The Daily Beast Podcast - Why I Can’t Stand Rich People with Liberal Lawn Signs

Episode Date: June 6, 2021

You know those lawn signs that say things like “Hate has no home here” or “Water is life?” Well, Thomas Frank, author of The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism cannot stand those signs. In this bonus episode of TNA, he tells Molly Jong-Fast about how liberalism is going in the wrong direction—and what we can do to actually get sh*t done. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, and welcome to another bonus episode of The New Abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special guest with historian and journalist Thomas Frank. If you don't know him, he co-founded and edited The Baffler, which was pretty much the zine that got me into politics. He's also the author of books like What's the Matter with Kansas and Listen Liberal Among Others. But today he's going to talk to us all about his new book, The People Know, a brief history of anti-populism. So, Thomas, I live in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and if I look in any direction of my block. I see these signs that say, in this house, we believe in science, Black Lives Matter, women's rights are human rights, no human is legal, all things which I think

all three of us agree and believe in, but you've noticed that the sign is missing something. Yeah. Yeah, those are, those signs are in my neighborhood as well. I live in Bethesda, Maryland these days. It's a very affluent suburb of Washington, D.C. And I started noticing those signs, what, about halfway through the Trump years. And, you know, and again, I agree with all the sentiments that these signs express. The whole idea of the sign is it's supposed to summarize the credo of modern liberalism. So it's all these different items. Women's rights are human rights. You know, Black Lives Matter. Love is love. And then they've added, since I wrote the book, they've started appearing with a couple other line items, like water is life.

And there's, you know, a couple of other things, right? Wait, water is life? Water is life, yeah. Hydration day. I guess that's meaning they're against pollution, right? Right. That makes sense, right? I like water.

Yeah, we all drink water, right? Yeah. And it sounds kind of like Dr. Strangelop. Do you remember where the guys really worried about the Soviets, like, like, sapping and impurifying our... Okay, we're not going to go there. right now. But anyhow, so there's a judge, Judge Birch society. Yeah, exactly. But the

idea of the signs is to list all the causes of liberalism. And again, these are all things that I agree with. But there's one thing that is conspicuously missing from these signs. And even when they add more line items, it'll still be missing. And that item is, of course, anything having

to do with labor or with the struggles of working people. You know, like health care should be affordable, or every job should pay a living wage, you know, something like that. There's nothing like that on these signs. And once you start, and once I noticed that, I was, you know, for a long time, I was like, why, you know, all these affluent people with these signs proclaiming their liberalism?

And that's, you know, that's kind of annoying in and of itself, right? But there was always something about those signs that rubbed me the wrong way, and it took me a while to figure it out. But once I did, I started noticing this everywhere that this whole past of liberalism or the left or whatever you want to call it, the whole past of liberalism, which has to do with working people, forming unions, struggling for better conditions, struggling to be part of the middle class, all that's been erased. And from our modern day sort of understanding of what being a liberal is. I was just reading today, all these people on Twitter celebrating the fact that a bunch of, well, basically the Fortune 500 companies had some sort of conference call where they're all coming together to discipline the state of Georgia for a sort of reactionary voting laws, right, that they just passed there, which is, you know, those voting laws are indeed a step backwards and a big mistake.

But what's funny is liberals openly identifying themselves with the CEOs of America's largest corporations. It's like our whole past, liberalism's whole past as a movement that was about work and about economic questions has been deleted. And I want to go one step further than that. That's an observation that I'm sure you guys have made as well in the last couple of years. But there's something else about it that bugs me. You know, and that's the fact that these are yard signs. This is something people are proud of these. I once had a project. I was going to go around and photograph those signs in front of what we call McMansions, you know, these sort of instant,

these gigantic houses that they're building in neighborhoods like the one I live in, these houses that are like three times a size of whatever was there previously, they go right to the edge of the lot. They're very garish and ostentatious. And you often see these signs in front of that kind of house. And what the signs are saying is, and this is the thing that really bugged me, the signs are saying, we're not just richer than you as the house. establishes, you know, the gigantic, you know, brand new mansion.

