Thomas Frank and The Baffler on the betrayal of populism by liberals.

It's No. 42 of The Baffler, on the topic of populism.

What’s to blame for our disgraceful turn toward fascism? “The scourge of populism,” your Ivy-educated tutor answers confidently. But the liberal framing of populism as an uprising of unruly rednecks in MAGA gear, writes founding editor Thomas Frank in his introduction to Issue no. 42, is a betrayal of “the faith in ‘the people’ that built unions and fought World War II.”

Yes, I know: What is ...

The Baffler is America’s leading voice of interesting and unexpected left-wing political criticism, cultural analysis, short stories, poems and art. We publish six print issues annually, as well as online content every day of the cursed workweek.

Founded in 1988 by Thomas Frank as “the journal that blunts the cutting edge,” the magazine is currently edited by Chris Lehmann and headquartered in New York. We publish both new and established voices, and our regular contributors include Barbara Ehrenreich, Susan Faludi, Evgeny Morozov, Rick Perlstein and Astra Taylor. You can subscribe here for as little as $24 a year.

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Frank's introduction is choice. A subscription to The Baffler is likely to be a Saturnalia present to myself. 

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The People, No, by Thomas Frank (The Baffler)

An introduction from our founding editor

THE BACKLASH AGAINST LIBERALISM was thirty years old when this magazine dedicated a special issue to it in 1999; today it has been running for a full half-century and it is ready for its testimonial dinners and commemorative postage stamps. In its early days, the backlash was startling and strange: it was ordinary people siding with the Chicago police when they brutalized protesters; it was the hardhat as a symbol of reaction; it was a Republican presidential candidate claiming to speak for the “silent majority.”

The common man appeared to be in open rebellion against liberalism, and it was no passing tantrum. Dozens of tax revolts and busing riots and flag battles later, The Baffler tried to gauge the volcanic perversity of the spectacle. Populism, we thought in 1999, had once been a phenomenon of the left; it was a mobilization of the people united in outrage against bankers, industrialists, or just “the establishment.” How had it come to pass that middle-class Americans now poured into the streets to demand that the taxes of the rich be cut or that the coal mines be deregulated? And how could the backlash keep going as it dismantled the middle-class arrangements on which its fantasies were based?

Well, continue it did. Today a spiteful disciple of Richard Nixon’s law-and-order agenda sits in the White House. The shade of segregationist George Wallace stalks the land, and the crypto-racist spirit of the white backlash is playing on TV all day, every day.

In one sense, I guess, we can finally say that Americans understand this. Among the bien pensant theorists of the liberal “Resistance,” everyone talks about “populism” today, and everyone is against it. For the high-born and the well-graduated, the word is perfect—in one drive-by slur, it brings together all that is not-them: the racist and the rural; the uneducated and the left-behind; the clueless billionaire president and his adoring proletarian throngs. Today it is the dread of populism that causes the foundation dollars to flow and the murmurs of agreement to sweep the well-heeled audience at Aspen or Davos or SXSW.

The incandescent perversity of the thing, however, is completely lost to populism’s growing chorus of detractors. In 1999, we thought right-wing populism was a historical mystery that needed to be unraveled and understood; in the minds of its legions of analysts today it’s no mystery at all. For them, the common people’s incomprehension of liberal values is as unremarkable and self-evident as is the superiority of Yale over Southeast Missouri State. Populism, much of our ruling punditburo now believes, is a creature of the ill-informed right by its very nature. Bring aggrieved plebes together in movements and mass rallies and of course they will start chanting the name of Trump. That’s just who ordinary Americans are. In this democracy, it’s the people themselves who are the problem.

This is the reason that so many of the prized manifestos of the left these days resemble nothing so much as ritualized scolding—or, rather, concerned letters from mom gently reminding the lowly of their precarious place in the New Economy hierarchy. Before long, chide the solons of liberalism, they’ll have to retrain and repatriate to one of the coastal warrens of tech monopoly and lifestyle liberalism—places where they don’t look too fondly on MAGA hats.

At the other end of the ideological spectrum, meanwhile, the Tea Party movement of 2009 is now in the midst of a full-on populist makeover. Never has there been a phonier, more transparent bid to mislead an angry public. Supposedly a protest against bank bailouts, it was actually launched from among the futures traders on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange—and then backed to the hilt by Beltway libertarians looking for a way to distance themselves from the badly damaged Republican brand. The movement’s Number One heroine, Ayn Rand, spent decades dreaming up ways to express her contempt for democracy and its beloved average citizen. The Tea Party movement’s great demand for solving the problem of out-of-control bankers—more bank deregulation—seems to have been developed as a kind of thought experiment to gauge the outer limits of human gullibility.

