Thomas Frank: Amerikanische Kultur For Germans

"The world is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to those that feel."

Horace Walpole


"It shall be so.
Madness in great ones must not unwatched go."

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, Sc. 1

We in the US must certainly present a puzzle to the German mind.   Although there is a growing body of puzzling evidence in the developed nations of the West. We have cast off the moorings of tradition, and set sail into the vast uncharted but terrifyingly familiar seas once again.

Madness has both a simplicity and an intricacy, interwoven into a fabric that is both opaque and yet revealing.

Thomas Frank Explains the American Political Landscape To an Australian Gathering

Here is a fairly short, 25 minute overview of the American political landscape that Thomas Frank delivers in The Shaw Address in Australia.

He urges them not to go down a similar path in 'this low, dishonest age.'

Thomas Frank: The Catechism of Tech, Bank, and Globe, Which Is Nothing But an Excuse For an Out-of-Touch Elite

"Back in 1941, Franklin Roosevelt set down his understanding of American political history, in which there were two schools of political belief.

'The liberal party believed in the wisdom and efficacy of the will of the great majority of the people, as distinguished from the judgement of a small minority of either education or wealth.'

What Roosevelt could not foresee was a party system in which the divide fell not between the few and the many, but between the small minority of education and the small minority of wealth. Enlightened technocrats on one side, and resentful billionaires on the other. Get that great majority back together, and they would be unstoppable."

Thomas Frank

In order to change and regain their party's historical mandate, the Democrats have to abandon their patterns of behaviour adopted and set down in the 1990's.

They may have to get rid of their consultants, and most importantly their methods of fund raising almost exclusively among the professional moneyed class with which they closely identify.

And above all, they must take Hillary Clinton and her class of big money politicians aside, and bid them good luck and goodbye.

They must embrace genuine change,  instead of attempting to imitate reform by continually softening their image with professionally applied makeup, and a cynically thin veneer of identity politics and tribalism.

This is how they have managed to avoid discussing this vast inequality of ours, and addressing, with practical solutions rather reframing the questions with diversionary rhetoric, the slow demise of the long ignored working poor and middle class, which is their traditional base, and their party majority.

How the Clinton-Obama Complex Gave Us Trump, And a New Thomas Frank Book Rendezvous With Oblivion

"Over the last month I have tried to describe conservative power in Washington, but with a small change of emphasis I could just as well have been describing the failure of liberalism: the center-left’s inability to comprehend the current political situation or to draw upon what is most vital in its own history.

What we have watched unfold for a few decades, I have argued, is a broad reversion to 19th-century political form, with free-market economics understood as the state of nature, plutocracy as the default social condition, and, enthroned as the nation’s necessary vice, an institutionalized corruption surpassing anything we have seen for 80 years...

When you view the world from the satisfied environs of Washington — a place where lawyers outnumber machinists 27 to 1 and where five suburban counties rank among the seven wealthiest in the nation — the fantasies of postindustrial liberalism make perfect sense. The reign of the 'knowledge workers' seems noble.

Seen from almost anywhere else, however, these are lousy times. The latest data confirms that as the productivity of workers has increased, the ones reaping the benefits are stockholders. Census data tells us that the only reason family income is keeping up with inflation is that more family members are working.

Everything I have written about in this space points to the same conclusion: Democratic leaders must learn to talk about class issues again. But they won’t on their own. So pressure must come from traditional liberal constituencies and the grass roots, like the much-vilified bloggers...

The more comfortable option for Democrats is to maintain their present course, gaming out each election with political science and a little triangulation magic, their relevance slowly ebbing as memories of the middle-class republic fade."

Thomas Frank, Rendezvous With Oblivion, NYT 2006

This guest opinion piece from Thomas Frank in 2006 seems particularly prescient in retrospect today.  It provided the name for a newly published collection of his essays.

This first video interview below is also reprise, but it is so insightful, so spot on, that I thought it would be useful to bring it back now ahead of the fall elections.  It is from that great series of interviews on Reality Asserts Itself.

How soon we forget, with all the distractions and dog and pony shows served up.

Not that the corporate wing of the Democratic Party will listen to reason. The pay is too good, and they will fight to retain their privileges until the bitter end.

They may begin to fake listening to their own broad base, not just the millionaires, more aggressively.  They are good at faking concern and feeling your pain while doing very little.

Change will come only as the Progressives turn the party over on its head from the bottom up, at the primary ballot box and the elections.

Obama was a well polished and timid sell-out, from his first 100 days.  But Bill and Hillary were  venal carnies from the first.    I never voted for either of them.  But I have family in Arkansas, and their nature was well established back then.

And may have been proto-fascists too, if you remember the two highest profile law enforcement actions of the Clinton administration: Waco and Ruby Ridge.

Obama was not much better if one recalls the brutal way in which dissent was suppressed under him, with the historic use of Espionage Act, and the coordinated crushing of Occupy movement and just about anyone else who stood against him.   Like so many verbally acute figures he was given over to paranoid overreach when words failed.

So whenever a hard core Democrat tells me how awful the Trump voters are, and there are some pretty ugly actors in that crowd, and how tragic it is that they failed the country at the polls, I want them to remember this video.

Make no mistake, Trump is embarrassing, and anyone with a view to history can see the damage he is doing with his dilettante, con man's approach to policy.   I forecast that in their anger and frustration people would grab the wrong solution from the shelf, and here it is.

But all things considered, we can thank the arrogant willfulness of Hillary and her corporate stooges for it.   The rise of a demagogue almost always owes something to the long term failure of the governing elite to stand up to the predations and depredations of the rich and the heartless.   And alas, the GOP sold their souls to the moneyed interests long ago, and are beyond redemption.

Thomas Frank has published a new collection of previously published essays titled Rendezvous With Oblivion.  The title comes from a column he wrote for the New York Times in 2006.

A video interview of this new book is included below in the second video.  The interview is an update on the state of US politics, and the Democratic Party in particular. The book is a thematic collection of previously published columns.

I think he could have done a bit more with the material in terms of updating and showing how what he has previously said, and foretold, is unfolding.

The Democratic establishment and highly placed party functionaries do not want to change—   they are dedicated to their own personal power and control, and all about getting paid off first and foremost. 

And their greed is killing us.





Thomas Frank discusses his new book, Rendezvous With Oblivion.




And for good measure, here is a specific discussion of the details of the election blunders and fatal complacency fueled by arrogance and disdain for the common people.