Thomas Frank--widely admired by Kossacks near and far, and author of the bestseller, What's the Matter with Kansas?--has really let loose today, over at The Guardian. It’s a scathing take-down of the Democratic Party’s status quo (much like his latest book, Listen, Liberal), and this Bernie supporter agrees with Frank’s sentiments 100%. Read his entire column if you dare (click on the headline, immediately below). Here’s the opening excerpt…
Convinced that the country’s ongoing demographic shifts
will bring victory for years to come, the party establishment
acts like its candidates need do nothing differently
The year of our discontent rolls on, and now it is Indiana that hands victory to the insurgent senator Bernie Sanders and the protectionist demagogue Donald Trump.
Seven years have passed now since the last recession officially ended, and yet the country’s fury has scarcely cooled. To this day we remain angry at Wall Street; we rage against career politicians; and we are incandescent that the economic system seems to have been permanently “rigged” against working people. Median household income has still not recovered the levels of 2007. Wages are going nowhere. Elite bankers are probably never going to be held accountable for what they did. America is burning.
Listening to the leading figures of the Democratic party establishment, however, you’d never know it. Cool contentment is the governing emotion in these circles. What they have in mind for 2016 is what we might call a campaign of militant complacency. They are dissociated from the mood of the nation, and they do not care.
I mean this in ways both great and small. The party’s leadership is largely drawn from a satisfied cohort that has done quite well in the aftermath of the Great Recession. They’ve got a good thing going. Convinced that the country’s ongoing demographic shifts will bring Democratic victory for years to come, they seem to believe the party’s candidates need do nothing differently to harvest future electoral bumper crops. The seeds are already planted. All that is required is patience...
In his conclusion, Frank refers to Trump as “...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.”
The author explains, “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.”
Frank’s cup of Democratic disdain runneths over in the closing sentence of his commentary in Wednesday’s Guardian…
That they [the Democratic status quo] 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.
Again, you may check out Thomas Frank’s full Guardian post by clicking RIGHT HERE.
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