Yet in the fast-growing field of populism studies, the Tea Party movement is widely understood to be the realest deal there is. This is what populism looks like, the new Trump-addled cohort of populist diagnosticians confidently tells us; indeed, it is an almost perfect example of the species. That anti-bank catechism the founders of American populism preached in Kansas a century ago is the outlier, the mystery. That faith in “the people” that built unions and fought World War II is something completely forgotten. Don’t call those things “populism”; don’t even think of them at all.

The story of how racist right-wing demagoguery came to be the meaning of “populism” rather than a perversion of the populist impulse is a fascinating one, but what’s even more critical now is the implication of the change.

What does it tell us when liberals, faced with epic political corruption, spectacular bank misbehavior, and towering inequality, take that opportunity to declare war on populism? It tells us that they’ve lost any sense of their own movement as an expression of the vast majority. It tells us they have no idea why they believe they should be entrusted with power in the first place. And it reminds us that their particular brand of class-based self-delusion is a luxury that the rest of us can ill afford.

Thomas Frank explains how Trump could win another term, and how genetically altered Democrats might prevent it.

There's no water at THIS reservoir.

"In the vast catalogue of social posturing, there are few more repugnant sights than rich people congratulating themselves for being righteous. In particular, it is a terrible way to win back the blue-collar white voters who were responsible, even more than were the Russians, for Trump’s win."
-- Thomas Frank

Frank's original essay at Harper's is a longer read, and I recommend it, but the Cliff Notes version is provided at The Nation.

Thomas Frank: Trump Could Win the 2020 Election, by Jon Wiener (The Nation)

Let's focus on two questions asked of Frank by Wiener.

JW: Okay, what about Mueller saving us?

TF: Every Democrat that I talked to is counting on Mueller to deliver the midterms for them. This has worked for Democrats before. The famous Watergate class in Congress in 1974 was entirely the doing of Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal, and the Democrats are basically expecting that to happen again. It looks like it will work.

JW: What’s wrong with that?

TF: It breeds a kind of passiveness among Democrats where they never have to think about their own message. They may succeed in the coming midterms, but that’s a recipe for disaster in the long term. If Trump is not running for reelection three years from now, there’s going to be another Trump. The Republicans are never going to retreat from what this guy showed them in 2016. They now understand how you beat the Democrats. The next Trump is not going to be so vulgar, he’s not going to have affairs with porn stars, he’s not going to pick fights with NFL players. So the Democrats have to be thinking bigger. They can’t think “Oh, he screwed up. Great! Now we get back in.”

Or, as Frank put it at greater length at Harper's:

How do Democrats change course without sounding like they’re criticizing Obama or the Clintons — or, by extension, the neoliberal fantasy that has sustained the party since the Nineties? The answer is that they can’t, and so they don’t. They would rather sit back and expect Robert Mueller to rescue them. They would rather count on demographic change to give them a majority somewhere down the road. So they “do nothing and wait for the other side to implode,” observed Bill Curry, a former adviser to President Clinton who has emerged as one of the Democratic Party’s strongest internal critics. “That’s been their strategy for most of my adult life. Well, how’s that been working out?”

Curry continued his critique. The party, he said, desperately needs to get over its infatuation with its glorious past: “The mistakes of the Democratic Party are the mistakes of Obama and Clinton. Taking responsibility for those mistakes means holding them accountable. And so many people have such deep, positive feelings for Obama and the Clintons that they can’t bear to have that conversation.” His conclusion was as blunt as what I heard from so many others: “Trump wins by the Democrats not changing.”

It would be enjoyable to speak of these matters with our local Democratic horizontal hierarchy, serial drinkers of the DNC's by-the-numbers-bot-speaking Kool-Aid for so very long. But it remains a tableau of circled wagons, dedicated first and foremost to maintaining grassroots beak-wetting at the expense of ideas.

Frank persists in offering the solution to our miasma.

Get that great majority back together, I think, and it would be unstoppable. There is really only one set of successful politics for an age of inequality like this one, and it naturally favors the party of Roosevelt. Trump succeeded by pretending to be the heir of populists past, acting the role of a rough-hewn reformer who detested the powerful and cared about working-class people. Now it is the turn of Democrats to take it back from him. They may have to fire their consultants. They may have to stand up to their donors. They will certainly have to find the courage to change, to dump the ideology of the Nineties, the catechism of tech, bank, and globe that everyone now knows is nothing but an excuse for an out-of-touch elite. But the time has come. History is calling.

Choosing between Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos is like the choice of Pabst or High Life. It's no choice at all.

Center of the target.