We're not just richer than you. We're better than you. We're better people. We're more virtuous. You know, we know all these, all these fine things. And we hold all these fine things to be, those are our values here in this house, as the sign says. So you've talked about this concept of the utopia of scolding and how you think that that doesn't

actually help us get reforms. that we're all looking for. Can you talk to us about that? So I like to make up, you know, new, descriptions for things. And that's the one that I'm proudest of from this book, the Utopia of scolding. And that's kind of what I'm describing here. That's what a place like Bethesda, Maryland is. You know, these very affluent people, I call it a utopia because for them, it's heaven on earth. They live in these wonderful homes. They drive these beautiful cars. You know, right now it's springtime, the trees are, you know, the cherry trees just bloomed and then the magnolias and now it's onto the dogwoods. It is, this place is heaven on earth. But it's also a place from which,

from the heights of which, you know, my people who live here scold the rest of the world for being insufficiently, you know, virtuous. Right. Insufficiently enlightened. It's a utopia of scolding. And in some ways, that's what liberalism, modern day liberalism, has become. It's a movement where well-to-do, highly educated people scold the rest of the world for not being as smart as them and not being as well-educated and not being as enlightened. So with that, we all want social justice. Like you're not saying this because you're on that side of like, oh, we should shut up. I'm pretty far to the left. You got to remember something. People used to call me a communist. I mean, well, they still do. But I mean, I flocked to you because you were

the farthest left writer I could find in the late 90s. What I would say, though, is though, like, we all want social justice achieved. We all want these things we're having a struggle. A lot of people are like, shut up about to defend the police. But you have a different answer to what we should be doing and why this utopia is wrong. Could you explain what you kind of outline in this book with that? Well, the key word in the book is populism.

The core idea of populism. And in some ways, the core idea of the historical left or liberalism, the core idea is solidarity. You know, people coming together in enormous numbers to demand reform, specifically economic reform, to reform capitalism. The kind of situation that we're in today where liberals exist, where, you know, they're basically being a liberal means you get to scold people lower than you on the social hierarchy because they didn't go to school. They didn't go to a fancy school and they don't know the jargon or whatever it is. That's the opposite of solidarity. That's not how you build a movement.

That's how you destroy a movement. This is a politics of subtraction rather than a politics of addition, a politics of coming together. All the great sort of moments of reform in American history happened as a result of gigantic mass movements that were brought together by appealing to enormous numbers of people, not by scolding them, but by bringing them together in huge mass movements. This is the civil rights movement. This is the labor movement of the 1930s. This is the farmer's movement of the 1890s.

And these are the great success stories of liberalism. And what made them happen was solidarity, not scolding. So can we talk, though, more like what solidarity means. I'm worried that people may not, like, understand what the actual actionable thing would be of this. Of how you build a mass movement? Yeah, yeah. Of how you build a mass movement and what you should be doing instead of scolding, what actually happens? And like, what is the bad behavior the elites are engaging in?

Okay. All right. Maybe that's that last one, because that might tee you up a little too much. We can go on about that all day. I don't know if you want to, I don't know if you're ready for that. Yeah. You know, the bad behavior that elites are engaging in, Jesus. I mean, you, you know, I, we just came off this big fight over the minimum wage that my side lost. And, you know, the minimum wage hasn't increased in this country since George W. Bush was president. I mean, that's the last time they passed a minimum wage. And it's, it's adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage. is lower today than it has ever been. I think going all the way back to the 1930s when the minimum wage began. And, you know, our system is happy to pay millions and millions and millions of

workers a wage to pay them in a way where they basically can't raise a family. They can't buy a house. They can't get a car. They can't really, you know, they can't be members of the middle class, as that term was traditionally understood. What I just want to know, I have really felt strongly that we need to have a $15 minimum wage. And can you? explain why we can't get there because that is really of interest to me? Yeah. Yes, of course. I mean, because a lot of powerful people in this country don't want that. I mean, it's incredibly straightforward. The people who are, you know, who own this country and who donate to politicians don't want it. And by and large, this sort of white collar professional elite who are the

