by Thomas Frank
These days I think it’s more important than ever to try to learn from history, as we are constantly finding ourselves doomed to repeat it, so I searched my “to read” list of saved history titles and found this one, recommended by a fellow traveler on our trip to Cuba last year. Thomas Frank is a journalist and author who grew up in the wealthy suburbs of Kansas City, and entered his young adult life as a fervent Republican. His journalism career took him from the Wall Street Journal to Harper’s to The Guardian, and he now identifies as a left-wing populist and supporter of Bernie Sanders.
Frank uses his home state of Kansas as a morality tale of the ways in which voters can be persuaded to support “social causes” that are diametrically opposed to their own economic self-interest, thereby shifting the entire national political balance. Here is a quote from a review in Foreign Affairs: “Why, Frank asks, do working-class Kansans labor to support a right-wing agenda that will strip them of social benefits, lower their wages, and provide enormous tax windfalls to the rich?” I have asked myself the same question about why working class MAGA Republicans say they want to get rid of “Obamacare.” By now, between new coverage for pre-existing conditions and extended coverage for young adults, the vast majority of them must be getting health care they were never eligible before. Published over 20 years ago, this historical analysis of the state that gave birth to progressive agrarian populism in the late 19th century is almost quaint in its ire for George W. Bush, who in the 2000 election carried the state by more than 80 percent. (Don’t you kind of miss Bush I these days?) Quaint, maybe, but it is very useful to look at the long view of how we got where we are today. Equally fervent in his criticism of the Democratic Party, Frank has managed to edge me closer to the far left politics of my millienial children than I ever would have expected.
I listed to the audio edition, narrated by the author himself, which at first I found too strident and sarcastic. But as I took in Frank’s argument, stridency and sarcasm seemed to sound exactly the right tone. Now I’m reading a lot more about the Democratic Socialists of America.