Trump's enemy is not your friend: why we shouldn't defend Amazon, by Thomas Frank (The Guardian)

Why must we choose between the worst president of our lifetimes and one of the most rapacious corporate enterprises in the country?

... Confronting concentrated, autocratic economic power is what Democrats used to do. It was the definition of the species. They fought against monopolies in oil and food and transport that ripped off producers with one hand and consumers with the other. But now it’s Trump who, in his clumsy and authoritarian way, is trying to swipe that legacy.

I am making a tricky point here, so let me be clear: I don’t like Amazon, and I don’t like Donald Trump either. I would approve enthusiastically if a president started enforcing antitrust laws, but that’s not what Trump is proposing to do. What we are being offered instead is a choice between the worst president of our lifetimes and one of the most rapacious corporate enterprises in the country. And, eagerly, we are lining up with one or the other.

This in turn seems to me an almost perfect representation of the wretched choices available to Americans these days, as well as the megadoses of self-deception we are swallowing in order to make them. It is everything that is wrong with our politics, and it extends from the most sweeping matters of state right down to the individual reader.

The brutal conclusion:

And this is where we are now in the world’s greatest democracy. We have the billionaire Republicans, with their bigotry and their war on all things public, and the billionaire Democrats, with their oblivious ideology of globe and technology. To the common people, assembled in all our majesty, the momentous question is posed: who do you hate more?

Media vs. Trump: "It’s about legitimacy, of course, and what’s left of the respectable press is utterly captivated by the theme."

To begin your week with optimism and encouragement ... and whoever said the picture has to match the text?

The media's war on Trump is destined to fail. Why can't it see that?, by Thomas Frank (The Guardian)

The news media needs to win its war with Trump, and urgently so. But the goal should be more than just reestablishing the old rules of legitimacy

These are the worst of times for the American news media, but they are also the best. The newspaper industry as a whole has been dying slowly for years, as the pathetic tale of the once-mighty Chicago Tribune reminds us. But for the handful of well funded journalistic enterprises that survive, the Trump era is turning out to be a “golden age” – a time of high purpose and moral vindication.

The pivot:

These things don’t happen because the journalists that remain are liberals. It happens because so many of them are part of the same class – an exalted and privileged class. They are professionals and they believe in the things that so many other professional groups believe in: consensus, “realism”, credentialing, the wisdom of their fellow professionals and (of course) the stupidity of the laity.

This is the key to understanding many of their biases – and also for understanding why they are so utterly oblivious to how they appear to the rest of America.

The Midwest: Next time around, "will Democrats serve the 80% of us that this modern economy has left behind?"

To introduce this link, I'll once again defer to the junior editor, Jeff Gillenwater.

Number of times Joe and Josephine have voted for Democrats because the two of them believe the U.S. should implement a universal healthcare system: 23

Number of times any of the Democrats for whom they've repeatedly voted have actually supported the implementation of a universal healthcare system: 0

Number of times Joe and Josephine have insisted that the real problem with the country is a bunch of rubes elsewhere who are too dumb to vote in their own interest: 257

Is the chairman woke yet?

ON THE AVENUES: Dear Mr. Dizznee: Can you hear me now?

The hypocrisy keeps getting deeper, the metaphorical sewage is rising, and pretty soon coffee break will be over, and it’ll be back to standing on your head, counting the recent catastrophes.

As the young folks like to say, that Thomas Frank -- he's just killing it.

I can't help noticing that while the local Democratic Party hierarchy has kept me blockaded for more than three years, numerous "rank and file" Democrats continue to engage in conversation (rather like all those Catholics in Italy ignoring the Vatican's edicts on birth control), and many of them can't seem to come up with rejoinders to Frank's points.

Until they do, doubling down on failed comprehension seems unlikely to bear electoral fruit, but what does this apostate know, anyway?

The Democrats' Davos ideology won't win back the midwest (The Guardian)

And what I am here to say is that the midwest is not an exotic place. It isn’t a benighted region of unknowable people and mysterious urges. It isn’t backward or hopelessly superstitious or hostile to learning. It is solid, familiar, ordinary America, and Democrats can have no excuse for not seeing the wave of heartland rage that swamped them last November.

Another thing that is inexcusable from Democrats: surprise at the economic disasters that have befallen the midwestern cities and states that they used to represent.

The wreckage that you see every day as you tour this part of the country is the utterly predictable fruit of the Democratic party’s neoliberal turn. Every time our liberal leaders signed off on some lousy trade deal, figuring that working-class people had “nowhere else to go,” they were making what happened last November a little more likely.

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: "The Revolution Will Not Be Curated."

Before undertaking to curate the weekly word play content, allow me to dispense (for the very last time, I promise) with a wee bit of housekeeping.

