Blaming the Knight

It was a lot more fun analyzing and critiquing Thomas Frank's Listen Liberal before the election. Now it looks a lot more prescient. Have I come so far from my working class roots that I could apologize for and defend the Democratic Party as it is currently configured? Or perhaps I merely projected my values onto the party and hoped that if things were different they wouldn't be the same. Either way, as flawed as it is, as thoroughly as it has abandoned working people according to Frank, it was the one thing standing between us and president trump.

Every time Frank posted something about how rotten the Democratic Party was, or one of his critiques made it's way into my newsfeed, I kept thinking "this is a really interesting thesis but can't it wait until after the election?" The analogy that popped into my head that I couldn't really fully articulate was "can't we wait to criticize the knight for trampling our rose bushes until after he (she) slays the dragon?" The natural corollary to criticizing the "good guys" is to be happy that the "bad guys" won, so what does he say now that a fascist demagogue is to be inaugurated in less than a month?

“What you can say now, someone told this to me yesterday, is that Trump wrecked both parties and he ended two political dynasties: the Bush’s and the Clinton’s and for doing that we all owe Donald Trump some thanks. That’s the good side of Donald Trump, that he just smashed the ruling faction in both parties in the same year."

Sure, it's just an off-hand remark to some journalism student at the University of Missouri, but seriously, this was not a day after the election, it was a month. So he was aware already of trump's cabinet choices, his twitter wars with all sorts of people and publications, the Russian involvement in our election, the demands from his transition team to the Energy Department to produce all the names of climate scientists, and so on. "We all owe donald trump some thanks"? Are you kidding me? How many people are going to die unnecessarily in the coming years? Was it worth wrecking both parties and ending two political dynasties so we can throw away every facet of liberal democracy?

There is literally no limit to how far the authoritarians can go now. What could possibly restrain them? Most of us are members of the "superfluous population" we don't contribute to wealth production and we are all expendable. Right now neo-nazis are converging on a little town in Montana harassing and intimidating Jewish residents there, before trump has even taken office. Is this an isolated incident or a harbinger of the future? Ending the career of Hillary Clinton is somehow worth this? And the thousand and counting hate crimes since the election, those are worth ending a political dynasty? Last I checked neither political party is "wrecked" the rotten GOP runs the entire country now, and the Democrats are still sitting clueless and bewildered. Nothing was really upended institutionally, republicans voted for the republican candidate.

Let me lay it on the line, Thomas Frank was my hero. I never missed an opportunity to talk about his ideas or interject his analysis everywhere from casual conversation to academic writing. But I guess to be a liberal (outside of the gilded halls of the well-graduated that Frank's book is all about) is to have your heart broken. Maybe that is too much, there have been thinkers and scholars who I really looked up to but outgrew such as Jello Biafra and Noam Chomsky. There have been politicians who let me down like John Edwards, who seemed at least to be committed to the issue of poverty and inequality. But there has really only been one other intellectual who I really felt betrayed me and that is Ralph Nader when he ran again in 2004.

The worst part is there is almost nothing I really can contest in Listen, Liberal; as a party the top Democrats have abandoned working people and embraced a worldview of elite professionals who look down their noses at anyone who can't make it in today's economy. Though Frank does bring up Ricky Ray Rector, the man Bill Clinton flew home to Arkansas during the 1992 campaign to oversee his execution. Frank noted that Clinton used the occasion to grandstand on his "tough on crime" position but neglected to note that the reason Rector was unable to understand what was happening to him was that he suffered brain damage from a suicide attempt while already in prison. The why is important. Why the Democratic Party stopped being the party of the people is also very important, but when an outright fascist is on the ticket opposite from them is not the best time to address it in public.

I would have been more than happy to examine every single wart on every elected and appointed Democrat after donald trump had been rendered a footnote in American history. Whether Frank's book and subsequent work convinced anyone to stay home or vote against Hillary Clinton I cannot say; did anyone in the republican pretty hate machine pick up on this dissenting liberal and play up the "Dems in disarray" meme? Also hard to say. But dragon-slaying is hard work, we only had one knight to try and do the job. They had Vladimir Putin, the heads of all the cable news networks, James Comey, 62 million vicious morons ready to pull the lever for anyone with an "R" after their name, Scott Walker, Rick Snyder, and 29 other republican governors and legislatures monkeying with the election laws and process, and nearly three decades of manufactured scandals to throw at her.

And when we come right down to it, no one is really on "our" side. There is no "our" side, this was a civil war where one side (the right) relentlessly beats down a disparate group of weaklings who can't put aside their differences for anything. The result, in hindsight, I guess shouldn't surprise anyone.

But all these words are coming from a broken heart.