© Carolyn Kaster / APPresident Barack Obama is joined by presidential nominee Hillary Clinton after he spoke at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July.
Thomas Frank's marvelous scorched-earth assault on the Democratic Party and professional elites in his book "
Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?" has one fatal flaw. Frank blames the liberal class, rather than the corporations that have seized control of the centers of power, for our descent into political dysfunction and neofeudalism.
Yes, self-identified liberals such as the Clintons and Barack Obama speak in the language of liberalism while selling out the poor, the working class and the middle class to global corporate interests. But they are not, at least according to the classical definition, liberals.
They are neoliberals. They serve the dictates of neoliberalism—austerity, deindustrialization, anti-unionism, endless war and globalization—to empower and enrich themselves and the party. The actual liberal class—the segment of the Democratic Party that once acted as a safety valve to ameliorate through reform the grievances and injustices within our capitalist democracy and that had within its ranks politicians such as George McGovern, Gaylord Nelson, Warren Magnuson and Frank Church and New Deal Democrats such as Franklin D. Roosevelt—no longer exists. I spent 248 pages in my book "
Death of the Liberal Class" explaining the orchestrated corporate campaign to erase the liberal class from the political landscape and, more ominously,
destroy the radical labor and social movements that were the real engines of social and political reform in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The Democratic and the professional elites whom Frank excoriates are, as he points out, morally bankrupt, but they are only one piece of the fake democracy that characterizes our system of "
inverted totalitarianism." The problem is not only liberals who are not liberal; it is also conservatives, once identified with small government, the rule of law and fiscal responsibility, who are not conservative. It is a court system that has abandoned justice and rather than defend constitutional rights has steadily stripped them from us through judicial fiat. It is a Congress that does not legislate but instead permits lobbyists and corporations to write legislation. It is a press, desperate for advertising dollars and often owned by large corporations, that does not practice journalism. It is academics, commentators and public intellectuals, often paid by corporate think tanks, who function as
shameless cheerleaders for the neoliberal and imperial establishment and mock the concept of independent and critical thought.
The Democratic and the professional elites are an easy and often amusing target. One could see them, in another era, prancing at a masked ball at Versailles on the eve of the revolution. They are oblivious to how hated they have become. They do not understand that when they lambast Donald Trump as a disgrace or a bigot they swell his support because they, not Trump, are seen by many Americans as the enemy. But these courtiers did not create the system. They sold themselves to it.
And if Americans do not understand how we got here we are never going to find our way out.
Comment: Here's the reality: the bombings in NY and NJ have taken the focus off of the actions in Syria, where the US military and its proxy terrorists bombed the Syrian military. When one asks in this situation, who benefits, the answer is the US government. Why in the world would Russia do something to benefit their so-called enemy? But the media is so entrenched in spreading propaganda that it can't see past its nose, so it automatically throws softball questions at politicians and calls it journalism.