From the advent of this column a little over a year ago, I've richly enjoyed mercilessly roasting its namesake with relentless weekly rhetoric.

"Shane's Excellent New Words" also will be a regular feature at NA Confidential. That's because a healthy vocabulary isn't about trying to show you're smarter than the rest. To the contrary, it's about selecting the right word and using it correctly, whatever one's pay grade or station in life.

To clarify for those who haven't heard the story, the idea for this column arose when the city of New Albany's corporate council tweeted (or maybe it was a Facebook comment, redolent of pique and crayon) to the effect that when Roger uses "big" words, it's just to show he's smarter then the rest.

Nah, but consider the source. When you're suckling at the bond-engorged teat of the taxpayer, there are times when you can't be bothered to think clearly. 

Meanwhile, I've grown bored (not board, mind you) with the polemical device, so while the column name stays, the weekly prelude goes.

This week's word is curate. At first, it may seem that the word's noun and verb usages are different.

curate

[noun kyoo r-it; verb kyoo-reyt, kyoo r-eyt]

noun

1. Chiefly British. a member of the clergy employed to assist a rector or vicar.

2. any ecclesiastic entrusted with the cure of souls, as a parish priest.

verb (used with object), curated, curating.

3. to take charge of (a museum) or organize (an art exhibit): to curate a photography show.

4. to pull together, sift through, and select for presentation, as music or website content: “We curate our merchandise with a sharp eye for trending fashion,” the store manager explained.

It all makes sense considering the word's origins in "care." Both curate and curator can be said to be showing care, whether for people or things.

Origin of curate

1300-50; Middle English curat (< Anglo-French) < Medieval Latin cūrātus, equivalent to Latin cūr (a) care + -ātus -ate1

Related forms include curatic and curatical as adjectives, and the nouns curateship, curation and subcurate.

Speaking locally, a few years ago when City Hall unleashed Boomtown Ball on an unsuspecting downtown, the press release mentioned the fact of the band Houndmouth's role in "curating" other participating musical acts. This marked the first time I'd heard the word used in this (shall we say, "contemporary") context, apart from the more familiar description of museum organization.

From this evolution comes a relatively new usage, curatolatry. Writer Thomas Frank takes it from here.

The Revolution Will Not Be Curated, by Thomas Frank (The Baffler)

Making sense of curatolatry

“The era of the curator has begun,” declared the prominent art critic Michael Brenson in 1998. The figures who assembled artworks into galleries, he reasoned, were now “as essential” to exhibits as the artists themselves. Curators were a species of universal genius who “must be at once aestheticians, diplomats, economists, critics, historians, politicians, audience developers, and promoters,” Brenson wrote. “They must be able to communicate not only with artists but also with community leaders, business executives, and heads of state.” And what a curator “welcomes or excludes” is what makes all the difference.

Whatever else we might think of this assertion, it was certainly prescient. Today the era of the curator is in full flower. The contemporary literature about the heroic organizer of exhibitions is large and enthusiastic, with adulatory new installments added all the time. In 2006, a prominent art writer saw a generation of bold young curators “armed with a vision of possibility and an image of the curator as a free agent, capable of almost anything.” In 2012, the New York Times marveled at the growing number of “programs in curating studies” and at how certain curators established themselves as “star names” in the art world.
Brightest among these stars, without a doubt, is one Hans Ulrich Obrist, a curator at the Serpentine Gallery in London, the author of Ways of Curating and A Brief History of Curating, and the closest thing there is to an art-world superstar these days, his every taste-quirk fawned over by the press.

But it is in the broad world outside museum culture where the phenomenon we might call curatolatry (as in the worship of curation and curators) is really booming. Everyone wants to curate things these days—to choose what to welcome and what to exclude—whether they work for an art gallery or not. “Curator,” for example, is the name of a PR agency in Seattle. “Curate” is the name of at least four different software applications. “Curate” is a data-gathering firm based in Madison, Wisconsin. It’s a kind of flavored water available at a grocery store near you. It’s also a brand of snack bars, whose maker explains the name as follows: “Curate means to bring things together to share them as a collection.”

Those who work with food are especially prone to thinking of themselves as curators. Chefs, for example, are said to be curating things wherever you look. There are countless internet personalities who refer to themselves as “food curators.” With a little searching, you will also encounter wine curators, beer curators, coffee curators, tea curators, spice curators, and cupcake curators.
The fantasy of curation can be extended to virtually any product category. Shops are often thought to be curated. So are rugs. And furniture. Cosmetics. Landscaping. Wardrobes. Music is eminently suited for the oversight of curators. So are TED talks. In fact, “curator” appears to be the actual job title of the chief officer of the TED organization, as it is of those who oversee TEDx events. It’s also a title of a radio producer at NPR.

