"More and More, They Represent the Well-Credentialed People Who Monitor Us in the Workplace, and More and More Do They Act Like It"

"To say that this will give the right an issue to campaign on is almost too obvious. To point out that it will play straight into the right's class-based grievance-fantasies requires only a little more sophistication. To say that it is a betrayal of everything we were taught liberalism stood for–a betrayal that we will spend years living down–may be too complex a thought for our punditburo to consider, but it is nevertheless true."

At The Guardian, Thomas Frank criticizes calls by Democrats for online censorship.

"Liberalism's Favorite Historian"

"All the peculiar elements of the affluent, educated worldview are here: the reduction of history to a struggle between moral categories, the deletion of working-class movements from the story of progress, the distaste for economic grievance, the obsessive focus on the executive office, and the score-keeping of racist remarks, as though wickedness could be quantified and exorcised in that way." 

Thomas Frank at Harper's reviews Jon Meacham's The Soul of America.

"What If This Crazy Story Turns Out to Be True?"

"Because if the hypothesis is right, it will soon start to dawn on people that our mistake was not insufficient reverence for scientists, or inadequate respect for expertise, or not enough censorship on Facebook. It was a failure to think critically about all of the above, to understand that there is no such thing as absolute expertise. Think of all the disasters of recent years: economic neoliberalism, destructive trade policies, the Iraq War, the housing bubble, banks that are 'too big to fail,' mortgage-backed securities, the Hillary Clinton campaign of 2016—all of these disasters brought to you by the total, self-assured unanimity of the highly educated people who are supposed to know what they're doing, plus the total complacency of the highly educated people who are supposed to be supervising them."

At The Guardian, Thomas Frank ponders the fallout if the accusation that Covid leaked from a Chinese laboratory.

"Every City Is Either Vibrant These Days or Is Working on a Plan to Attain Vibrancy Soon"

"History is more than a conflict between bogue millionaires and cool millionaires, however, and once you grasp this, you realize that it doesn't take a whole lot of 'creativity' to come up with real answers to the big problems. You just need to change the questions slightly. How about, instead of serving some targeted fraction of the master class, we chose to give an entirely different group of Americans what they wanted? Even if those Americans weren't cool? What would that look like?"

In a 2012 Baffler article, Thomas Frank takes on efforts by cities to promote their "vibrancy."

"When the Party of the Left Abandons Its Populist Traditions for High-Minded White-Collar Rectitude, the Road Is Cleared for a Particularly Poisonous Species of Rightwing Demagoguery"

"However, there are consequences when the left party in a two-party system chooses to understand itself in this way. As we have learned from the Democrats' experiment, such a party will show little understanding for the grievances of blue-collar workers, people who–by definition–have not climbed the ladder of meritocracy. And just think of all the shocking data that has flickered across our attention-screens in the last dozen years–how our economy's winnings are hogged by the 1%; how ordinary people can no longer afford new cars; how young people are taking on huge debt burdens right out of college; and a thousand other points of awful. All of these have been direct or indirect products of the political experiment I am describing."

Thomas Frank at The Guardian warns Joe Biden away from returning to Democratic centrism.

And John F. Harris at Politico discusses the stalemate within the Democratic Party.

"A Finger Wagging in Some Deplorable's Face, Forever"

"This sounds dreadful to me, but I suspect that for a lot of prosperous liberals, it wouldn't be such a bad thing. For them, there's an alternative to political victory: a utopia of scolding. Who needs to win elections when you can personally reestablish the rightful social order every day on Twitter and Facebook? When you can scold, and scold, and scold, and scold."

In a 2018 Harper's article, Thomas Frank warns Democrats against being merely the champions of the professional class.

"The Product of a Completely Different World Than the Ivy League Meritocracy That Has Taken Over the Democratic Party"

"Catering to society's well-educated winners is no way to run a party of the left: Biden seems to be one of the few mainstream Democrats to have grasped this. He recalled in the interview being told by a Hillary Clinton operative in 2016 that he 'had to make a distinction between progressive values and working-class values'.
"'I said I've never found a distinction,' Biden claimed he replied. 'Never found them hard to sell.' He told the Times about white working-class enthusiasm for gender wage equality and some other issues, and then he took this shot at the very heart of modern-day liberalism: 'We treat them like they're stupid. They know they're in trouble, and nobody's talking to them. Nobody's talking to them. That's what we used to do. That was our base.'"

