2016 Postmortem

Thomas Frank -

Even more alarming for Democrats were the stark implications of “Kansas” for their grand strategy of “centrism.” As I tried to make plain back in 2004, the big political change of the last 40 years didn’t happen solely because conservatives invented catchy conspiracy theories, but also because Democrats let it happen. Democrats essentially did nothing while their pals in organized labor were clubbed to the ground; they leaped enthusiastically into action, however, when it was time to pass NAFTA and repeal Glass-Steagall. Working-class voters had nowhere else to go, they seem to have calculated, and — whoops! — they were wrong. The Kansas story represented all their decades of moderating and capitulating and triangulating coming back to haunt them.

Maybe I concealed it too well, but this critique of the Democrats was supposed to have been one of the book’s big takeaway points. It was fun to mock the culture-war fantasies of the right but in doing so I also meant to challenge Clintonism. Yes, it had worked wonders in fundraising terms, but in forswearing the economic liberalism that appealed to working-class voters, it brought them electoral disaster. Again, the proof was all around us, in all the embarrassing defeats of those years, not to mention the needless capitulations like Al Gore’s in 2000. The bland centrist style that Democrats held so dear was political poison. To beat the right, I argued, they needed to move left.