Thomas Frank, historian, journalist, and author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? and Listen, Liberal, joins us to dissect how Democrats abandoned populism, the rise of Trump’s faux-populism, and why the party refuses to embrace the working class. He also explores the path forward for authentic left-wing populism in the face of neoliberal failures. (Video version of this podcast is here.)

Nathan J. Robinson

People should pick up and buy your books because they never expire. But it is also depressing because it means that you are one of the most astute and least listened to people in the country.

Thomas Frank

But I've grown used to that. Nathan, when I was young, I had these ambitions that things might be otherwise. I used to feel bad about how nobody cared and nobody listened, but I don't care anymore.

Robinson 

But Listen, Liberal even had the finger on the cover pointed straight at them, so they knew—they knew—who it was that had to listen. And you couldn't have worded that more directly, and the liberals didn't listen. Let me read it here from the last page of Listen, Liberal published in 2016, before the calamity of that year.

“Now all political parties are alliances of groups with disparate interests, but the contradictions of the Democratic Party coalition seem unusually sharp. The Democrats posture as the party of the people, even as they dedicate themselves everywhere, resolutely, to serving and glorifying the professional class. Worse, they combine self-righteousness and class privilege in a way that Americans find stomach turning. But every two years, they simply assume that being non-Republican is sufficient to rally the voters of the nation.” 

Frank

Yes, and by the way, I wrote that before I even knew about Donald Trump. 

Robinson

And here we go. You say, “this cannot go on,” but you make a prediction, and you say, “yet it will go on,” which I like, and it has gone on. As I say, you wrote this in 2016. That's a long time ago. And then we just saw a catastrophe that I think is partly caused by some of the problems that you identify in this book.

Frank

Yes, well, come on, this is the Democrats. Is that Red Bull you're drinking? 

Robinson

Yes, this is a giant sugar-free Red Bull. I need my energy.

Frank

It feels like you've got me beat on the energy front here, Nathan. What can I say? When I wrote that, it was a description of a life of disappointment at the hands of the Democratic Party, first Bill Clinton and then Barack Obama. I think Trump is mentioned once in the original version of the book. I later wrote an afterword, and I think I called him names or something. 

Robinson

That's kind of interesting that you didn't need to mention Trump in order for the analysis to work.

Frank 

The book came out in spring 2016, so I would have only mentioned him briefly—the Republican primaries were ongoing at the time. I had no idea that he would be the candidate. What a surprise.

Robinson

Let's dive into what it was that you were identifying then more precisely. I read a paragraph that nicely summarizes it up, but let's go into a bit more detail about when you were pointing this finger directly into the face of the liberal and saying, listen, look, this is headed for catastrophe, and it's going to continue until you have a serious revelation. What would you describe as the revelation that was not had? 

Frank

Well, this is a big question. What people often don't realize is that this is a long process. It's not just something that just happened. It's not Kamala Harris, it's not Hillary Clinton. They have a lot to answer for, but this is something that's been going on for a very long time. And steadily, but surely, the Democratic Party—they did this out in the open. It wasn't a conspiracy. They talked about it and boasted about it, gave speeches, wrote books and magazine articles about it, turned their back on what they used to be. When I was young, you would turn on the TV after each electoral disaster, like after Reagan had worked this incredible defeat. The one that really got me was when George Bush senior beat Michael Dukakis, where Dukakis had actually been in the lead in the polls. George Bush senior was this kind of awful man, and he won anyway.

And then you go on TV the day after, and the pundits would always say the same thing: the Democratic Party has to abandon the New Deal. They can no longer be the party of the New Deal. They would have these various terms for it, but one of the favorite ones was they have to become neoliberals. This was the big idea in the '70s and '80s. There are other names for it. They call themselves Atari Democrats. But the idea of it is they had to become the party of a social cohort, of a social class, that was identified with futureness. That sounds like bullshit, and nevertheless, it is true. They really did say these things in the '70s and '80s and into the '90s. And then finally they got their way. Here comes the New Democrats, Bill Clinton and his group, and he's speaking exactly the things that they've been describing, and lo and behold, hallelujah, he wins.

Robinson

It works. It's vindicated. It's true. They were right.