And, of course, “curating” describes something that websites are supposed to do. It is the new and more benign word for what a short while ago was called “aggregating,” or what a less pretentious person might call “editing” or “sifting.” The web is a vast, chaotic, onrushing thing, the idea goes, and “curators” promise to sort it all out for us, welcoming and excluding as they see fit. That’s why what goes on at Pinterest and Tumblr and Instagram and Digg is often called “curating.” Above all, curating is what takes place at Facebook, where busily sifting “news curators” used to choose stories to be included in the hotly desirable “trending” category.

In that particular case, however, curation didn’t work out so well. Last year, Facebook’s staff of curators were accused of deliberately ignoring conservative news items that should rightfully have been deemed “trending.” The scandal dragged on for weeks, until eventually the company decided to delete its custodians of newsworthiness, replacing them with a computer program in August.

Here’s where our story of curatolatry takes a turn for the strange ...

Books by Thomas Frank and Steve Fraser explain the Democratic collapse as "a crisis not only of policies but of the theories justifying them."

Dear local Democrats: "It's the economy, stupid."

After the Fumble, by Matt Stoller (The Nation)

Having dominated the Democratic Party for years, the meritocrats now find themselves in a state of crisis.

Donald Trump is hated by large swaths of the country. Yet despite this fact, he is now president, and in the process of undoing the work of Barack Obama, a man whose elegance and intelligence rival that of any American president in the last 50 years. The results of the election have left liberals and Democrats scrounging for explanations—often those that don’t require accepting their share of the blame for one of the greatest electoral upsets in American history. According to some, it was Putin’s meddling in the election. Others point to a press that has been hostile to Hillary Clinton for decades; or to the various strains of racism and sexism in America that Trump exploited; or to the Republicans’ scorched-earth strategy against Obama, obstructing his policies and political appointments; or to the Electoral College, since Clinton won the popular vote by several million.

As with any complex event, there is no single cause for Trump’s election. But what is clear is that the Democratic Party revealed much deeper weaknesses in its foundations. The collapse of the party in most states, and the weakness of the center-left globally, underscores a larger ideological problem: a crisis not only of policies but of the theories justifying them.

Two books published before the election—­Steve Fraser’s The Limousine Liberal and Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal—­issued prescient warnings of this crisis and offer some clues as to the ideological problem facing the Democrats

Frank:

In the end, Frank argues, the Democrats need to recognize that their ideology is the problem. By invoking the rhetoric of meritocracy, partnering with financial elites, dismantling much of the welfare state, and ignoring the interests of working-class Americans, they have created a nation that is far more deeply unequal (and also, ironically, one in which it’s harder for them to win elections). “The course of the party and the course of the country can both be changed,” Frank writes, “but only after we understand that the problem is us.”

Fraser:

Steve Fraser’s The Limousine Liberal gives us another gloss on the Democrats’ transition from a majority to minority party. But Fraser shifts the optics: Instead of focusing on the Democrats themselves, he chronicles the history of an image that reactionaries have used for years to go after “elites”: that of the “limousine liberal,” the self-satisfied establishment do-gooder whose condescension creates an “aggrieved sense” among the public. Limousine liberalism as a metaphor, Fraser argues, is the historical glue that binds the 1930s hostility to the New Deal with the anger at “the countercultural and racial reformations of the 1960s.”

Thomas Frank and Bernie Sanders talk about things Adam Dickey doesn't want to hear.

Since I'm in such a good mood this morning, we'll be taking a glance as Thomas Frank and Bernie Sanders talk about an array of compelling ideas that local party bigwig Adam Dickey doesn't want to hear.

However, first let's take a brief diversion into post-electoral Democratic self-delusion, one of Mr. Disney's perennial specialties.

Can They Count?, by Jonah Walters (Jacobin)

Blaming third-party voters for Trump’s win isn’t just bad politics. It’s bad math.

In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election day victory, political wonks find themselves in an urgent predicament — apparently, not a single one of them owns a calculator. This crisis is ill-timed indeed. Performing simple feats of addition and subtraction is a vital part of the wonks’ post-election number-crunching ritual. But without calculators, wonks make mistakes.

The calculator crisis has already had an impact on public opinion. Justifiably unnerved by the shortage, data-slingers have flailed in the days and weeks following the election. As a result, they’ve churned out misleading analyses full of bad math.

The worst instances of bad math have to do with the so-called “protest vote,” cast by those voters who, disgusted by the major candidates on offer, pulled the lever for marginal third-party challengers like the Green Party’s Jill Stein. To hear the wonks tell it, these voters were dupes — frauds even — and they cost Clinton the election.

