Johnny Unbeatable Would Have Permanently Destroyed American Conservatism
By 
Thomas Frank presents an argument he definitely has not made dozens of times before:
Can liberals please work out how to win back the working class?
It’s pretty wild that people who write about politics in 2018 are still using “working class” to mean “white working class” with all the ugly assumptions that go with it pic.twitter.com/RoWN9JnkHL
— Adam Serwer 🍝 (@AdamSerwer) July 29, 2018
But since this commemorates the one thousandth time Frank has written the same column, maybe there’s a new twist this time?
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.
Yes, politics is easy if you assume a priori that everyone agrees with you.
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.
In both their accomplishments and their compromises, the ACA, ARRA, and Dodd-Frank are all major accomplishments squarely within the New Deal tradition, and the first one is arguably the most ambitious downward distribution of wealth ever enacted by the United States Congress. But, as with the Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the Great Society this did not lead to a long period of liberal domination, because in fact the theory that good policy is good short-term electoral politics is not very well-founded no matter how often people assert it.
But, anyway, he has clear evidence that Democrats don’t even want to win elections:
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.”
He has a point there — it was a serious mistake for the Democratic Party to make Tony Blair their presidential nominee in 2016.
Anyway, now that he’s going on hiatus from his column perhaps we can get more interviews in which he and the interviewee agree that they’re both right about everything and everybody agrees with them.