Frank

Yes, exactly. And that's how they take it. His election, and then especially his reelection, is our vindication from heaven that this is the right path, that this is the way to go. You identify yourself not with working people, but with the highly educated. They had these pet love names for them. They called them the learning class. I love that one because just so obnoxious. They called them the wired workers. These pet names for the group that they saw as a party of the left in a two-party system. What it has to do is to dedicate itself to this group of people. And they did what they did, and they did it deliberately. And you look at the works of Bill Clinton as president. He was a very consequential president. It's often forgotten nowadays, but he actually did things as president. It wasn't all just his chummy Arkansas—

Robinson

There were lots of things that were done.

Frank

Yes, there were things, Nathan. I saw an article in the Wall Street Journal the other day calling for a new Bill Clinton, and it was entirely about his folksy manner and the way that he gave the stiff arm to Jesse Jackson, who, by the way, in retrospect, kind of looks like a hero. This is the guy who actually got it right back in the '80s and '90s.

Robinson

I think he's the one who said, Bill Clinton is what it looks like when Jim Crow goes to Yale. 

Frank

Did he really say that? Oh, my god, that's classic. I've never heard that one before.

Robinson

He came around a bit, I think, over the course of the Clinton presidency.

Frank  

He did, as one does. As everyone did. Clinton, he was so smart. Again, you mentioned Yale. I think Yale Law School has a lot to answer for. 

Robinson

My classmates at Yale Law School: JD Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy. I knew when I was there that we were breeding the ruling class, but I didn't know just how bad. I think they were actually a year ahead.

Frank

Wait, who's the other one? Come on, the Supreme Court judge that Trump named. 

Robinson

Oh, Kavanaugh?

Frank

Yes, Kavanaugh. I almost went to Yale Law School, just so you know.

Robinson

Oh, really? 

Frank

Yes, I got accepted, and I thought I was going to go, and then I decided at the last minute that I would study history instead. I didn't want to be a corporate lawyer.

Robinson

That's the thing. I watched the process of everyone coming in being really interesting, and then they became boring over the course of three years.

Frank

I would have been in Brett Kavanaugh’s class.

Robinson

Oh, my god. We had Lina Khan, JD Vance, and Vivek Ramaswamy at the same time. 

Frank 

That's amazing. So I went and studied history instead, and look where it got me. 

Robinson

It helped you analyze the world correctly. 

Frank

Yes, and I love writing history. I just love it. I love doing archival research. And even before we get into the politics here, I should mention where I've been the last couple of years. People are like, where you been? Why haven't you been writing? I've been working on a book. I write every day, and it's a history of creativity. I'm really deep in the subject right now. I took a break from it to write that op-ed for the Times and to do podcasts. In two days, I will go back to doing that. I really like archival research. I love it. It's become a lot more efficient with the internet. When I wrote my first book, which was sort of similar to this book about the advertising industry in the 1960s, it was hard to do research. You had to spend all your time in the library, and you had to go to New York City and interview people and go through special files, and it's all online now, or not all, but like 90 percent. Anyhow, that's my first passion.

Robinson

Well, I'm excited for it. How many more years do we have to wait? 

Frank

It should be out the next year. It's almost done. I assume I'll have to rewrite it a couple of times, but all the material is there right now. I'm writing a chapter about the MacArthur Genius grants. Which—just so you know, Nathan—are not for genius at all, but for exceptional creativity. I bet you didn't know that.

Robinson

I did not know that. So, okay, Bill Clinton: how this all started with Bill Clinton?

Frank

Well, it started before him. There were predecessors. So it goes back, actually, to the McGovern years, when in '72, the Democratic Party deliberately wrote organized labor out of the party. They reorganized the way that the Party chose its presidential nominee, and along the way, they basically contrived to take all the power from organized labor, which used to be very closely associated with the Democratic Party. If you're old enough to remember, they were basically their party, and the McGovern people contrived to kick them out. They did it with the best of motives, let's put it that way. They did it with the best of motives, but they also did it with some pretty shitty motives.

