Just finished "Listen Liberal!" by Thomas Frank. It was not bad, a little repetitive.
- the Democrats have completely abandoned the working class, and now have open contempt for them - they turned instead to the 9% just below the 1% and have thoroughly converted them from Republicanism - the self-congratulatory intelligentsia are motivated mostly by their own feelings of superiority, morally and intellectually
Frank has been invaluable in helping me understand the changing dynamics of the Democratic Party over my lifetime. Here's the symbolic fulcrum. In [his new book, The People, No] book Frank turns to the work of historian Jefferson Cowie (the author of Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class) to provide chilling additional detail to the Fonda vs. Fonda story. Cowie quotes Easy Riders creenwriter Terry Southern on what it meant for the stock rednecks in the pickup truck to blow the shit out of the Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper characters: Southern said that he understood the film’s horrifying final scene as, “‘an indictment of blue-collar America, the people I thought were responsible for the Vietnam War.’” “Which is to say,” Frank resumes, “Southern thought the people serving in the Vietnam War were the people who got us into the Vietnam War.” And thus did a new generation of college-educated and morally narcissistic American liberals reimagine the salt-of-the-earth Joads as deplorables, as irredeemables — “as fascists” (pp. 190-191).
- the Democrats have completely abandoned the working class, and now have open contempt for them
- they turned instead to the 9% just below the 1% and have thoroughly converted them from Republicanism
- the self-congratulatory intelligentsia are motivated mostly by their own feelings of superiority, morally and intellectually