Thomas Frank: All Aboard The Oblivion Express!

The other day I noticed, with something of a shock, that Brett
Kavanaugh, the supreme court nominee, is almost exactly the same
age as me. I have always scoffed at those of my generation who cynically
hitched their star to the conservative movement but now, as I take my leave
from this space, it occurs to me that maybe they played the game right after all.

The Great Revolt review: Trump-approved study of 2016 is key reading
for Democrats

I started out in
journalism in the orange-fingered sunset of the Reagan era. The rise of the
right, I felt back then, was the most consequential development of my lifetime,
and understanding it was where I came to focus my energies.

What came to
fascinate me was the paradox of the thing. Republicans had
successfully inverted their historical brand-image as the party of the
highborn, remaking themselves as plain-talking pals of the forgotten people who
had so spurned them during the Great Depression. Republicanism’s payload,
however, was the same as it had been in 1932. And just look at what
conservatism proceeded to do to those average people once they welcomed it into
their lives.

But understanding
the perversity of rightwing populism only brought me to another mystery: the
continuing failure of liberals to defeat this thing, even as its freakishness
and destructiveness became apparent to everyone. My brain twirls to think that
rightwing populism is still running strong in 2018 – that it’s even worse now
than it was in 1988 – that the invective and the journalism and the TV shows
and all the mournful books about the decline of the middle class have amounted,
basically, to nothing.

Democrats simply have to take one of the houses of Congress this
fall and commence holding Trump accountable

We had the perfect
opportunity to reverse course in 2008, after a deregulatory catastrophe sent
the billionaires shrieking for handouts and ruined middle America as collateral
damage. That was the perfect moment for liberals to reclaim their Rooseveltian
heritage by governing forcefully on behalf of ordinary people, by warring
against over-powerful corporations, by demonstrating the power of the state to
build a just and humane society. But they didn’t do it.

The biggest Trump resignations and firings so far

I know the excuses:
those Republicans were so clever, they wouldn’t vote for Obama’s proposals,
etc. But from the long-term perspective, what really mattered was the absence
of Democratic will. Instead of doing what the moment required, Democrats chose
to help the banks get back on their feet and to stand by as inequality soared;
they scolded their base for wanting too much and they extended their hand
instead to Silicon Valley and big pharma. The task of capturing public anger
was one they regarded with distaste; they left that to Tea Party demagogues and
to Donald Trump.

We are going to pay
for that failure for a long time. The GOP should have been ruined by the
financial crisis; instead the culture wars are raging all over again, with dog whistles
and fights over the flag and the persecution mania of the populist right
blaring from the TV screen. We’re right back where we started. The crisis went
completely to waste.

For all their
cunning, Republicans are a known quantity. Their motives are simple: they will
do anything, say anything, profess faith in anything to get tax cuts,
deregulation and a little help keeping workers in line. Nothing else is sacred
to them. Rules, norms, traditions, deficits, the Bible, the constitution,
whatever. They don’t care, and in this they have proven utterly predictable.

Wisconsin, of all places, is a battleground state. In the hands of
a real politician, Trumpism could romp even farther

The Democrats,
however, remain a mystery. We watch them hesitate at crucial moments, betray
the movements that support them, and even try to suppress the leaders and ideas
that generate any kind of populist electricity. Not only do they seem
uninterested in doing their duty toward the middle class, but sometimes we
suspect they don’t even want to win.

(This is more than
just a suspicion, by the way. As none other than Tony Blair has said,
“I wouldn’t want to win on an old-fashioned leftist platform. Even if I thought
it was the route to victory, I wouldn’t take it.”)

Still, as we are
reminded at every turn, this flawed organization is the only weapon we have
against the party of Trump. And as the president’s blunders take a turn for the
monumental and public alarm grows, the imperative of delivering a Democratic
wave this fall grows ever more urgent.

Make no mistake: it
has got to happen. Democrats simply have
to take one of the houses of Congress this fall and commence holding Trump
accountable. Failure at this baseline mission is unthinkable; it will mean the
Democratic party has no reason for being, even on its own compromised terms.

 As a conservative, I despair at Republicans' support for Trump.
His vision is not conservatism

Charles J Sykes

What concerns me as
I begin my leave, though, is the larger picture. Trump may be an oaf, but the
vicious strain of rightwing populism he introduced is not going away. Trumpism
is the future for the Republican party – it delivered Ohio, Pennsylvania,
Michigan and Iowa too. Wisconsin, of all places, is now a battleground state.
In the hands of a real politician, Trumpism has the potential to romp even
farther.

Beating the right
cannot simply be a matter of waiting for a dolt in the Oval Office to screw
things up. There has to be a plan for actively challenging and reversing it,
for turning around the fraction of working class voters who have been
abandoning the Democratic party for decades. The time is up for happy fantasies
of office-park centrism and professional-class competence.

As for me, I am off
to write a few books. I’ll be back in this space in a few years and we will see
how things have gone.

Thomas Frank is an
American political analyst and historian. His books include What’s the Matter
With Kansas?. His latest is Listen, Liberal: or, What Ever Happened to the
Party of the People?

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