And you go back and look at the literature of that campaign and of that moment, and they were already saying, we cannot be this party of labor. We have to be the party of enlightened professionals, of the kids coming out of Yale Law School. People were actually saying things like this at the time, and the Party has been working out of that theory ever since. What's funny is, I don't know too many people that have critiqued that theory. I think I can count them. This is me, I'm one of them. Listen, Liberal is one of those books. But there's maybe five others. It’s like it happened and nobody paid any attention to it, even though it was on TV. You had guys saying this nonsense on TV after every election. You had Bill Clinton boasting about it, but there were very few critiques of it. And now here we are. It's been allowed to run for 50 years.

Robinson

Like we were saying, Clinton seemed to prove that the theory worked electorally. 

Frank

That was his promise. That was his magic. That's why they loved him. So the Wall Street Journal had this story like two days ago reminiscing about Clinton, and it's entirely about his manners, and he's a homey Arkansas folksy guy who can connect us with working people. And I'm like, wait, are we talking about the same guy that deregulated the banks? Are we talking about that guy? Is that the one? The friend of the working man who allowed Wall Street to become what it is today? That guy? And that is what they mean. It's funny how nobody can talk about the two things at the same time, his manners and what he actually did. Bill Clinton, who screwed working people in this monumental way with NAFTA and PNTR China and also the Bill Clinton who had that soft southern accent and was so lovable and liked to go to McDonald's.

Robinson

So I take it that you see the Trump victories as the culmination of a decades-long process whereby the Democrats abandoned the New Deal as the kind of exemplar of democratic aspirations, abandoned labor, and became something else that is often called neoliberalism or corporate liberalism.

Frank

Yes, they did that. This is what happened. And now, if you ask me, we're at the end of the road for this thing. You look at whose votes they win now, and it's entirely affluent people. So I grew up in this neighborhood in Kansas City. And by the way, if you've heard any of these anecdotes before, just stop me. I grew up in suburban Kansas City, in Johnson County, Kansas. And we were not rich people. I still don't really understand how the Franks managed to wind up in this neighborhood, but we were surrounded by the ruling class of Kansas City, so the kids whose families own the place, and I mean own the place. It's that kind of city. It's a very beautiful city, but it has this very small ruling elite. These families all knew each other, and they lived all around us, and I knew their kids. And they were all Republicans. And I thought, these are the most Republican people I'm ever going to meet in my life. And you take a guy like Bob Dole, they loved Bob Dole. That's what politics is. It's a guy like that.

I sold the house and moved out, but I was there for the 2020 election, and Joe Biden won every single precinct in that neighborhood. It is astonishing. I can't believe it. I used to tell the story of when I would vote there when I was younger and just figuring out politics. And I would go to the polling place, which was at a country club. I'm serious. It was at this extremely elite country club that would never let people like me and my family join. And I went to the polling place, and they asked what party, and I said, I'm a Democrat. And they had a big computer printout for Republicans. This is Mission Hills, Kansas. And then for the Democrats, they had a single page. And now, it's entirely reversed. It's just the strangest thing.

But that's who the Democrats are. That's who they have wanted to be all these years. That's what they talked about becoming, and they got their wish. And here's the thing, Nathan, I don't know what power, what rebuke, what form of chastisement can convince them that this is a mistake. I don't know if anything can. Because it's such a self-flattering form of politics to believe that you're these wonderful people who are so enlightened and so tasteful. And what do you do when you lose? You scold. You scold the world.

Robinson

On the one hand, you can say clearly they're making a terrible mistake by not pushing policies that are going to help ordinary people. Clearly, ordinary people understand that Democrats are not pushing policies that will help them. They understand that they're out of touch. But also, there are structural reasons now why it's very hard for them to change. On the Kamala Harris campaign, it was interesting. She came out with this anti-price gouging policy that was kind of—

Frank

It was kind of good. And I never heard another word about it after the convention.

Robinson

Well, I have read that what happened is that her Uber executive brother-in-law gave her a phone call and said, Wall Street doesn't like this, you need to back off on it. And so they altered the policy, and they said, it's actually just groceries, and it's just an emergency, and it doesn't mean anything. So one of the problems here is that they can't listen. Because now, when you have to satisfy the donors, it doesn't matter if you know that what you're doing is wrong, and you're going to lose. They are now so dependent upon big money.

