What’s the Matter With Thomas Frank?

[KoKo]

Last edited Wed Mar 11, 2015, 08:45 AM - Edit history (2)

CAVEAT: I'm a big fan of Thomas Frank's Book "What's the Matter With Kansas" and his articles for YEARS....but, Paul Street does make points in this article that I found interesting. Maybe others will, also, as we look ahead. And, btw, I'm not a huge critic of PBO, but have had serious concerns as I've "watched and waited" throughout his Presidency. Street points out his own concerns about issues we on the Left would want to work for in the future as we move into the Election 2016 Cycle with possibility of another Clinton Presidency.

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What’s the Matter With Thomas Frank?

by Paul Street

ZNet, February 28, 2015. It’s an odd and perhaps usefully ego-deflating sensation to feel invisible, in my case to write books and essays and give speeches and talks that can seem like they never existed, as if they were never penned, typed, or spoken. That’s how the celebrated liberal author, Harpers’ Magazine essayist, Salon writer, and political commentator Thomas Frank has been helping some of us on the intellectual Left feel this year.

“A Bit of Blunt Class Analysis”

Consider Frank’s recent, widely read Salon essay properly mocking the standard center-left defense of US President Barack Obama. According to a standard liberal apology, Obama has always and sincerely wanted to do genuinely progressive and left-leaning things to roll back the exaggerated power of the wealthy corporate and financial Few and to defend the nation’s poor and working class majority and the common good. Alas, the excuse runs, our great wannabe people’s president has been powerless to act on these noble ambitions because of the combined reactionary and checkmating influences of the Republican Party, big political money, a gerrymandered Congress, the deadening handing of American federalism, and racism.

Without completely discounting these real barriers to decent policy on the part of a hypothetically progressive White House, Frank’s Salon piece offers a historically astute correction to this liberal lament. “When historians seek to explain the failures of the Obama years” Frank muses, “they will likely focus on a glaringly obvious, and indeed still more hard-headed explanation that the apologists for Obama’s enfeeblement now overlook: that perhaps Obama didn’t act forcefully to press a populist economic agenda because he didn’t want to. That maybe he didn’t do certain of the things his liberal supporters wanted him to do because he didn’t believe in them.”

Why, Frank asks, did the Obama administration not only “leave Wall Street standing after Wall Street plunged the nation into a slump without parallel in most people’s lives” but even “allow…Wall Street to grow more concentrated and more powerful than ever”? Why did a president elected on a promise of progressive change repudiate his own clear “power to react to the financial crisis in a more aggressive and appropriate way”? Why did he choose Wall Street insider “Tim Geithner to run the bailouts” and appoint the corporate lawyer “Eric Holder to (not) prosecute the bankers” and Wall Street ally “Ben Bernanke to serve another term at the Fed?” As Frank points out, it would have been both good policy (“the economy would have recovered more quickly and the danger of a future crisis brought on by concentrated financial power would have been reduced”) and good politics – “massively popular” with the nation’s mostly white working class majority (something that would “have deflated the rampant false consciousness of the Tea Party movement and prevented the Republican reconquista of the House in 2010”) – if Obama had wielded his “bully pulpit” to take a populist and progressive stand.

Frank’s thesis is that the financial crisis worked out the way it did – with Wall Street unpunished, richer, and more powerful than ever – “in large part because Obama and his team wanted it to work out that way.” At the same time, Frank proposes “a bit of blunt class analysis” suggesting that that big money exercises huge influence (imagine!) over Democrats as well as Republicans (imagine!) and that the Democratic Party has been “transform[ed] in recent decades into a dutiful servant of the professional class” with an “amazing trust in the good intentions and right opinions of their fellow professionals from banking, law, economics and journalism” and by a “generally dismissive attitude toward the views of working people.” (Thomas Frank, “It’s Not Just FOX News,” Salon, January 11, 2015)

Invisible Left Warnings

ee…who knew? Starting in the summer of 2004 (right after Obama’s rock star speech at the Democratic National Convention) and continuing through the 2008 presidential election and beyond, I took to the pages of numerous Left journals and Web sites (ZNet, Z Magazine, Black Agenda Report, Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, and more) to warn my fellow US progressives and leftists the world over about Obama’s fake-progressive, reactionary, neoliberal, imperial, and objectively white-supremacist essence. The Obama who “didn’t do certain of the things his liberal supporters wanted him to do because he didn’t believe in them” (Frank) is the very Obama (with whom I was quite familiar from my years working as a social policy and Civil Rights researcher and advocate in Illinois and Chicago from the late 1990s through 2005) about whom I raised insistent alarms from the birth of the national Obama phenomenon (in August of 2004) on.

CONTINUED AT:

https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/whats-the-matter-with-thomas-frank/