Because what really happened was this.

The Democrats lost because their Republican challenger was able to galvanize voters far more successfully than Hillary Clinton, whose technocratic blend of esoteric policy-talk and milquetoast liberalism did next to nothing to motivate turnout, even with the specter of a Trump presidency looming large.

So, the Democrats drew the short straw, and the reform process begins. Or does it?

How the Democrats could win again, if they wanted, by Thomas Frank (The Guardian)

Labor and economic equality used to be at the heart of liberal politics. Rich professionals expunged these concerns – and have reaped the consequences

What makes 2016 a disaster for Democrats is not merely the party’s epic wipeout in Washington and the state capitals, but that the contest was fought out on a terrain that should have been favorable to them. This was an election about social class –about class-based grievances – and yet the Party of the People blew it. How that happened is the question of the year, just as it has been the question of other disastrous election years before. And just like before, I suspect the Democrats will find all manner of convenient reasons to take no corrective action.

But first let us focus on the good news. Donald Trump has smashed the consensus factions of both parties. Along the way, he has destroyed the core doctrine of Clintonism: that all elections are decided by money and that therefore Democrats must match Republican fundraising dollar for dollar. This is the doctrine on which progressive hopes have been sacrificed for decades, and now it is dead. Clinton outspent Trump two-to-one and it still wasn’t enough.

Leaving aside the question of how this conclusion pertains to Jeff Gahan's fattened war chest, it isn't pretty.

This year the Republicans chose an honest-to-god scary candidate, a man who really ought to have been kept out of the White House, and the party’s centrists choked. Instead of winning, the pragmatists delivered Democrats to the worst situation they’ve been in for many decades, with control of no branch of the federal government and only a handful of state legislatures. Over the years, and at the behest of this faction, Democrats gave up what they stood for piece by piece and what they have to show for it now is nothing.

At least we now understand what it really means to swing.

... the real swing voters are the working people who over the years have switched their loyalty from the Democrats to Trump’s Republicans. Their views are pretty much the reverse of the standard model. On certain matters they are open to conservative blandishments; on economic issues, however, they are pretty far to the left. They don’t admire free trade or balanced budgets or entitlement reform – the signature issues of centrism – they hate those things. And if Democrats want to reach them, they will have to turn away from the so-called center and back to the economic left.

Frank doesn't believe the Democratic Party will be up to the task of introspection and rehabilitation. The party won't make the necessary changes, and ...

This will happen because what leading liberals cannot understand – what they are psychologically blocked from understanding – is that the problem isn’t really the white working class. The problem is them.

For those of an optimistic nature, there's a potential silver lining.

If the unreconstructed Democratic party is to be saved, I suspect, what will save it is what always saves it: the colossal incompetence of the Republicans. This, too, we can already see coming down the rails. Donald Trump is getting the wrecking crew back together, and before too long, I suspect, he will have the country pining for Hillary Clinton.

Ah, what might have been, but Bernie Sanders is not looking back in anger.

Bernie Sanders: Where We Go From Here, by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)

It feels like a bomb went off in Washington. In less than a year, the leaders of both major parties have been crushed, fundamentally reshaping a political culture that for generations had seemed unalterable. The new order has belligerent outsider Donald Trump heading to the White House, ostensibly backed in Congress by a tamed and repentant majority of establishment Republicans. Hillary Clinton's devastating loss, meanwhile, has left the minority Democrats in disarray. A pitched battle for the soul of the opposition party has already been enjoined behind the scenes.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who won overwhelming youth support and 13 million votes during primary season, now sits on one side of that battle, in a position of enormous influence. The party has named him "outreach chair," and Minnesota congressman and Sanders political ally Keith Ellison is the favorite to be named head of the Democratic National Committee. This is a huge change from earlier this year, when the Sanders campaign was completely on the outs with the DNC, but many see Sanders' brand of politics as the Democrats' best shot at returning to prominence.

Since November 9, the Floyd County Democratic party has continued doing what it's done best during Chairman Dickey's tenure: Avoid any trace of content while erecting sanitized facades to hide behind.

Of course, there are times when Occam's razor rules, and the simplest explanation is the best; as such, local Democrats have absolutely nothing in the tank, and so nothingness is the only path the party can take.

We already know how it's going to play out hereabouts:

New Albany Heating and Air presents ...

COOL PAPA GAHAN AND THE COMPLETELY REVISED AND UPDATED FLOYD COUNTY DEMOCRATIC PARTY

"Meet the new loss ... same as the old loss ... "

It's the economy, stupid.

So, we must help working people who are getting a raw deal, this raw deal being the result of the economic policies our own party relentlessly pursues.