Frank

Yes, it's part of the machine. And that's an excellent point, and it makes it an even more depressing story. So I've been talking to different people over the last couple of days, and we argue about what they should do. All of those arguments are exactly, as you say, kind of moot, because they're not allowed to do the things that they need to do basically. For them to do these things would require some kind of political earthquake. Now, arguably, we just had that. But it can get worse for them. They can screw this up even more. 

Robinson

Well, Hillary Clinton should have embraced the Bernie agenda if she wanted to win, and she should have made Bernie her vice president. She couldn't.

Frank

Come on, she couldn’t.

Robinson

She couldn't. So you can tell her to listen—

Frank

It’s not who she is. Arguably, Kamala—I don't know who Kamala Harris is. We didn't have long enough to learn about her. I don't know really what she believes in. We know that she was very good on the abortion issue. Real good. She was eloquent, persuasive, passionate. She was real good on talking about Donald Trump's unfitness for office. She was excellent on that, I thought. On nothing else was she even so much as interesting. She didn't care, didn't look into it, didn't study up. Just didn't care. But the thing is that we know so little about her that we don't know really know where her heart was. 

Robinson

And in the 2020 campaign when she ran in the primaries, she was willing to embrace a lot of the Bernie policies and then kind of famously, at the start of this campaign, ditched a number of them. They asked her, do you still support Medicare for All? And she said, no, absolutely not. Her campaign literally put out a statement saying, Kamala Harris no longer supports Medicare for All; Kamala Harris no longer supports a job guarantee. They did this in the first couple of weeks of her campaign.

Frank 

Way to go, Kamala. Because what if she had made the whole election a crusade just about that? It would have been really interesting. But nobody has that kind of imagination. It's funny, all that money—and she just spammed me while we're sitting here, by the way. 

Robinson

Spamming for more money. 

Frank

Yes, they're still spamming. And all that money, all of that expertise, and they can't do anything remotely creative, anything that's slightly original or unexpected. They can't pull it off. All that money—and maybe the money handicaps them. Maybe it's something like that.

Robinson

You say all that money. But actually, those things are really related.

Frank

Look at their convention. I keep going back to the conventions, and I went to both parties conventions this year on behalf of a French newspaper. Their convention was so uninteresting. By their standards, it was a great success. So, look, there was this moment when Biden drops out, and it's like, what are we going to do, Democrats? What are we going to do? We got to have a candidate. And there was a question very briefly, should we have an open convention? Should all the Democrats come together in Chicago, fight it out, fight over the issues, and come up with somebody? It's like, oh my god, save us. No, do not do that. Whatever you do, don't do that.

And I wonder now, in retrospect—and so you did the opposite of that, and you chose your candidate immediately. You got together by a process that is still unknown to us, chose your candidate immediately, and then made the convention into this propaganda event on her behalf—a very tight, almost military precision sort of campaign propaganda event. How would it have gone if you'd actually gone out there and debated ideas? What would have happened if you had actually done that? If you guys had actually gone into the convention without a candidate and had to stay there as long as it took to get one, it might have been healthy. We don't know. We'll never know.

Robinson

No, we didn't have a primary, either, obviously, because Joe Biden decided he was ready for reelection, and then they made a great effort to shut down any potential challengers, which also seems like a mistake in retrospect, given what happened with Joe Biden.

Frank

The mistakes that they made are really unforgivable. 

Robinson

I'm trying to understand the distinction between the things that are mistakes and the things that are built into the party as it is, because of the process that you describe in terms of the changes in their constituencies.

Frank

Maybe I am totally wrong about this, but I think that their allergy to an open convention tells us something really important about these guys. I think their desire to avoid primaries tells us something really important about these guys, that they are desperate to stop certain voices from having a say in the way that candidates are chosen at all.

Robinson

When they had an open primary, Bernie terrified them, and they all had to come together and find someone to stop Bernie.

Frank

He might have a chance. If they had an open convention, they might choose someone like Elizabeth Warren. Who the hell knows? That might happen. Anything could happen. One of the really fascinating things about the Democratic Party is that, over the years, they have managed to keep a lid on it. The same bunch always wins. This is the Clinton/Obama faction that always comes out on top, and has, since Walter Mondale, always been the nominee, and they are determined to keep it that way. In some ways, it is their party. They own it in the same way that organized labor used to own it in the old days. It is their party. They're not going to give up. They're not going to surrender it. You can go and ask them for it. You can ask them very politely, Mr. Nathan Robinson, and they're not going to give it to you. 