Thomas Frank at The Guardian explains "Joe Biden's mystique."

"Let's Find Out Why"

"The English language provides a great many solid choices for someone wishing to describe a leader who plays on mob psychology or racial intolerance. 'Demagogue' is an obvious one, but there are others—'nationalist,' 'nativist,' 'racist,' or 'fascist,' to name a few. They are serviceable words, all of them. In the feverish climate of the Democracy Scare, however, none of those will work: 'populist' is the word we are instructed to use. 'Populists' are the ones we must suppress."

Thomas Frank at Harper's Magazine looks at the original Populists compared to how the description is used today.

"The Time Is Up for Happy Fantasies of Office-Park Centrism and Professional-Class Competence"

"Trumpism is the future for the Republican party–it delivered Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Iowa too. Wisconsin, of all places, is now a battleground state. In the hands of a real politician, Trumpism has the potential to romp even farther.
"Beating the right cannot simply be a matter of waiting for a dolt in the Oval Office to screw things up. There has to be a plan for actively challenging and reversing it, for turning around the fraction of working class voters who have been abandoning the Democratic party for decades."

As Thomas Frank says goodbye to The Guardian, he slams the Democrats on his way out.

"Next to This Stupendous Transformation, All the Culture Wars and Flag-Fights and Stupid Tweets Fade into Insignificance"

"According to Josh Bivens, of Washington's Economic Policy Institute, you can trace the slow decline of US workers' bargaining power in the historical statistics. As the years go by, it requires ever lower levels of unemployment to ignite the wage growth that was once the hallmark of good times. 'The decades-long campaign by employers to kick away any sources of economic leverage enjoyed by typical workers seems to have worked,' he tells me. 'These workers now get real wage increases only during white-hot labour markets.'
"This is the central story of the last four decades, the vast social engineering project to which all our recent presidents and both parties have contributed."

Thomas Frank at The Guardian writes that the American economy's problem is "not the possibility that workers might prosper, but that they're not prospering yet."

"America’s Way of Expressing Class Antagonism"

"All of which suggests a different answer to the question with which we began. Why is our traditional left failing? It is true that the other side doesn't play fair any more, but it’s also true that the Democrats are lost in a fantasy of white-collar benevolence. For all their algorithms and their lavishly detailed position papers, their leaders have little personal sympathy any longer with the travails of working people."

Thomas Frank at The Guardian defends "populism."

"The Old Shell Game Plays Out Once More"

"Fantasizing about the vic[t]imization of venture capitalists isn't what got Donald Trump elected in 2016. But by appointing Kudlow, the president seems to be betting that the substance of the populist narrative doesn’t matter as much as does the superficial rhetoric of the thing. And so, before our eyes, the bitter blue-collar gripes of the Steve Bannon era are being exchanged for the sunny supply-side credo of Larry Kudlow. One form of populism growls darkly about 'American carnage', the other burbles about the day big business is liberated from arrogant regulators, but both pretend to despise elites, and maybe that’s all that matters."

Thomas Frank at The Guardian writes that Donald Trump's latest advisors will make sure that "ordinary Americans will suffer."

Big Tech Is Watching You

In The Guardian, Thomas Frank and John Harris warn readers of the power of social-media companies.

"A Form of Liberalism That Routinely Blends Self-Righteousness with Upper-Class Entitlement"

"Most people on the left think of themselves as resisters of authority, but for certain of their leaders, modern-day liberalism is a way of rationalizing and exercising class power. Specifically, the power of what some like to call the 'creative class', by which they mean well-heeled executives in industries like Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood.
"Worshiping these very special people is the doctrine that has allowed Democrats to pull even with Republicans in fundraising and that has buoyed the party's fortunes in every wealthy suburb in America."

Thomas Frank at The Guardian reacts to the fall of Harvey Weinstein.

"We Have Here a Real Crack in the Wall"

"Of course, this is only the first glimmering of the larger sort of self-appraisal that must happen before Democrats turn things around. Building a real populist movement is going to require them to ditch not only their squishy prose but also their bankerly image, their love affair with Silicon Valley, and their summers hobnobbing with the billionaires on Martha's Vineyard.
"The Democrats will have to question the direction they have been traveling for decades. And there is every reason to expect the whole thing will quickly be forgotten amid the anti-Trump hysteria that saturates the culture of Washington, DC–every reason to expect that Democrats will find it easier to relax into the lazy assumption that they need do nothing more to defeat Donald Trump's horrifying Republicans than show up."