rank and file of liberalism nowadays also don't want it because they're very suspicious. of people being rewarded without deserving it, of something that, you know, the minimum wage is not meritocratic. It doesn't reward you according to how well you did in school. It just rewards you, period. The same with labor unions. The whole idea of unionism is that everybody is in it together, everybody gets paid fairly. And this is for a lot of Americans, sort of well-to-do Americans, this is enormously suspicious. This is something they really dislike, the idea that people could get a middle-class standard of living without having tried hard in school? It seems nuts to me. I mean, especially with what we saw in Alabama with the Amazon Union,

like clearly, right, Amazon has produced, has made Jeff Bezos the richest man in the world, right? Yeah. So clearly, something's going wrong, right, for his workers. And the Amazon worked really hard to try to convince people that they didn't need a union, obviously more proof that they didn't need a union. And yet somehow they didn't get there. And it just shocks me. It was not shocking to me. It was depressing and dispiriting, but it wasn't shocking because this is every, I used to write about strikes and about unions a lot back in the, well, back in the 90s. And this is, this is always how corporate managements react to unionization drives. This is always what they do. They bring in, there's a whole industry of consultants. Their union avoidance consultants is what they're called.

And they help you beat back and organizing campaigns. And it's, you know, there's a, there's huge amounts of money. I mean, they teach this stuff at universities. It's an, it's a, it's not just an industry. It's a profession. I'm sure they have a profession and, you know, a professional code and right practices and have conventions every year and all that sort of thing. How you beat unions, you know, Union avoidance. We're getting away from the subject that you originally asked me about, Jesse, which is, you know, how do you build a movement that succeeds? And there's a guy that I, very important sort of intellectual figure for my career, a man called Lawrence Goodwin, who wrote probably the best book about populism that anybody's ever written, came out

back in the 1970s, it was called Democratic Promise. And it was about populist movement, by which I mean a movement of farmers and workers back in the 1890s. This was a left-wing third-party effort that tried to reform the American economy. You know, I read that book way back when, and it's stuck with me always. And then when I went to write my book about populism, this current one, the people know, I dug into who Larry Goodwin was. He's dead now, but he ran a program at Duke University in his latter days after his populism book came out where they did, they tried to do an oral history of

the civil rights movement. You know, they would go around interviewing people. And this guy's really is actually really interesting. And I looked into his life story a little bit. And he started out as an organizer in the civil rights movement in Texas. And he was, you know, going door to door and doing all the things that organizers for the civil rights movement did in the mid-1960s. And he actually wrote quite a bit about this, you know, in various magazines at the time. And then he did his work on populism. And then after all that, he wrote articles sort of theorizing what it takes to build a mass movement based on his experience in the civil rights movement and based on what he learned about

the populist movement. And he also included in this the labor movement in the 1930s. Again, these are the three great examples of mass movements in our history that changed everything. And he says that when you go to build a movement like this, it's very, very difficult to do. It's really tough to build a democratic mass movement, a movement of millions and millions of ordinary people. But you have to do that. You have to build such a movement if what you want to do is reform American society, and specifically reform the American economy in a democratic way.

You know, just having a bunch of smart people in Washington, D.C., a bunch of technocrats, that's not going to do it. If you want to achieve real lasting reform, this is how it's done. It's with a mass movement. Unfortunately, mass movements are extremely difficult to build. But we have these three great examples. So he goes into this. And the passage of his that really stuck with me after reading it was where he says, one of the things that you have to have as an organizer of mass movements is what he calls. And this is his phrase, ideological patience.