Robinson

Well, in a certain sense, then, Listen, Liberal looks like it's intended for the people who are causing the problem, but actually, it's intended for those of us who need to throw those people out of power.

Let me ask you how Joe Biden fits into the picture. There is a certain narrative that suggests that the Biden presidency was a sharp break from the neoliberal Democratic Party that you describe. Joe Biden obviously made a big effort to appear more pro union. He declared, I'm going to be the most pro-union president. In the first year, he said he wanted to be the next FDR, etc. Do you see that as entirely a fraud? Or is there something to that?

Frank

There is something to it. I think now everything that you and I are talking about has started to dawn on them. But back in the day, when I wrote Listen Liberal, I would say you could count the number of Democrats who agreed with me on one hand. There's like five of them. I could probably list them for you. Bernie is one. Sherrod Brown was one. But I think to a certain degree, Biden actually got it and did take the initial steps that you would take if you were going to try to put the party on a different course. He did. So look what he did on antitrust. That's probably the brightest spot of his administration. He did inspiring things. And this is stuff that I had once called for. I used to write articles about this back in the day, about how the Democratic Party needs to break with the sort of Clinton legacy on antitrust, and they need to get tough on this again because it's one tool where you don't need Congress. The laws were passed over 100 years ago. You just have to start enforcing them. And I'll be goddamned, he did it. I was very excited about that.

You mentioned Lina Khan earlier. I think she's exactly the kind of person that they should have running federal agencies. That is exactly what they should have been doing. Now, that said, with everything you described, these are tiny, tiny steps in the right direction, but they're massively overshadowed by the other things: by the Gaza disaster, by inflation, by Biden's age issue. In some ways, I think the Biden years are a kind of tragedy. This is a guy who seemed to understand it to some degree, and then who the hell knows what happened? Well, we still don't know. 

Robinson  

There's something very strange to me where you're indicating there that Biden started to get some hint that maybe you should do these things that actually deliver for people. Bernie Sanders understands this intuitively and has understood it forever, and it strikes me every time I see—I like looking at the comments section. And comment sections are a cesspool, but they give you an interesting indication of how people respond to things. And so when you watch Bernie Sanders on Joe Rogan or on Fox News, and you look at the comments section of the people who are the typical audience for those kinds of things, and when you go out and talk to normal people, and you say, what do you think of Bernie Sanders? They say, well, I'm a Republican, but I always respect Bernie. He tells it to you straight, every single time. The Bernie Sanders theory of how you reach people and what a social democrat should look like, and all of this stuff you're saying about how you just need to be like an honest, plainspoken New Deal Democrat who offers to help people and doesn't lie to them, is really intuitive.

Frank

In some ways, Bernie is this reassuring figure from long ago. He's selling politics from the 1940s in a 1940s accent. I really like that guy.

Robinson

This is what Harvey Kaye says, and he actually faulted Bernie for pivoting to talking about Scandinavia. He said, don't talk about Scandinavia. We have this all-American tradition of social democracy and populism—of course, which is one of your specialties. Go back to the 1930s and '40s in our country, and we have Woody Guthrie and this patriotic social democracy kind of thing. 

Frank

And it had intellectuals, too. Nobody thinks of the '30s as a happy time, but there was amazing revolutionary work getting done then, politically, culturally, and intellectually.

Robinson 

You recently wrote this op-ed for the New York Times after the election. You've been writing about these things for 20 years, and you say, 

“I began to doubt that any combination of financial disaster or electoral chastisement will ever turn on the light bulb for liberals. I fear that '90s style centrism will march on.” 

And in this election, we saw a worsening of the tendencies that you describe, where it's even more rich people voting for Democrats and even more working-class people going into the Trump coalition. But of course, ultimately, Trump is a fraudster. You write about the history of populism, and left and right populism are not the same thing.