Thomas Frank at The Guardian gives qualified praise to the Democrats' "Better Deal."

"Liberals Have Supplanted Conservatives as Moralizing Busybodies"

"Social norms against overt expressions of racism have been an important driver of improved social relations in the past 60 years. Sometimes it's a fine political and moral strategy to make people feel guilty—if what they're doing is bad enough, and if there's a strong enough consensus that it is bad.
"The problem with the liberal busybodying is not that it passes any judgments on individual behavior, but that the judgments have become too numerous, too specific, and too frequently changing. Following all the rules has become exhausting."

Josh Barro at Business Insider tells liberals that they "can win again if they stop being so annoying."

Steven W Thrasher at The Guardian calls Democrats "pathetic."

Emmet Penney at Paste warns against liberal "lectureporn."

Thomas Frank at The Guardian says that journalists are "utterly oblivious to how they appear to the rest of America."

Bryce Covert at The New Republic reacts to the Democrats' "A Better Deal" campaign.

And Lee Drutman in The New York Times writes that he has found "one area of notable discord between Clinton and Sanders supporters—their degree of disaffection with political institutions."

"The Distant People Who Rule Them Simply Do Not Give a Damn"

"That Brexit will do little to restrain those winners, and will instead injure the people of Barnsley, Grimsby and Sheffield, is almost certainly true. That it will result in yet another triumph of the hated Tories seems highly likely. That it will conclude in outright disaster like the miners’ strike of 30 years ago is also very possible.
"But it is not hard to understand. Just as in America, a certain chunk of the British ruling clique now traces its legitimacy to its globalist enlightenment and an intimate familiarity with the thinking of the new-economy god. They meet every year at Davos; they conjecture about the nature of creativity and how innovation will save the world; and in happier times they swooned for the idea that Britain's great national virtue was its coolness. And it is bullshit, all of it."

In The Guardian, Thomas Frank "visited the industrial heartlands of northern England" in the run-up to Britain's parliamentary election.

"The Utterly Predictable Fruit of the Democratic Party's Neoliberal Turn"

"The way I see it, the critical test for our system will come late next year. The billionaire great-maker in the Oval Office has already turned out to be an incompetent buffoon, and his greatest failures are no doubt yet to come. By November 2018, the winds of change will be in full hurricane shriek, and unless the Democratic Party's incompetence is even more profound than it appears to be, the D's will sweep to some sort of mid-term triumph.
But when 'the resistance' comes into power in Washington, it will face this question: this time around, will Democrats serve the 80% of us that this modern economy has left behind? Will they stand up to the money power? Or will we be invited once again to feast on inspiring speeches while the tasteful gentlemen from JP Morgan foreclose on the world?"

Thomas Frank at The Guardian writes that "Democrats can have no excuse for not seeing the wave of heartland rage that swamped them last November."

Downfall

Writers at The New York Times react to Donald Trump's victory in the presidential election (as does Nate Cohn).

As do Andrew Sullivan, Ed Kilgore, and Jonathan Chait at New York.

As do Brian Beutler, Jeet Heer, and Ryu Spaeth at The New Republic.

As does Andrew Prokop at Vox.

As does Tom Frank at The Guardian.

As do Joan Walsh and John Nichols at The Nation.

As do Helaine Olen, Jim Newell, Andrew Gelman, and Will Saletan at Slate.

As does Richard L. Hasen at Talking Points Memo (while John Judis and Theda Skocpol debate each other).

As does Kevin Drum at Mother Jones.

As do Bernie Sanders and Harry Reid.

As does The Onion.

"To Take Seriously What They Say They Care About"

"What it explains is that the party that had been the voice of working people for decades gradually lost touch with that constituency, and eventually became much more the voice of professionals. The kind of people who read the New Yorker and Slate. The Republicans weren't doing anything for working people in terms of trade, or taxes, or jobs. In fact, they were worse for them, but in some ways, culturally, the Republicans began to get closer to that group of Americans. You could say in the absence of either party doing a whole lot for them, they drifted toward the party that at least seemed to have a feel for their way of life, sounded more like them, saw the world more like them. That was a grievous illusion, but it was a powerful one in the absence of a Democratic Party that knew how to reach those voters."

Isaac Chotiner in Slate interviews George Packer about the Democratic Party and white workers.

And Thomas Frank in The Guardian uses hacked e-mail as primary sources.