with ordinary people. You don't scold them. These are people who are going to come to you pretty much, they don't know the jargon, right? They're ordinary Americans. They're not highly educated people. These are working class people. By definition, that's what you have to work with

if you're going to build a mass movement. And you don't just automatically judge them because they didn't go to college or because they didn't learn the jargon. The idea of a mass movement is to build those, people into something different. And so you have to practice what he called ideological patience. And once you, you know, you read that phrase, once you get that phrase, once you understand that phrase, it all becomes clear because what we're doing today, what liberals are doing today,

is exactly the opposite of that. It's all about informing the world how good they are. And also, in passing, how bad everyone else is, how lacking in proper values, how insufficiently enlightened the rest of the world is. That's the utopia of scolding. The utopia of scolding is the exact opposite of what we need, of ideological patience, of building a mass movement. So say your person who listens to this podcast and you're a liberal who went to college, I'm not going to say there. I'm a liberal who went to college. You know, I am part of what I critique. That's, that's, I'm a liberal who didn't go to college. So we'll just agree to just, you know, but what would say would be, you know, I think the people who listen to this podcast generally are, you know,

I don't think they think of themselves as snobs and I think they think of themselves as pretty, as on the right side of history. Now, whether or not that's true, you know, we'll eventually be. Up to history, and determine, won't it? But how, what could they do to do the right thing, you know, to support labor unions and to, and to be able to do what's righteous? Well, it's tough nowadays. But, I mean, there's, look, there's, there's still plenty of good, Democrats out there, plenty of good liberal Democrats to support, there's lots and lots of them. The first thing is to, you know, take that damn yard sign down and stop just like, the idea of liberalism isn't to go out there and tell the world what a good person you are. It's not a badge

that you wear. It's about reform. We've got to achieve those reforms. I mean, there's so many good causes. And there's actually things I'm very, I probably come across as a very negative and pessimistic person. And that is my sort of traditional, that's how I talk. But if you press me, there's all sorts of good things afoot in Washington right now. I mean, the Biden administration is brand new. We don't really know what's going to come out of it yet, but it could be very positive. I really like the sort of signals that he is giving on antitrust issues, which is maybe the next big coming sort of reform. And by the way, a very populist issue.

Right. It being against monopolies. But, I mean, we're living in a time of incredible monopoly power. we all know about that. The social media giants, the various tech firms, they are all reaching for monopoly, and a lot of them have achieved it in a really shocking way. And all of a sudden, these guys are under fire. Well, that's great.

I'm very positive about that. And he does also say he's a union man. Yes, he does. He does. No, Biden says some good... His support for the Amazon Union is pretty unprecedented in recent presidencies. It is infuriating. The Amazon Union is infuriating to me.

And I wonder what normal people can do to encourage unionization. Because what I think has really struck me is that there's been about, you know, 30 years of people sort of degrading unions and corporatists, you know. And now we have a situation where we really do have workers who are not being protected. And so they have to pee and bottle. Yeah. You are so exactly right, Molly. That is, and I'll tell you something. So this has been one of my causes, one of the things that I have cared about for a long time is the ability of workers to organize and for them to be able to, you know, negotiate with their bosses, et cetera, et cetera.

There is, I mean, nothing that I believe in and that argue for that estranges me from my fellow, you know, educated liberals more than when I talk about that stuff, you know, the right of unions to. Oh, my God, yes. It's just my fellow sort of highly educated liberals can't stand that stuff. They can't stand it. And look, this is something I was in college during the Reagan administration. And I remember when he busted the air traffic controllers. Actually, I was in high school when that happened. It was fairly easy to see, even in those days, that we were heading in, that we were heading

towards, you know, basically a plutocracy, a place where workers had lost all their power and we're going to lose everything else soon afterwards. It was easy to see. That's what the baffler was all about. We could see that coming. Our first anthology, the one I was telling you guys about before we started, the subtitle of it. Wait, I've got it right here. Hang on.

It's called, oh, my God, it's so, the title of it is, the title of it still blows my mind. Commodify your dissent. This is the subtitle, the business of culture in the new gilded age. In 1997, we were. We were talking about, you know, outrageous inequality. Well, this is the heyday of Bill Gates, you know, and Microsoft. And we had this term that we would use, the culture trust, basically meaning there's these new monopolies out there. This, you know, that there is this force of monopolization.