Frank

You asked three different things there. So first of all, about the idea that centrism is not really centrism at all but this sort of Clintonism that we were talking about at the beginning of the show, this philosophy that the Democrats developed through the '70s, '80s, and '90s, that absolutely and utterly controls the party now. And I said in the article—I think the Times cut this line out because, obviously, they have house style, and you're not allowed to say certain things. But I said this philosophy will go on because it makes too much pundit sense. It's too obviously true to the professional elite of our world, the people who control our world. It's too obviously true even though it's false. Even though it's completely wrong, it's too flattering to the kind of people who write columns in the New York Times, to the kind of people that are on MSNBC, the kind of people who run American universities, foundations, and Wall Street firms. It makes too much sense. They're like, yes, the learning class should be in charge. Yes, the intellectuals, the elites, or the people who have advanced degrees should be in charge. That's why they call it an advanced degree. That's why they call it Yale.

I don't fucking know. I'm just making stuff up here. But it makes too much sense to them for it to ever be derailed by electoral chastisement. I believe that. I don't know how you get them out of there. And then you asked about populism. You don't really want me to go down that road, do you?

Robinson

We are seeing this class realignment. You point out the neighborhood that you grew up in went from Republican to Democrat, and people who used to be Democrats and working class are now Republicans. Even Latinos in South Texas are starting to vote for Donald Trump in larger numbers. But it's not like we're going to see the Republicans embracing New Deal style, authentic populism.

Frank

Well, they talk about it, don't they? They make those noises.

Robinson

Right. But then Trump gets into office, and everyone's anti-labor.

Frank

And he cuts your taxes and puts the oil man in charge of the EPA, or whatever the hell it is. Nathan, we talked about how much fun it is to write and everything. You've sort of teased me because it's very frustrating that nobody listens. And this is one where I am just banging my head against a wall. I'm from Kansas. Populism means something there. It was a movement that we had in Kansas. It's a well-known thing. Even if people don't know the details, they know that it existed. They know what it was, roughly. It was a left-wing farmer labor movement a long time ago that swept over the state and then disappeared. Everybody knows those basic facts. When I was in graduate school, I decided it would be my subject. I would study it, and I did. I studied it for several years, and then I gave up on it because everybody was writing about populism back then.

This is in the '80s. Everybody was writing about populism. It just felt pointless to add another monograph on top of this already gigantic pile of essays and books about American populism, but it's always been the motif of my political writing. In addition to it being important because I come from Kansas, populism is also important because it's the beginning of the modern left in American life. This is literally where it starts, with the Populist Party. They're the first ones to actually start calling for a regulated economy, nationalization of things, votes for women, among other things. To basically formulate economic policy in the interests of ordinary people rather than in the interest of big business. That was unthinkable at the time. That was revolutionary. It was absolutely new, and it was shocking, and they were more or less beaten down.

But it was also the beginning, and it later grew and flowered into what we know as the New Deal and the Roosevelt administration. And this became what the Democratic Party was about, up to Lyndon Johnson. Johnson's grandfather, by the way, was an actual uppercase “P” Populist in the Texas Legislature. It's neither here nor there, but this is the backdrop of everything that I know about American politics. In What's the Matter with Kansas?, I was describing the people who were once the rank-and-file of populism being drawn over to the other side, and that it was being done with language that sounded populist.

So this is an important distinction. It feels like I've lost it here, but it's fake populism. So the Republicans use populist language all the time. You go back to Reagan. They did it with George W. Bush, and this is one of the reasons he annoyed me so much. They did it all the time, but they always did it in a cultural sense. You might remember George W. Bush with his pork rinds and touring the country with the country singers. This crap. And Reagan was very good at doing this act as well, but it's always an act. At some point, I lost control of this, and people just started calling it right-wing populism, and they started using the word populist as a synonym for racist, and then they started using the word populist as a synonym for fascist.

I fight this as hard as I can. I just got an email the other day. I have a lot of readers in Europe, weirdly enough. Like I said, I write for a French newspaper, and I do book tours over there all the time. My latest book is about populism, about the actual history of populism, and how the word came to mean these things that are the exact opposite of what it was—which I think is important, by the way, in a really awful way. So I wrote a whole book about this, and it just drives them crazy. Example: I was reading an article in The Guardian the other day. I used to write for The Guardian. Good paper. I was reading an article—I'm sorry, you have a bad history with them, but we won't go into that. 

