What's the Matter With America?

Back in 2004, a full fourteen years ago, Thomas Frank published a book entitled What’s The Matter with Kansas? In it, he looked at how a segment of the population was consistently voting against their own economic self interests. He argued that so called “culture war” issues, played to emotions that overrode economic concerns.

Twelve years later that trend reached its apogee with the election of Donald Trump. Therefore it’s important to remember that Trump didn’t create the economic, class and cultural divisions in America, he merely exploited them.

Those trends, fed by changes in the nature of work, technology, communication, and global economics have resulted in a society that is, in many ways, not recognizable from the America of yore.  Given that, it's important to remember that the American people played a role in creating this environment, do they now have the power to fix it? Can they put Humpty Dumpty back together again?

Thomas Frank, like the Simon and Garfunkel song, has spent a long time, looking for America to try and find the answer to this question. He reports it in his new book Rendezvous with Oblivion: Reports from a Sinking Society.

My conversation with Thomas Frank:

What's The Matter With Democrats?

When we examine the roots of today’s chaos in the Republican party, we see that much of it has been caused by the party using and manipulating social issues to hold together Red State voters, while ignoring and even acting counter to their real economic concerns. This was the premise of one of the seminal books of our modern political age, What’s the Matter with Kansas, by Thomas Frank.

Today, Frank argues that the Democratic party is facing a similar situation and is ignoring a whole swath of it’s traditional working class base voters.

He argues in his new book, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People that the traditional working class Democratic voters, the ones that drove the Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Johnson coalitions, have been ignored. That the traditional Democratic Dunkin Donuts/ Walmart voter has been replaced by the Starbucks/Whole Foods voter.  And that o
once again, even in the Democratic party, social issues have been used to transcended the real economic needs and distress of Americans.

To some extent this has given rise to the Bernie Sanders movement. But more specifically it’s left the door open for a populist demagogue like Donald Trump, to take advantage of this openings on both side of the political equation.

My conversation with Thomas Frank:

Up is down, down is up...

Just as we often use living viruses to cure disease, so the Right argues that the cure for financial crises, environmental degradation, minimal national investment and no energy policy is less of all of them. The idea, which the country bought into in 2010, is that only by less regulation, more crony capitalism and more rewards for the economies winner, can we solve the problems of the average Americans. Sounds like Alice in Wonderland, but it's the basis of the platform of this years Republican candidates. Thomas Frank, bestselling author of "What's the Matter with Kansas," explains what's going on in his new book Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right.

My conversation with Thomas Frank:

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