I could've posted several videos in the past couple of weeks, all saying the same thing, of course (which is an indication that I'm probably also one of those people who consume news that agrees with their opinions), but I must say I've really enjoyed this
series of interviews with Thomas Frank on the Real News Network, done by Paul Jay, who is a really good interviewer, I think.
Here's the last video of six, the last part of which is really good, I think (text posted below video), because it's a summary of what this entire thread is about:
! No longer availablePAUL JAY: But let me just end up by getting us back to the moment we're in. How dangerous do you think the moment we are in is? What do you think people should do about it?
THOMAS FRANK: I thought it was, on election night and a few weeks after that, I was very afraid. I have a family. I'm, obviously, deeply concerned for the future of this country. I love this country. I was very worried about Donald Trump becoming president. You know what's made me feel relieved? Is to learn how incompetent he really is. This guy, he's got a Republican Congress. He still can't get anything done. That's a huge, enormous relief for me.
PAUL JAY: For now.
THOMAS FRANK: For now. Right. No, there's still... He could screw up foreign policy so easily because the president has so much...
PAUL JAY: As I said earlier, Pence is in the wings.
THOMAS FRANK: Look, like I said, the next Trump is going to be much worse than this Trump. The next one, what Trump proved again, is how to beat the Democratic Party. Until the day the Democratic Party takes a long cold look in the mirror, and understands where they have gone wrong, and by the way, I'm ready. The minute they want to have me come and talk to them about it, I'm ready to do it.
PAUL JAY: But as you said, they got a vested interest in ...
THOMAS FRANK: Yeah, they're not interested in that.
PAUL JAY: They got a vested interest in not seeing that.
THOMAS FRANK: In never seeing that, exactly. In never taking that long look in the mirror. But the day they do, they will start to understand what they have done, and they will also start to understand how to defeat these guys. This is a long... Remember now, if you take one thing away from this, this is a long process. This is not Trump. This goes back to Nixon. This goes back to Reagan. This goes back to Wallace.
PAUL JAY: It goes back to financialization of the whole economy.
THOMAS FRANK: Yes, it does. I mean, the strategy that Trump used: the fake populism that Trump used. This is deep in the... this is a strategy invented years ago. And by the way, the string that the Democrats are playing out also goes back to that same period in the late '60s and early '70s when they decided they weren't going to be a party of working class people anymore, and they weren't going to be interested in the New Deal anymore. They were going to be a very different party. A party of the information economy, the postIndustrial economy. They made an incredible blunder at that time and they've never looked back. They've never questioned that blunder, and until the day they do.
PAUL JAY: When I say how dangerous a moment, it's only partially about Trump. When you add climate change into the equation ...
THOMAS FRANK: Yes. And our inability to act.
PAUL JAY: There's kind of no time for the normal long-term process.
THOMAS FRANK: If you really want to end on a depressing note, Paul, just a short time ago, I for one, felt like we had the answers within our grasp. Barack Obama, 2008. Here he comes. These enormous crowds. He's so smart. I had met him. I lived in Hyde Park, his neighborhood in Chicago. He was my state senator. I admired that man. I wanted him to be great. I thought he was going to be great. I looked at him and I thought, I saw Franklin Roosevelt. I thought this is the Franklin Roosevelt for our time. Here comes the right man at the right moment with the right ideas, and it didn't happen.
He had the power and he had the people behind him. He had the world behind him and it didn't happen. That is, I think that is in a way far more depressing than Donald Trump. That we had the man, and we had the energy and we had the ideas, and it... I don't want to say we blew it because I don't feel like we did. But yeah, our side blew it.
PAUL JAY: Maybe the thing that hopefully won't be so depressing, and 2020 I think is going to be the most decisive election in the history of the country. If the broad majority of people who had that feeling about Obama learn the lesson, and learned "Listen Liberal", learned the lesson, because maybe then that can be a turning point.
THOMAS FRANK: But we're all, of course we're all...
PAUL JAY: If people drink the Kool-Aid again...
THOMAS FRANK: We're all prisoners of, I mean now we're in the aftermath of that sort of golden moment of 2008, 2009, and we're prisoners of our hope that we had for Barack Obama, and we don't want to let that go. Other people have watched their way of life slip away. Everything has gotten worse. Inequality is out of control. Other people have gone for Trump. Trump is like this sort of Obama through the looking glass, promising a sort of curdled hope, a kind of resentment and outrage, but appealing to a lot of the same people, a lot of the same emotions. We're in the backwash of hope now. It's going to take, it's going to take something, an extraordinary effort to pull that off again. I don't know if the world will go along with that.
I mean, you can have heroic individuals here and there, Bernie Sanders, but Barack Obama, you had the heroic individual, but you also had history cooperating in a financial crisis that gave him that moment of possibility, and that's not going to happen again. Or it might happen again, and instead put the power in the hands of a completely different kind of individual. I'm sorry, I should never end on a note like this, but I think to be realistic about where we are, you have to look this thing in the face.
PAUL JAY: You got to.
THOMAS FRANK: That's what happened to us.
PAUL JAY: Because you can't, we can't keep living our lives as if it's all normal. You can't keep doing business as if it's all normal. We ain't in a normal moment of history. There were moments like this before but never so existential.
THOMAS FRANK: There's another problem, is that we can't be critical. Democrats love to imagine that they're the party of intellect, and the party of discernment and learning, and that they can see through, they can pierce the veil and they can see through the phoniness. But we have tremendous problems turning our scrutiny on the Obama period and on what happened. That's what I tried to do in "Listen Liberal." I invite your viewers to read it. It's a first step in a process that has to happen.
PAUL JAY: Well I hope you'll be back. We'll do the '90s. We'll do the Obama years.
THOMAS FRANK: I'd love to. Don't forget George W. Bush and the wrecking crew.
PAUL JAY: All right. Thanks for joining us.
THOMAS FRANK: You got it man. Any time.