Well, it was all easy to see coming. And here it is. But you know what's interesting to me as someone who came of age in the 1990s? And I, you know, I published my first book then. And that was sort of when I was famous, I like to say. You had a good 90s. Right. I was only, like, working for three years of it, but I had a good, it was pretty much the end of my group.

But what I noticed was there was a lot of money in magazine publishing and book publishing. Oh, my God. Do you remember I always talk about this Fortune magazine in the late 90s? It was like, it was like 300 pages thick, each issue. Yeah, yeah. Because all the advertising, this is during the dot-com bubble. Exactly. And that business really did die.

Yes, it did. Yep. And that is an interesting, you know, that phenomenon, like we never figured out how to monetize writing. You know, it's sort of that, the 90s were the peak of that. I think about that often. And journalism. Yeah. I remember, like, these newspapers that had monopolies, you know, and their towns and and what was the phrase back then?

They had a, and these were monopolies that were specifically granted to them by Congress. And, you know, because ordinarily monopolies are a bad thing. but newspapers had monopolies all over the place. And we used to call it a license to print money. You know, because they controlled all the advertising in the city, right? If you wanted to do classified ads or any other kind of advertising, you know, department store ads, you had to go to the local newspaper and there was only one. And they could charge whatever the hell they wanted.

And now, I mean, oh my God. It's, I mean, the horror stories are just one after another. But my hometown paper is one I always think of, the Kansas City Star. which was one of America's great newspapers once upon a time. And is today just this, I mean, it's just, it's very thin. It's not even printed in Kansas City. It's printed in Iowa. I think I don't remember.

I found out a while ago how many reporters they have left, and it's something like a dozen. Their sports coverage is still robust. But everything else is, yeah. It's very sad. It's absolutely awful. It's just tragic. So I feel like we'd be remiss if we didn't get you on one last subject. So you were one of the first people to really popularize and help us understand how the right wing was mobilized in the culture war with what's matter with Kansas and the wrecking crew.

I wanted to see if you notice anything that's being under discussed these days about what the GOP is doing to mobilize things. I mean, I think a lot of it's clear before our eyes, but you've observed this for so long. I was curious if you're seeing anything people aren't seeing. Anything that they're doing is new. I mean, well, the culture wars have gone on and on and on and on and to the point where that's what it's all about. But the other, I mean, so when I wrote What's the matter with Kansas, the Fox News phenomenon was relatively new. When I went to discover, you know, I went out to try to figure out why my home state had swung so far to the right, you know, which was shocking and new at the time. And it was all because of culture war issues. The theory of evolution was was a big one at the time. But the biggest one, the biggest one, was anti-abortion sentiment. And then after that, there was just this whole host of other issues having to do with guns and everything having to do with religion, on and on and on down the list. And this sort of air of grievance that had settled over people was just, you know,

it was quite incredible. But the real insight of that book was that the culture wars were all sort of camouflaged class wars. This is the genius of culture wars. It's a way of talking about social class without, doing anything about it without challenging the economics of it. And that's what culture, that's what sort of right-wing culture war is. It's a way of roping in people who would, who ordinarily don't really benefit from, you know, Republican dominance, you know, quite the contrary. And but roping them into the conservative coalition anyways, well, that's gone

so much farther now. I mean, it's all that anybody talks about is, you know, it's just one culture war after another. And what's really freaky is that's, that's liberalism, now too. The Fox News model is everywhere now. That's CNN. That's MSNBC. That's all we do is fight culture wars. But don't you think some of what happened in Kansas is because of the Koch brothers? Because I read your book and you said that. Well, they were players. They weren't as important at the time. This is, so the book is mainly about the 1990s. They really got up and running later on. But yeah, they're in there. And they were funding people here and there. But it ballooned later on. I mean, they became much bigger players later on. By and large, you know, the class

