Thomas Frank’s Own Private Idaho

Remember when Lewis Lapham wrote some cliches about a Republican convention that hadn’t happened yet as if he had already watched it? His Harper’s successor’s coverage of the 2016 campaign is the near-equivalent of this. Frank has a narrative about American politics in which it’s always 1996, the Democratic Party is always running to the right, and there is literally no set of facts that could get him to in any way modify it.

His latest column is roughly three million words based on this ludicrously false premise. Although, once again, he has to start by being far too charitable to the Republican Party:

But first let us focus on the good news. Donald Trump has smashed the consensus factions of both parties.

This is just utter, embarrassing nonsense. Trump has smashed nothing important in the Republican coalition. Ryan, McConnell and Trump have fit together like a glove, and the Republican coalition came out of the 2016 election intact.

Along the way, he has destroyed the core doctrine of Clintonism: that all elections are decided by money and that therefore Democrats must match Republican fundraising dollar for dollar.

I agree that if the United States only conduced one national election every 4 years, the Supreme Court’s gutting of campaign finance law — which I’m old enough to remember people on the left opposing — wouldn’t be that big of a deal. Alas, it matters more at lower-level and state races. How are Democrats doing there?

But let’s get to the meat of the argument:

Neither were any of the other patented maneuvers of Clintonism. With Hillary carrying their banner, the Democrats triangulated themselves in every way imaginable. They partied with the Wall Street guys during the convention in Philadelphia, they got cozy with the national security set, they reached out to disaffected Republicans, they reminisced about the days of the balanced federal budget, they even encouraged Democratic delegates to take Ubers back and forth from the convention to show how strongly Democrats approved of what Silicon Valley was doing to America. And still they lost.

The idea that Hillary Clinton ran a campaign of “triangulation” is an utterly absurd lie. Again, Clinton ran, very explicitly, the most left-wing economic campaign of any Democratic candidate in decades. She ran, explicitly and proudly, on (inter alia) a family leave plan, an increased minimum wage and better overtime rules, the Employee Free Choice Act, increased child care funding, Social Security increases, a public option for health care, and support for repealing the Hyde Amendment. The idea that this was really a conservative campaign because she occasionally mentioned that her husband ran surpluses is silly. And his examples give away the show — Clinton ran a centrist campaign, irrespective of her policy agenda, because convention delegates at events with open bars were encouraged to take Ubers? His ability to cherry pick to massage his narrative is remarkable. The slightest empty gesture to economic populism by an extremely right-wing Republican campaign gets him excited, while on the other hand when the Democratic Party runs exactly the campaign he’s been urging them to run for time out of mind he focuses on some random less-than-trivia to argue that they haven’t changed at all.

You can criticize Clinton’s messaging, although the idea that there’s One Magic Trick that Hillary Clinton could have used to get the media talking about policy rather than EMAILS! strikes me as absurd. And it’s certainly true that Clinton’s strategy of peeling off suburban Republican women was a failure, although it’s hard for Frank to criticize the campaign for that when he’s still arguing that Trump shattered the Republican coalition. But, in context, what’s important is that Clinton did not try to appeal to Republicans with policy trimming, but with attacks on Donald Trump’s character. This was ineffective tactics, but what it is not is Bill-Clinton style “triangulation.” Clinton’s core appeal was to the Democratic base.

To talk about “Clintonism” as a single thing that conflates the massively different campaigns of 1992/1996 and 2016 is, at best, pure bad faith. It misunderstands how politics works, but even leaving that aside Frank’s argument is just straightforwardly factually wrong. You can argue that the “real” Hillary Clinton is Bill Clinton circa 1996 and that’s how she would have governed, but that’s not Frank’s argument here. His argument is that Hillary Clinton ran in 2016 like Bill Clinton did in 1996, which could not possibly be more wrong.

The rest of his piece is the classic refusal by people on the left who hate the Democratic Party to ever take “yes” for an answer. Not only does he ignore the Democratic shift to the left, he argues that it won’t happen in the future:

There are some indications that Democrats have finally understood this. Elizabeth Warren’s star is on the rise. Bernie Sanders is touring the country and reminding people that class politics are back whether we like it or not. Keith Ellison is running for chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

But the media and political establishments, I suspect, will have none of it. They may hate Donald Trump, but they hate economic populism much more.

Despite the Democratic Party running on its most liberal policy platform ever, the Democratic establishment hates economic populism and will prevent the party from ever moving to the left of where it was in 1996. The fact that the contest to head the DNC will be between Keith Ellison and Obama’s populist, left-liberal Secretary of Labor is central to Frank’s point.

It goes on from this anti-factual premise for quite a while. If you want to get out of the boat, don’t say you weren’t warned.