So I'm reading an article about Trump's victory, and it's a very good article, and at the very end of it, it says, this is what it looks like when he parks his populist tanks on your lawn. And I'm like, why do that? Why wreck an otherwise good article? And why trash a good word? Why trash a word that's at the heart and soul of the American left? Why do that? Anyhow, it just bugs the hell out of me. There are consequences for it, and the consequences are what we see around us. When you say that populism is actually fascism and racism, you have made this whole species of politics off limits to yourself. And it's a species of politics, frankly, that we have to have if we're ever going to get out of this. 

Robinson

And you've almost validated Trump's own claim to what he is. He says he's a man of the people, and you say Trump is running as a man of the people. And you're like, no.

Frank

You see, these are interlocking pathologies. So Richard Hofstadter, famous American historian who—let the record show—when I was younger, I really admired. He's a great writer, and he's a brilliant thinker, but he was wrong. And by the way, this is not just me. A lot of other American historians have gone down this road.

For example, Christopher Lasch, who was his protégé and loved him, and then later started writing about populism himself. And what everybody comes to realize is that Hofstadter was wrong about populism. His interpretation of it was a caricature, and it was a stereotype. He had his examples, but they were cherry-picked. This is something we have a lot of experience with. His examples were cherry-picked, and his depiction of populism was completely incorrect, and historians basically figured this out right away after his book came out, but they've never been able to stop it—again, it's an idea that can't be stopped by its own errors. This is now the second time we've talked about this.

The reason his anti-populism works is it's so flattering. His idea of, how do you get reform? So he's writing in the 1950s and coming out of this background, and the New Deal is basically over. We're in the Eisenhower era, and the great universities are coming up. They're expanding by leaps and bounds, and you have this whole new class of highly educated people being put in charge of everything. Daniel Bell also writes about this. All of these guys, intellectuals in the '50s, wrote about this. So how do you make reform? Well, according to Bell and Hofstadter and the rest of the sort of consensus gang, the way you make reform is you get a bunch of these guys around a table in Washington, D.C., and you decide on the reform. That's the professional model of reform. And that's where the Democratic Party is today. That's what they believe in.

But what Hofstadter wanted to make toxic and make off-limits so that we would never try to do it again was the opposite model, the populist model, where reform comes from the bottom up. That's what populism was. It was a mass movement of ordinary people, where the idea was, we have to educate everyone so that they understand the issues because it's a democracy, and we all have to participate. That was the populist model, and initiative and referendum came out of that and all these other things. Once you tell yourself that's actually racism—when you put that off-limits to yourself, you've made a colossal mistake. You made a colossal choice, let's put it that way. You've made a choice. It's a bad choice, but that's the choice that we have made. And all of these debates about populism are not idle, and they're not just about history. They're not just about something 100 years ago. They're about how to go forward. You shouldn't have asked me that, Nathan.

Robinson

Let's close with the how to move forward thing. You have a passage in your New York Times op-ed where you say, “can anything reverse it?” 

And you say, “only a resolute determination by the Democratic Party to rededicate itself to the majoritarian vision of old, a great society of broad, inclusive prosperity. That means universal health care, higher minimum wage, robust financial regulation, antitrust enforcement, unions, welfare state, higher taxes on billionaires, even the cool ones. And it means, above all, liberalism as a social movement, as a coming together of ordinary people,” not, as you've just said, a series of top-down reforms by well-meaning professionals.

Frank

Well, there you got it. That's it. The thing is, how to get there? And I don't spell that out because I don't know the way.

Robinson

Within the party, outside the party.

Frank

Just so you know, the first draft of this essay that I wrote basically said that it's impossible. I was in kind of a funk. It's impossible, and we'll never get there and see you later. And then I took a step back, and I was like, you can't say that. You can't go into the pages of the New York Times and say something like that. So I had to put some kind of sunshiny ending on it. The thing is, how to get there? And I don't know. I do know that it's been done before.

Okay, let's look at these people in Listen, Liberal: “New Democrats,” the neoliberals before them. They did it. They conquered the party. The party is a site of contestation, as we were saying earlier. This is one of the reasons they always stave off the contest. They always manage to suppress the contest or to rig it in some way. You look at what happened to Bernie Sanders in 2020 or in 2016. With an open convention, no thanks.