conflict in Kansas was the people that I grew up among. By the way, this is a really interesting story. I don't know if you bargained for this one. So I grew up in Johnson County, Kansas. And if you've ever been to Kansas City, this is the sort of affluent white flight suburbs of Kansas City, Missouri. They're in Kansas. And the neighbor, specific neighborhood that I grew up in. It's called Mission Hills. I describe it in what's matter with Kansas. And in some deep, detail. And my family were not, we weren't rich people, but all the kids that I grew up among were, right? And they, you know, I went to school with them and I played with them and all that. And the families that they come from, this was the ruling class of Kansas City and of the state

of Kansas. These people owned the place. And they were some of the most Republican people. Well, I thought at the time, this is what the Republican Party is. It's these people. There is no more Republican group in the United States than these people. And they tended to be, you know, they were Bob Dole, Nancy Casabom, Dwight Eisenhower, Republicans, what we've now called, you know, moderate Republicans. Well, that is what they call them, moderate Republicans. So they're very conservative on economic issues, but they believe in education, you know, the public schools where I group are very good, you know, that sort of thing. And what's fascinating to me. And so there's all these, these sort of culture wars in Kansas would involve these, you know, by and large, working class, can't. who imagined that the moderate Republicans were, you know, the ruling class of the state, that these were, that's what the war was against. And what's crazy is that just here in this last election, these people that I, you know, went back to Johnson County to observe the election of 2020 with my own eyes, again, when I was growing up, I thought these were the most Republican people

in the world. They had voted for every Republican candidate going back to, for president, going back to 1916. That's the last time they went for a Democrat, was when Woodrow Wilson was the Democratic candidate. And back then, I mean, Johnson County was a farm area. It wasn't part of Kansas City at the time. Well, I mean, they went for every Republican since then. Alf Landon, Barry Goldwater, you know, every single one, right? And they just went for Biden.

And by the way, it's not because they've become poor. They are still by far the most affluent county in the state of Kansas. This is one of the most affluent places in America. And I looked at the precinct. I got into the data and looked at the precinct data for my neighborhood, the neighborhood I grew up in. Biden won every single precinct in that neighborhood. There is a tectonic shift going on in this country that we haven't really understood yet. Anyhow, that's more than you bargained for as an answer. It's the difference between class. Like, there is no class divide anymore, right? It's a wealth

divide because class is no longer really a thing. I think class is a thing, and I think class is important. But there are changes underway in how we think about class and how class is manifested. And the biggest change is what I wrote about in my last book, which was called Listen Liberal. This was my sort of career ending. This is the book that really did it for me, right? I'm very proud of it, but it succeeded in making a lot of people real unhappy. The whole point of that book was that there is, you know, that there is this other ruling class in America. It's not just the Koch brothers.

and it's not just like the sort of grandees who own, who inherited the world. There's this other ruling class coming up, and this is a class that traces its power and its authority to educational credentials, to what it achieved, to its sort of advanced educational attainments. This is the professional class, is what I call them, but, you know, the managerial professional elite, however you want to put it. But these people now, this cohort, you know, this sort of old money cohort, you know, the sort of old money cohort, you refer to the Koch brothers who inherited an oil company. And this sort of older cohort that built a business or that inherited a business has been supplanted, at least from what we call

the commanding heights of the economy, the industries that really matter, has been supplanted by this other group that traces its authority to educational attainment. And by the way, if any of this is confusing, just stop me. But the white color elite, I mean, that's Silicon Valley, right? And that's Wall Street now. Wall Street, when I was a young man, do you remember in the 80? There was no more Republican industry than Wall Street. And now, of course, they overwhelmingly supported Biden over Trump, although, you know, some of them, Trump had some supporters. You know, they overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton over Trump.

They liked Mitt Romney, but that's probably the last Republican we're ever going to see them support. And before that, they loved Barack Obama. Things are changing. All of these industries that I'm referring to, which are, again, the dominant powers in our world. They're Democrats now. And the people that run them are people who trace their authority, again, to, you know, they're members of this professional elite. Thank you so much for joining us. This was great.

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