this article was originally published November 20th, 2019 on my Can’t You Read book blog. I’m reposting it, backdated, here on NIDC, to collect all my writing into a website I control due to my belief that the rise of fascism will ultimately lead to widespread online censorship; particularly on corporate platforms like Tumblr, where I used to write.For a more complete explanation, click here.

 

Quickshot Quotations

 

 

Today’s “Quickshot Quotation” comes to us from the Politics and Fascism page of my library in the form of “Rendezvous with Oblivion”; a collection of previously published essays about the decline of American society under neoliberal capitalism, by author, historian and political analyst Thomas Frank – a name you may recognize from our earlier review and commentary piece about his previous book “Listen, Liberal.”

Although it is ultimately difficult to recommend a book comprised entirely of previously published (albeit, slightly updated) essays to the discerning book-shopper on a budget, I’ve personally grown to be such an unabashed fan of Frank’s work that I had no problem plunking down twenty-two bucks for a physical copy of seventeen essays I could probably still have found online for free.

Divided into four thematically related sections and featuring essays spanning from 2011 right up to its publication date in 2018, Rendezvous with Oblivion is ultimately a book not just about the unraveling of American liberalism but more specifically the isolation, atomization and dehumanization increasingly inherent in life (or death) under western neoliberalism and the rule of elite capital. Written entirely in Frank’s now-famous, wistfully bemused composition style, the author somehow manages to make it at least somewhat enjoyable to read about the purposeful looting of the labor class, the ongoing financialization of our economy and the utter moral bankruptcy of a Democratic Party that now openly despises class consciousness among “the proles.”

Perhaps most importantly of all however, whether he’s talking about fast food workers, the fall of the American small business sector to monopoly power or disaffected labor class voters who’ve (with some justification) turned their backs on the Democratic Party, it remains apparent that Thomas Frank actually cares about the people, places and way of life he’s writing about. Rendevous with Oblivion is not another elitist academic’s faux-sympathetic offering of condescension and crocodile tears to the poor American working stiffs, but instead a series of genuine, heartfelt warnings about what we as a society are losing in the face of the increasingly heartless, absolute rule of elite capital over us all – even at the cost of everything that makes life worth living.

These are all fine reasons to read Rendezvous with Oblivion in specific and Thomas Frank in general, but they aren’t the reason why the author’s analysis represents “must-read” material for the American leftist. Truthfully, it is Frank’s uncommon and incisive analysis of the professional managerial class voter and apparatchik who now represents the “soul” of the Democratic Party, which should be bringing all the (Bakunin) boys to the yard. As the author has noted numerous times, it is the affluent, economically conservative “upper-middle class” professional who have come to embody the base of the party in the wake of the Democrat’s post-McGovern betrayal of the labor class; wealthier, more educated and more influential than the dwindling labor class, it is indeed these college educated managers, professors and “experts” Democratic Party leaders now picture when they are asked to envision some concept of “the American people” – the labor class itself simply no longer merits notice in the elite liberal worldview that dominates political though in the top levels of the party.

As those of you who’ve read my prior writings on modern American class theory will no doubt be aware, I personally consider the absolutely paucity of discussion examining these modern class divisions in America to be in and of themselves a subtle form of anti-labor class propaganda and as such I find Frank’s in depth exploration of this “professional class” to be a vital resource in this media environment. Indeed, the fact that the author is both himself a recognized “liberal influencer” and a member of this petite-bourgeoisie, professional class lends a surprisingly frank, “inside baseball” feeling to much of everything Frank writes about the extremely profitable alliance between elite capital and the professional class, against the labor class – aka the rest of us.

In my last review of his work, I knocked Thomas Frank around for still being an American liberal – but today, after reading a much broader selection of his work, I’m starting to realize that the author’s liberalism may indeed be his finest asset; Frank might be the last liberal writer in the world who still believes in something, even if that something is as milquetoast as a “party of the people” and a social contract between capitalism and the labor class. Whether you start with Rendezvous with Oblivion, Listen Liberal or the author’s online writing in major left wing/liberal publications, I strongly advise the modern leftist scholar to make the time to read more Thomas Frank.

 

– nina illingworth

 

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.

Subscribe to NIDC to for email updates whenever a new post is published.

Support my work on Ko-Fi by clicking here.