But parties are contested, and it has been done in our lifetimes. There has been a group that took over the Democratic Party and remade it in their own image. Now they've clung very tightly to the levers of power ever since, and nobody has a plan for how to get them out of there. But that doesn't mean you couldn't dream one up. You could do it.

The other way is economic catastrophe in the manner of the New Deal. Nobody knew what Franklin Roosevelt was going to do. They just knew that he was the man of the moment, and he was able to completely remake the world as he saw fit. Now, the problem with this theory is we had that chance. That was 2008. That actually happened. And we did that, and we elected a man. If you're anything like I was, drinking the hope Kool-Aid back then—I went for Obama in a big way. I thought he was the man for the moment. I thought he was our generation's Franklin Roosevelt. I was completely wrong. And instead, he proceeded to enshrine this sort of neoliberal agenda.

Robinson

I think you have a funny part about Obama in the piece, don't you?

“I have with Silicon Valley, with venture capital, pull together my interest in science and organizations in a way I really find satisfying. Can you comment?” I hope Mr. Obama finds his silicon satisfaction. I hope the men of capital whose banks he bailed out during the financial crisis show with little gratitude and build him the biggest, most expensive, most innovative potential library of them all. But his party is in ruins today, without a leader and without a purpose.”

Frank

I go back to that quote because he's so blind to what's right around the corner in 2016 and what's happened ever since then.

Robinson

It's like when you watch him at the Correspondents' Dinner making fun of Trump, where he's like, oh, silly Donald Trump.

Frank

I know. So I look at that, and I always thought that was fair game because Trump was kind of a jerk. He was spreading all the stuff. It's also pretty goddamn harsh to have the president of the United States come out mock you for a half an hour. 

Robinson 

But I think it looks different because they didn't understand that Trump was a threat. I don't think he shouldn't have made fun of Donald Trump. But you watch those moments, and you realize, you think this guy's a clown, and you don't understand he is coming for you, he is going to destroy your—

Frank  

Trump is an opportunist. This is what these guys didn't understand. He's a businessman. He's an opportunist. He will say or do anything. And what did he choose to say? Think about this for a second. Trump may be stupid, but he's no dummy. 

Robinson 

That's a good distinction.

Frank

I was at his 2016 convention, and he was rattling off all kinds of old-timey democratic—one of the quotes that we didn't use in the Times article is his TV commercial from 2016 where he basically steals a passage from Bernie. It sounds like a Bernie Sanders commercial. And then JD Vance is the one who's doing this now. But look, as long as the Democrats aren't going to stand up for these people, and the Democrats are saying we have to leave the New Deal behind us—a guy who's an opportunist, a charlatan, who will say or do anything, what's he going to do? Just think about that. What's he going to do? He's going to take that rhetoric that you've discarded, this rhetoric that was incredibly powerful in its day, and he will use it against you. He would be foolish to do it any other way.

Robinson

Yes, I don't know if he will do no taxes on tips, for instance, but I thought it was a master stroke to say to his voters every time you get a receipt at a restaurant, he told them, write “no taxes on tips, Trump 2024” on the receipt at the restaurant. I thought that was brilliant.

Frank

That was a play for Nevada, is what that was. In Nevada, the culinary union is—

Robinson

It's interesting that you mentioned the 2016 because I went back and read his RNC speech. 

Frank

Yes, And do you remember this? He called for bringing back Glass–Steagall. 

Robinson

Everyone should read it. I've got it here.

“Big business, elite media, major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged system in place. I have visited the laid off factory workers, the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals. Every day I wake up determined to deliver for the people I've met across this nation that have been neglected, ignored, and abandoned. They're the forgotten men and women of this country, people who were no longer have a voice. I am your voice.”

Frank

That's straight out of Roosevelt. I thought that was incredibly powerful when he said that.

Robinson  

I do recommend that everyone now go and read your op-ed in the New York Times and then everything else you've written for the last 20 years. They'll find some themes that you repeat fairly frequently. It's not your fault that you have to repeat yourself.

Frank

Twenty years of the same essay with slightly different names and places.

Robinson

I don't know if the liberals will listen now, but we don't need the liberals to listen now, as long as the people—

Frank 

What's funny is that it caused a big stir. I haven't had anything with this kind of impact in a long time.

 

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.