These interviews are tricky sometimes. I have deeply admired Thomas Frank for years. He is a crack researcher and top-tier thinker who boldly rips his own party a new one while continuing to vote for it. He is an old-school Liberal who yearns for a party that can maintain moral consistency — instead of one that only pivots based on the urgings of donors and culture warriors. The anti-war party of the people is now the war-hawk party of Wall Street.
Frank’s disdain for Trump was clear and I have heard from some of you that this was an issue — likely because it was jarring. I don’t disagree with those who felt that way and it has made me question why I didn’t challenge him more. Simply, in the moment my goal was to tease out the history of the Democrats and their hard turn away from the working class — which began under Clinton. Debating about Trump felt like a distraction from Frank’s decades of research that explains the Dem meltdown we just witnessed. Perhaps I was wrong. Let me know what you think.
This David Halberstam quote is from the Listen, Liberal! introduction and signposts Frank’s thesis that the Dems worship of credentialism and the managerial class has been its undoing.
On another front: I am shaken up by Joe Biden’s encouragement of Ukraine to launch long-range American missiles into Russia — a provocative act likely to escalate the war in the final days of his presidency. It is an irrational move by a man who is known to be suffering from dementia. One can only hope that Trump is on the phone, back-channeling with Putin and Big Z, perhaps buying some time. If I didn’t know any better, I would say this is a final petulant act by a party and a man who want America’s foreign policy to fail. That might be extreme but it certainly doesn’t make Ukraine or the rest of us any safer — with Putin sitting on all those nuclear armed ICBMs that fly fast and far in only minutes. In the west, we have been governed by fools.
Ponder this, as the Trump administration takes shape, the pronouns are being removed from social media bios and people are speaking up in ways which suggest they were silenced by fear of cancel culture and left leaning autocrats. Now we see how political and dangerous this epoch was — think of culture wars and China where children were turned against their own parents. All in the name of power and control.
Stay critical.
#truthovertribe
Share this post