Meanwhile, it's vital to support the party on social diversity grounds, because the anger directed against us by those on the other side, who tire of suffering the raw deal our economic policies perpetuate, and instead direct their frustration toward our social diversity -- did we mention the importance of ignoring the implications of neoliberal economic orthodoxy in this equation?

Rather, a properly staffed Supreme Court will enforce requisite social discipline, sparing us participation in democracy on the ground.

Doesn't anyone else find it odd that Democrats (minus the neutered Sanders insurgency) seem allergic to any discussion of economics?

In New Albany, we've already seen how this void operates. Last year's mayoral campaign featured an incumbent Democrat who rarely if ever mentioned jobs, wages and employment. He succeeded in completely ignoring pocketbook issues, while flashing photos of public works built with borrowed money.

In a nod to the ubiquitous bumper sticker: Which party does Colonel Sanders belong to, anyway? The chickens are confused.

Hillary Clinton needs to wake up. Trump is stealing the voters she takes for granted, by Thomas Frank (The Guardian)

 ... Think about it this way. For years, Republican orthodoxy on trade made possible endless Democratic sell-outs of working people, with the two-party consensus protecting the D’s from any consequences. They could ram Nafta through Congress, they could do trade deals with China, they could negotiate the Trans Pacific Partnership, they could attend their conferences at Davos and congratulate themselves for being so global and so enlightened, secure in the belief that the people whose livelihoods they had just ruined had “nowhere else to go”.

In other words, it was only possible for our liberal leaders to be what they are – a tribe of sunny believers in globalization and its favored classes – as long as the Republicans held down their left flank for them. Democrats could only celebrate globalization’s winners and scold its uneducated losers so long as there was no possibility that they might face a serious challenge on the matter from the other party in the system.

Well, today all that has changed. The free-trade consensus lies in shards on the floor. The old Republican party has been smashed by this man Trump. It is a new political world out there. How will Democrats react to this altered state of affairs? How will they present themselves to voters now that the bipolar system of the last four decades has exploded, now that they can no longer count on free-trading Republicans to make their own passion for globaloney seem acceptable?

So far, Democrats are acting as though nothing has really changed.

Listen, Liberal: "The 1 Book Every Entrepreneur Should Read in 2016."

"As Frank explains it, we have two political parties that differ on social issues but which are in near total agreement on economic policy and together are pursuing strategies that shift wealth upward to the professional class, while stripping blue-collar or white-collar workers of job security and the ability to earn a living wage."

Given the tone of recent social media chats, this post from earlier in the week bears repeating.

Robert Reich and Thomas Frank connect the dots between Hillary Clinton, Adam Dickey and Jeff Gahan.

Concurrently, Robert Reich posted the following at his Facebook account. I've highlighted the passage that most clearly explains Jeff Gahan's local governing preferences, and his prioritization to date. Union jobs at Pillsbury were lost, with nothing to replace them -- but Gahan's suburban Eastridge voters wanted parks.

When even Inc. gets it, the wisdom of a close friend is verified, because speaking locally, "Real D's could meet comfortably at Coqui's." Lots of you urge me to look past this, and concentrate on the Democratic Party as bulwark against Trumpism, a saga played out in far-off places.

I'd rather expose the Democratic rot right here at home. When one of them spots me a half-block away and abruptly turns into the alley, I feel like I've accomplished something real.

The 1 Book Every Entrepreneur Should Read in 2016: If the rise of Trump blindsided you, it's because you didn't read this book, by Geoffrey James (Inc.)

Every year I read dozens of books and provide you with a list of the "best of the best" motivational books, sales and marketing books, and management books. Many of the books I recommend (as well as those recommended by various pundits and billionaires) build on familiar themes, like entrepreneurship and leadership.

Once in a blue moon, I run across a book that forces me to think, that challenges me to re-examine my core beliefs about business and politics. The book in this case is Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People. It's an eye-opener and a must-read for entrepreneurs who want to understand what's happening this year in politics and business.

Contrary to what the title seems to imply, the book is not a conservative take-down of the liberal viewpoint. In fact, conservatives are barely mentioned. Instead, it's an expose of how the Democratic party realigned itself with the professional class (that would be the elites like us) and threw the working class under the bus.

Robert Reich and Thomas Frank connect the dots between Hillary Clinton, Adam Dickey and Jeff Gahan.

Q. What do Jeff Gahan's toadies say when the Bud Light stops flowing?
A: Wow, this regime really sucks.

First, author Thomas Frank previews the Clinton campaign.

Why must the Trump alternative be self-satisfied, complacent Democrats?, by Thomas Frank (The Guardian)

 ... In reality, Donald Trump is a bigot of such pungent vileness that the victory of the Democratic candidate this fall is virtually assured. Absent some terrorist attack ... or some FBI action on the Clinton email scandal ... or some outrageous act of reasonableness by Trump himself, the blowhard is going to lose.

