The People, No: <\/strong><\/em>A Brief History of Anti-Populism<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Thomas Frank is one of America\u2019s more skillful writers, an expert practitioner of a genre one might call historical journalism \u2013 ironic, because no recent media figure has been more negatively affected by historical change. Frank became a star during a time of intense curiosity about the reasons behind our worsening culture war, and now publishes a terrific book, The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism, <\/em>at a time when people are mostly done thinking about what divides us, gearing up to fight instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Frank published What\u2019s the Matter with Kansas? <\/em>in 2004, at the height of the George W. Bush presidency. The Iraq War was already looking like a disaster, but the Democratic Party was helpless to take advantage, a fact the opinion-shaping class on the coasts found puzzling. Blue-staters felt sure they\u2019d conquered the electoral failure problem in the nineties, when a combination of Bill Clinton\u2019s Arkansas twang, policy pandering (a middle-class tax cut!) and a heavy dose of unsubtle race politics (e.g. ending welfare \u201cas we know it<\/a>\u201d) appeared to cut the heart out of the Republican \u201cSouthern strategy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet Clinton\u2019s chosen successor Al Gore flopped, the party\u2019s latest Kennedy wannabe, John Kerry, did worse, and by the mid-2000s, Bushian conservatism was culturally ascendant, despite obvious failures. Every gathering of self-described liberals back then devolved into the same sad-faced anthropological speculation about Republicans: \u201cWhy do they vote against their own interests?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Frank, a Midwesterner and one of the last exemplars of a media tradition that saw staying in touch with the thinking of the general population as a virtue, was not puzzled. What\u2019s the Matter with Kansas? <\/em>was framed as an effort to answer that liberal cocktail-party conundrum \u2013 \u201cHow could anyone who\u2019s ever worked for someone vote Republican?\u201d was the version Frank described hearing \u2013 and the answer, at least on the surface, was appealing to coastal intellectuals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Frank explained the Republican voter had thrown support to the Republicans\u2019 pro-corporate economic message in exchange for solidarity on cultural issues, as part of what he called the \u201cGreat Backlash\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n While earlier forms of conservatism emphasized fiscal sobriety, the backlash mobilizes voters with explosive social issues\u2014summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art\u2014which it then marries to pro-business economic policies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n What\u2019s the Matter with Kansas?<\/em> was about more than that, but for the chattering classes, this thesis was enough. What they heard was that the electorally self-harming white Republican voter from poor regions like the High Plains was motivated not by reason, but by racial animus and Christian superstition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For a certain kind of blue-state media consumer, and especially for Democratic Party politicians, this was a huge relief, the political version of Sean\u2019s hug-it-out message to Will Hunting:<\/p>\n\n\n\n A reader looking back at that book will note Frank also predicted political disasters that would later befall Democrats, and outlined the thesis of his current book The People, No, <\/em>which will probably suffer financially for being pretty much the opposite of \u201cAll this shit, it\u2019s not your fault.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Kansas <\/em>title alone spoke to one of Frank\u2019s central observations: while red state voters might frame objections in terms of issues like abortion or busing, in a broader sense the Republican voter is recoiling from urban liberal condescension.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That Democrats needed Thomas Frank to tell them what conservatives fifteen miles outside the cities were thinking was damning in itself. Even worse was the basically unbroken string of insults emanating from pop culture (including from magazines like Rolling Stone: <\/em>I was very guilty of this) describing life between the cities as a prole horror peopled by obese, Bible-thumping dolts who couldn\u2019t navigate a Thai menu and polished gun lockers instead of reading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Republicans may have controlled government at the time, but when they turned on TV sets or looked up at movie screens, their voters felt accused of something just for living in little towns, raising kids, and visiting church on Sundays. What\u2019s the matter<\/em>, they were asking, with that<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Frank and basically anyone who\u2019d been to an antiwar meeting knew, actual liberals in the Bush era were \u201can assortment of complainers \u2013 for the most part impoverished complainers \u2013 who wield about as much influence over American politics as the cashier at Home Depot.\u201d In those circles, the union member was still revered, and the villain in small towns was a GM or Cargill executive, whose assaults on factory workers and family farmers of all races were central to the story of America\u2019s decline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Still, by the Bush years something had gone terribly wrong, in liberalism\u2019s effort to reach small-town America:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Liberalism may not be the monstrous, all-powerful conspiracy that conservatives make it out to be, but its failings are clear nonetheless. Somewhere in the last four decades liberalism ceased to be relevant to huge portions of its traditional constituency, and we can say that liberalism lost places like Shawnee and Wichita with as much accuracy as we can point out that conservatism won them over.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Frank ripped the political strategy of Clinton Democrats, who removed economic issues from their platform as they commenced accepting gobs of Wall Street money in a post-Mondale effort to compete with Republicans on fundraising. Gambling that working-class voters would keep voting blue because \u201cDemocrats will always be marginally better on economic issues,\u201d New Democrats stopped targeting blue-collar voters and switched rhetorical emphasis to \u201caffluent, white collar professionals who are liberal on social issues.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The move seemed smart. This was the go-go eighties, we were all Material Girls (for whom the boy with the cold hard cash was always <\/em>Mr. Right), and as Frank put it, \u201cWhat politician in this success-loving country really wants to be the voice of poor people?