Book Review: "Listen. Liberal!" by Thomas Franks

"Modern liberalism in action: an unregulated virtue-exchange in which representative of one class of humanity [the elites] ritually forgive the sins of another class [the rest of us], all of it conened and facilitated by a vast army of well-graduated American professionals, their reassuring expertised propped up by bogus social science, while the unfortunately object of their high and noble compassion sink slowloy back into a preindustrial state." 

Except for Walt's interpolations, that was written in "Listen, Liberal!" by Thomas Franks, a certified liberal who used to write for The Wall Street Journal and Harper's. After almost eight year's of the Obama presidensity, Mr Franks gave up on the Prez's "politics of hope".

He discovered that the US of A was being run, not by classical liberals fighting for the betterment of the common man, but by a class of progessional elites and technocratic experts, who have what Mr Franks calls "social authority". 

"Although we [the 'common' people] are the subjects are the subjects of ptheir[ diagnoses and prescriptions," he writes, "the group to which professionals ultimately answer is not the public but their peers.... They listen mainly to one another. The professions are autonomous; they are not required to heed voices from below their circle of expertise."

Mr Franks points out that the Democrats have done little to advance traditional liberal goals. They occupied the White house for 16 of the 24 years (to 2015, the date of his writing), and yet the decline of the middle class has only accelerated. Corpoorate and cultural elitism eclipsed the Democrats' supposed middle-class commitment. 

That's why, in "Listen, Liberal!", he calls the Democrats back to their historic goals, and predicts that unless they returned to the politics of the man in the street, they would lose the 2016 election. Which they did. And because they learned no lessons from their defeat, they would have lost the 2020 election had it not been rigged in the greatest political theft in American history.

But the Dimocrats didn't learn anything from their stolen victory. If anything, their policies got worse under the Prez's hand-picked and ill-fated successor. Elitism morphed into wokeism, leaving ordinary Americans in last place behind not just the elites but all the special interest groups the Dims pandered to in the name of diversity, equity and inclusion, hoping that the DEI types would keep them in power. 

The party of Mr and Mrs Clintons, Mr and Mrs Obama, Mr and "Dr" Biden, and Ms Harris and some white man, is now agonizing over its dim (geddit?) prospects for the future. Those who take helm of the presently rudderless ship would do well to read "Listen, Liberal!"... twice! And repeat if necessary.

Note to Canadian Liberals: The same happened to the Liberal Party of Canada, in spades, under the leadership of Blackie McBlackface, the heroic advocate of wokeism who is due to resign this month to avoid having the imprint of a big real Canadian boot etched permanently on his derrière. 

Only a fool... or a Trudeau Liberal... could fail to see the parallels with the fate of Obama, who, by the way, publicly endorsed Trudeau in the greatest liberal bromance of recent years.

Walt's one-and-only copy of this excellent book, gently used, autographed on request, is available on eBid.