This, in turn, frees the Democratic leadership to do whatever they want, to cast themselves in any role they choose. They do not need to move to “the center” this time. They do not need to come up with some ingenious way to get Wall Street off the hook. They do not need to beat up on working people’s organizations.

That they seem to want to do all these things anyway tells us everything we need to know about who they really are: a party of the high-achieving professional class that is always looking for a way to dismiss the economic concerns of ordinary people.

Hmm. Adam Dickey's local Democrats in a nutshell.

Concurrently, Robert Reich posted the following at his Facebook account. I've highlighted the passage that most clearly explains Jeff Gahan's local governing preferences, and his prioritization to date. Union jobs at Pillsbury were lost, with nothing to replace them -- but Gahan's suburban Eastridge voters wanted parks.

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How did Democrats lose the white working class to Republicans, and now to Donald Trump?

One answer is for years Republicans have skillfully played the race card (“welfare queens, “Willie Horton” the battle over affirmative action). The bigotry spewing forth from Donald Trump is an extension of this old race card, now applied to Mexicans and Muslims – with much the same effect on the white working class voters.

But this isn't the whole story. Democrats also abandoned the white working class. Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and controlled Congress for four of those years. In that time they've scored some important victories for working families – the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Family and Medical Leave Act, for example. But they’ve done nothing to change the vicious cycle of wealth and power that has rigged the economy for the benefit of those at the top, and undermined the working class.

In some respects, Democrats have been complicit in it. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements, for example, without providing the millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs any means of getting new ones that paid at least as well. They also stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class. Clinton and Obama failed to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated them, or enable workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down votes. Partly as a result, union membership sunk from 22 percent of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to fewer than 12 percent today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains.

In addition, the Obama administration protected Wall Street from the consequences of the Street’s gambling addiction through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout but let millions of underwater homeowners drown. Both Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated. Finally, they turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general-election campaigns. And he never followed up on his reelection campaign promise to pursue a constitutional amendment overturning “Citizens United v. FEC,” the 2010 Supreme Court opinion opening the floodgates to big money in politics.

What happens when you combine freer trade, shrinking unions, Wall Street bailouts, growing corporate market power, and the abandonment of campaign finance reform? You shift political and economic power to the wealthy, and you shaft the working class.

Why haven’t Democrats sought to reverse this power shift?

In part, because they bought the snake oil of the “suburban swing voter” – so-called “soccer moms” in the 1990s and affluent politically-independent professionals in the 2000s – who supposedly determine electoral outcomes. Meanwhile, as early as the 1980s they began drinking from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans – big corporations, Wall Street, and the very wealthy.

Democrats could still win back the white working class – putting together a huge coalition of the working class and poor, of whites, blacks, and Latinos, of everyone who has been shafted by the shift in wealth and power to the top. This would give Democrats the political clout to restructure the economy – rather than merely enact palliatives that papered over the increasing concentration of wealth and power in America. But to do this Democrats would have to stop obsessing over upper-income suburban swing voters, and end their financial dependence on big corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy.

Will they? Could they? What do you think?

Today's must read: "Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. Here's why."

Thomas Frank has listened to Donald Trump's speeches, and personally, he finds the candidate "disgusting," while adding a crucial caveat: Trump has disgusted him for more than 20 years.

This echoes my own comments, in that there was no need for Trump to run for president in order to be loathsome. I, too, have been disgusted by Trump, and for decades, not since last summer.

However, personal disgust isn't the point, either of Frank's essay or Trump's message. The author isn't the first to note that there are things Trump and Bernie Sanders have in common (see Pierce, Charles P.), and these things have to do with trade, the economy and normal, working people. What we're seeing this year is the inevitable result of ignoring the 800-lb gorilla.

This isn't to diminish the repugnance of so many of Trump's set pieces, merely to confirm that a valid point is a valid point, irrespective of who makes it. I skip to the conclusion, but you should read the whole essay.

Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. Here's why, by Thomas Frank (The Guardian)

Trump’s words articulate the populist backlash against liberalism that has been building slowly for decades and may very well occupy the White House itself, whereupon the entire world will be required to take seriously its demented ideas.

Yet still we cannot bring ourselves to look the thing in the eyes. We cannot admit that we liberals bear some of the blame for its emergence, for the frustration of the working-class millions, for their blighted cities and their downward spiraling lives. So much easier to scold them for their twisted racist souls, to close our eyes to the obvious reality of which Trumpism is just a crude and ugly expression: that neoliberalism has well and truly failed.