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n While Clinton Democrats were perfecting a new image of urban cool, opponents were honing a new approach:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Republicans, meanwhile, were industriously fabricating their own class-based language of the right, and while they made their populist appeal to blue-collar voters, Democrats were giving those same voters\u2014their traditional base\u2014the big brush-off\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The news media and Hollywood shifted accordingly. Working-class voices disappeared from the press and earnest movies like Norma Rae <\/em>and The China Syndrome<\/em> gave way to a new brand of upper-class messaging that reveled in imperious sneering and weird culture-war provocations:<\/p>\n\n\n\n In an America where the chief sources of one\u2019s ideas about life\u2019s possibilities are TV and the movies, it\u2019s not hard to be convinced that we inhabit a liberal-dominated world: feminist cartoons for ten-year-olds are followed by commercials for nonconformist deodorants; entire families of movies are organized around some transcendent dick joke\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n In Frank\u2019s home state of Kansas, voters reacted by moving right as the triumvirate of news media, pop culture, and Democratic politics spoke to them less and less. \u201cThe state,\u201d he wrote, \u201cwatches impotently as its culture, beamed in from the coasts, becomes coarser and more offensive by the year.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perceiving correctly that there would be no natural brake on this phenomenon, since the executive set was able to pay itself more and more as the country grew more divided, Frank wondered, \u201cWhy shouldn\u2019t our culture just get worse and worse, if making it worse will only cause the people who worsen it to grow wealthier and wealthier?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n We have the answer to that now, don\u2019t we?<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I was first sent out to cover the Donald Trump campaign years later, I assumed the editorial concept would be simple: mockery. New York\u2019s infamous \u201cshort-fingered vulgarian<\/a>\u201d had taken over national headlines in the summer of 2015 with a foul-mouthed stream-of-consciousness rap, organized around an impossible Pharaonic wall project and scare tales about rape-happy Mexicans \u2013 the Diceman doing Pat Buchanan. If this<\/em> was taking over the Republican Party, there wasn\u2019t much to report. The enterprise was doomed, and journalism\u2019s only mission was to make sure the silliest bits were captured before being buried under the sands of history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Twenty minutes into my first Trump campaign event, I knew this was wrong, and was seized by a sinking feeling that really hasn\u2019t left since. Trump in person sounded like he\u2019d been convinced to run for president after reading What\u2019s the Matter with Kansas? <\/em>His stump act seemed tailored to take advantage of the gigantic market opportunity Democrats had created, and which Frank described. He ranted about immigrants, women, the disabled, and other groups, sure, but also about NAFTA, NATO, the TPP, big Pharma, military contracting, and a long list of other issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2016, it was clear only a few people in the lefty media world understood what Trump was up to, and why he was a real threat to win. Michael Moore was one, and Frank was another. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a coincidence both were Midwesterners. Frank released his next book, Listen, Liberal<\/a>, <\/em>in May of 2016, just as Trump was seizing the nomination. It began with the following observation:<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the summer of 2014, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average hitting all-time highs, a poll showed that nearly three-quarters of the American public thought the economy was still in recession\u2014because for them, it was.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n He noted that workers\u2019 share of GDP hit the lowest levels in American history in 2011 and stayed there, as inequities stemming from the Obama \u201crecovery\u201d became a \u201cquasi-permanent development.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most of the press lived in a different America, though, and saw Frank\u2019s warning as annoying, repetitive whining. Cocky reviewers at places like the New York Times <\/em>bemoaned<\/a> the book\u2019s \u201cpessimistic note\u201d and berated him for seeing the \u201cuneven recovery\u201d of the Obama years as \u201ca tragedy rather than a triumph.\u201d Listen<\/em> to what? Hadn\u2019t he read the latest polls? Didn\u2019t he know the rout was on?<\/p>\n\n\n\n (It should be noted that new Times <\/em>reviews of books this week by Robert Reich and Zephyr Teachout, under the familiar headline, \u201cWhy the Working Class Votes Against Its Economic Interests<\/a>,\u201d are similarly snooty in telling both to \u201ctemper their anti-corporate zeal\u201d in this election year. Very little learning takes place at these institutions).<\/p>\n\n\n\n After Trump\u2019s election in November 2016, the first instinct of everyone wandering amid the smoldering wreckage of Democratic Party politics should have been to look in all directions for anyone with an explanation for what the hell just happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course the opposite took place. Frank seemed to be put into deep-freeze after Listen, Liberal, <\/em>largely I think because he was telling a truth no one wanted to hear about the difference between the way the New York Times <\/em>saw America, and how, say, Iowans or Nebraskans saw it. Trump meanwhile constructed his argument for the presidency atop that difference, and is still doing it today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Also: the word, \u201cpopulism,\u201d became a synonym for plague <\/em>or menace<\/em>. Post-Trump and post-Brexit, pundits tended to use the term in tandem with other epithets, e.g. the \u201cpopulist threat<\/a>.\u201d For Frank, a liberal intellectual whose breathless admiration for the actual Populist movement of the 1890s had been a running theme across two decades, this must have stung.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He responded by plunging into a history of Populism that probably began as quaint nostalgia but quickly turned into something else: a portrait of anti-Populism. The People, No <\/em>documents the furious elite propaganda response to bottom-up political movements that has recurred in uncannily similar fashion at key moments across nearly a century and a half of American history, and is firing with particular venom today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Populists were a third-party movement that popped into view in the late 1800s in response to the excesses of monopoly capitalism. It centered around regulation of railroads, currency reform, federal loans to farmers, and other issues. In a development that particularly frightened the very wealthy at the time, it sought and secured alliances with Black farmers. Proving the concept of breaking the political and economic monopoly of New York elites with sheer voter energy was almost more important than the individual issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A sort-of populist, William Jennings Bryan, became the Democratic nominee in 1896, only to be slaughtered by a mediocrity named William McKinley. The Republican was backed by mountains of corporate money and the dirty-pool genius of his campaign \u201cgeneralissimo,\u201d Mark Hanna (whose media-dominating, cash-gobbling wizardry in suppressing voter preference ironically made him the hero of Karl \u201cTurd Blossom\u201d Rove<\/a>). Mountains of propaganda depicted populists as diseased demons, unshaven slayers of American virtue:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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