The Elites Keep Losing: Thomas Frank on the Election

The same delusion keeps crushing the Democratic Party—with no end in sight.

Nov 09, 2024

On Thursday, author Thomas Frank and I riffed* on the implications of this election. Tom's books on professional/managerial liberalism ("Listen Liberal") and anti-populism ("The People, No") are good background material for this conversation. I also encourage you to read his op-ed in the New York Times, headlined “The Elites Had It Coming.”

As Tom writes, “A party of the left that identifies with people like (Dick) Cheney is a contradiction in terms, a walking corpse.”

Below are some excerpts from the conversation, lightly edited for clarity. This was our second conversation of the day because the first one failed to record, which explains the slightly disordered start to the conversation.

*"Riffing" in this case, means getting excited and interrupting each other a lot.

RICHARD:

I've been thinking for many years, and more so since this election, about the communication breakdown [in] the Democratic Party... There’s the communication breakdown between the Democratic Party and its traditional base in the working class. There’s the breakdown between the Democratic Party and other segments of the political left.

And then there’s the fact that the Democratic Party reacted to the media bubble of Fox News, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, by creating its own bubble. Now there’s a dual-track, stereo media system. There's Democratic Party media, there’s right-wing media, and the rest of it is not important enough or profitable enough …

By challenging the Democratic Party as often as you have you, unlike me, have shown true heroism because you—

TOM:

Well, that's nice of you, but you also—

RICHARD:

—you actually had something to lose.

TOM:

I was at the Republican convention. I was on the floor. I was within 20 yards of Trump when he gave his hour and a half long harangue, you know. And it was tough, exhausting.

RICHARD:

I can imagine.

But Trump in 2016 was something. I don't mean to diminish all the horrible things he's done and said, but there was something, I thought,something magnetic and hypnotic—starting with the fact that he was constantly breaking the proscenium, as they say in the theater, not observing the conventions of political speech …

TOM:

What it's devolved to is, he's not that interesting. He rambles, he ad libs constantly ... The convention was, of course, four days long and it was all about him, not about principles or the Republican Party ...

I was on the floor, in this crush of humanity. You couldn't move. And I would turn around every now and then and the rest of the audience was just like, their eyes had glazed over, they were so bored.

But you could see—you couldn't see this at home watching on TV—but you could see the prepared text because he was reading from. It wasn’t a teleprompter. There was a giant screen at the back of the hall so he can see it from where he's standing.

And you can see when he's ad-libbing, right? Because it stops and he's, he's just making stuff up. You know, he's just like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He's just telling these stories all the time.

RICHARD:

That (could provide) a great insight into somebody's mind: to transcribe that and have a parallel transcription of what was written versus what was said.

TOM:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's actually really, really interesting.

At the Democratic Convention it was harder to get on the floor because it was much more crowded ... but if you sat in the right place, you could see the prepared script. And they were very careful. Everything was scripted. It was timed. They had to be under five minutes or whatever. And they were.

It was like almost military precision: bringing people out, letting everybody have their say.

RICHARD:

Everybody but the Palestinian woman who was supposed to speak.

TOM:

In Chicago you get on the L train, you know, in the Loop or whatever, and it takes you out to the United Center or to the nearest stop, and about half the people on the train have their convention badges. They’re delegates or journalists. The other half are the Gaza protesters. They've got their signs and they're ready to go. But everybody's being polite.

Then they get off the train and the protesters go to one side of the street and the delegates go to the other.

TOM:

[Trump’s speeches] were boring but, as we now know, they were also effective.

RICHARD:

… For all his divisive rhetoric, the people who really love him feel like they belong to something bigger than themselves.

TOM:

Yes. I believe there's a name for that. It's called a social movement. He's not a populist, but it is a social movement.

And Vance is fascinating. When Trump chose him, I went and got Hillbilly Elegy, his book from 2016. I also watched the movie. I read the book, and I watched the movie and … they're not good.

The book is well written and everything, but it's poverty porn. It's endless stories of white-working class dysfunction and there is no resolution to it. It's just like, Look at these people. Oh my God. And then look at what they did. And then look at what they did. And then, oh my God, look at what they did then.

It’s just one anecdote after another, on and on and on.

And he is personally, and this is the movie is more, more so about this, he’s personally rescued from this horrifying world by Yale Law School. And this is, of course, this is from 2016.

And when I read it, I was saying to myself, This is, this is Obamaism. That’s what this is: rescued by higher education, rescued by an advanced degree from an Ivy League school. And that's the answer for [them]. The answer for them is Yale Law School ....

RICHARD:

… For many years now I've been doing this mental exercise when people (e.g., liberals) talk about rural white people, so-called “rednecks.” I imagine, for example, them talking that way about Black people. There’s an X-Files episode, which thankfully they no longer show, about a redneck family where all the sons are having sex with the mother and producing increasingly freakish children. Or—

TOM:

What?!? Is that—really? That's—

RICHARD:

Yes. Imagine if a Black person had written Hillbilly Elegy about their impoverished family using the same kind of, as you put it, poverty pornography.

It's disgusting. It's reductionist. It's turning people into cartoons in order to promote yourself. But of course, the liberal class loved [Vance’s book] until they realized what his politics were.

I wonder how much this thinking hurt [Harris]—and how much the endorsement of odious figures like the Cheneys just made people feel, well, there's nobody there.

TOM:

Yeah. For a long time I thought that was maybe just, you know, me and my liberal cohort objecting. But she really did. That was the push towards the end of the campaign: to say, let's get those Republican voters who feel slighted by Trumpism ...

This is the illusion that has cost them again and again and again. But in Democrat-land, it's not an illusion. They look around and there's all of these former Bush staffers who who now loom very large in the Democratic Party as pundits. They spoke at the convention. They're very important to the Democrats self-understanding nowadays … She [Harris] really thought that was a winning strategy.

How many times do they have to go down that road and ... meet this terrible chastisement?

RICHARD:

They also seem to forget that Dick Cheney was the most unpopular member of the executive branch in modern history. You know, 18 percent approval rating at one point. [Ed: It was actually 13 percent.]

TOM:

Yeah.

RICHARD:

And nobody likes Liz. I mean, Democrats do now, I guess. Partisan Democratic voters do, but nobody else really likes Liz Cheney. She's not a likable person. And so—

TOM:

Well, she’s not in Congress anymore, so something happened ...

——-

TOM:

Anyway, just so your viewers know: In our earlier effort to record this we talked about all the monstrosities, all the obscenities that are likely to come from the Trump administration. And we do know. We're not like—we're not idiots.

RICHARD:

Yeah, yeah.

TOM:

We're not morally blind. We're heading for real dark times in this country.

RICHARD:

So we'll meet a sense of humor more than ever.