Thomas Frank

EPISODE 171 With Thomas Frank

Welcome to Richard Helppie’s Common Bridge. The fiercely nonpartisan discussion that seeks policy solutions to issues of the day. Rich is a successful entrepreneur in the technology, health, and finance space. He and his wife, Leslie, are also philanthropists with interest in civic and artistic endeavors with a primary focus on medically and educationally under-served children.

And welcome to the Common Bridge. This is part one of a two-part interview that Rich had with author Thomas Frank. It ran a little long, so we’re going to run part one now and part two next week at our normal drop time. So we join their conversation in progress.

Rich Helppie:

Well, hello everyone and welcome to the Common Bridge. Happy that you’ve joined us today. We’ve got a great guest, Thomas Frank. You’re going to hear a terrific story from someone with a really long view on some of the political machinations and the history of the country and where we stand today. We’re going to talk about the history of Populism, some historical parallels, the state of the two major political parties today. Probably touch a little bit on how the reporting industry world is processing all this. And frankly, where does the average citizen fit in? All of us just trying to lead a decent life. Tom is a renowned author. He’s a commentator, a columnist, historian, and an analyst. We’re going to talk a lot about his professional background and some of the recent writings he’s had. But first let’s say hello. Tom, welcome to the Common Bridge.

Tom Frank:

Rich, it’s great to be here.

Rich Helppie:

Our audience likes to know a little bit about the guest, so maybe tell us a little bit about where were your early days and some of your academic prep, a little bit on your professional work.

Tom Frank:

Sure thing, so I’m born and raised in Kansas City, but Kansas City is in both Missouri and Kansas. I bet some of your listeners know that. And I’m from the Kansas side, I’m from Johnson County, Kansas. And so I grew up there, went to the public schools and went through life, did all the things that you do-went to college. I went to graduate school, studied history, meant to become a historian. And I got a PhD in the early nineties and the sort of job market for the humanities was just in a state of collapse at the time. And it’s only gotten worse since then. And so the joke is that I always say I went into journalism for the money because it paid more than doing what we call adjunct work, which is what I was doing. I ran a magazine that I started called The Baffler Magazine. It was sort of a literary journal of social commentary. And this was in my Chicago days. I lived in Chicago, Illinois, which turns out to be a wonderful place from which to view the world. And your bridge motif-one of my friends when I lived in Chicago was a guy called Studs Terkel, a great man, one of the truly great Americans. And his first book was called Division Street America. And the picture on the cover was of a bridge over the Chicago River on Division Street. I think they’ve since renamed the bridge for Studs, but I always think of that because that was his motif as well.

Rich Helppie:

There are some great newspaper people in Chicago, Mike Royko, Studs Terkel.

Tom Frank:

Mike Royko. I never met him, but I was a big admirer of his, there’s a great man.

Rich Helppie:

There’s some good-Cas, I believe it is, that’s writing today or Casner.

Tom Frank:

I don’t live there anymore. I live in Bethesda, Maryland these days. And so I’m not in Chicago any longer. And I’ve written a whole bunch of books, a lot of them about politics, and to the point where I’m really sick of it. But you know what, here’s one of the great things, so I’m in the suburbs of Washington DC. The thing about politics is there’s this endless bubbling cauldron of ridiculous stuff going on that you can write about. And that’s one of the reasons journalists-there’s a lot of reasons why journalists are drawn to it, but that’s one of them. And I always say, I’ve got to give a give up on this and go back to doing what I used to do, which is writing about art and culture and things like that. But politics is just so fascinating. And so I’m here in the suburban DC now, and politics is all anybody talks about in this town. And we’ll get into that later, but just one last point, everybody, everybody I know in this city, except me, has met Joe Biden.

Rich Helppie:

Well, he’s been there a long time, so that kind of makes sense.

Tom Frank:

Exactly, exactly.

Rich Helppie:

Touched a lot of people, and we are going to get into that, part of it is that the reporting industry-I refuse to call it reporters or journalism anymore-but the businesses that churn out things, they want to talk about the inside game. And what we do on the Common Bridge is we try to talk about policy. We try to talk about what’s real. It doesn’t matter if there’s a filibuster or not a filibuster, where’s the healthcare bill? What are we doing about borders? What are we doing about guns, and income inequality, and climate change and everything? They want to talk about everything but the real policies. And that’s what the Common Bridge is about. We talk policy, we talk about solutions. And also our brand promise is this, that every episode, every person should find something they don’t like, no matter where they are on the political spectrum. And after reading your stuff, I think this is a lay up.

Tom Frank:

Wow, did you ever come to the right guy.

Rich Helppie:

Yes, we did.

Tom Frank:

I can make everyone unhappy-left, right, and center. We’ve got something to piss everyone off.

Rich Helppie:

Exactly. So we’re going to have some fun with this. Your background is a writer. I want to make sure our audience hears about that. A lot of people say, hey, this is a liberal writer, what you’ve been writing about with Populism. And I really wanting to focus though, as we get deeper into this today, on your latest book, The People, No, and that’s not the people know-K-N-O-W, that’s the people comma N-O, and also a recent column you wrote for the Guardian that, I’m going to guess, maybe cost you some friends and perhaps some fans, the title-Liberals Want To Blame Right Wing Misinformation For Our Problems. Now, if you want to stop there, you would have had half the audience, but then you added the words “get real”.

Tom Frank:

Well, so journalists do not write their own headlines and I did not write that headline, but that captures the spirit of it.

Rich Helppie:

Well you owe somebody a coffee or a beer because that’s a good one. I do want to talk about the reaction to those recent publications a little bit, how you got your conclusions. Time permitting, maybe a little speculation what comes next, and I’m sure we’re going to talk about things that’ll educate our audience. Maybe we’ll touch a little bit on policies or maybe just help people understand how to process what we’re seeing today. And when we think about the books you’ve written, one of your early works was called The Conquest of Cool in 1997. And in reading your homepage, you talk about the link between pseudo-radicalism of the elites with a rebel culture in an unholy union.

Tom Frank:

It’s happening all over again, isn’t it? It never really stopped. I mean, it comes and goes, and we’re in another sort of a hot moment for it. So The Conquest of Cool was about something that fascinated me. This is the 1990s. I was writing a lot about rock music at the time, I was friends with a lot of musicians. And one of the sort of things that we would complain about was how commercial culture was really interested in what we were doing and how they were always trying to sort of grab it and take it away from us. And I decided to write about the history of that. And the great moment for youth culture in America of course, is the 1960s. And I decided to study how the advertising industry reacted to the counterculture in the 1960s. I know, it’s kind of a weird question, right? But once you start digging, it’s fascinating. The advertising industry was absolutely in love with the counterculture and the idea of rebellious youth, of young people engaged in some kind of uprising. They were really, really, really into this. Now this is not to say the advertising industry was like part of the new left or something like that, but they very quickly sort of appropriated the symbols and the sounds of the counterculture for reasons of their own. And I thought it was important to try to understand those reasons. And here we are, it’s all happening all over again.

Rich Helppie:

Indeed it is. And I’m going to skip forward, you wrote another book. We just don’t have time to go into all of those, The One Market Under God in 2000 about the idiocies on Wall Street.

Tom Frank:

The great bull market of the late nineties.

Rich Helppie:

I was running a micro-cap public company at that time. And you and I could probably swap a few stories, but things really got real for you in 2004, you authored a book called What’s The Matter With Kansas. Interestingly, you said that was your first foray into politics. And I loved the question, why do so many decent average people support politics that does them such obvious harm?

Tom Frank:

Again, it’s a great question. So that’s the setup, is that question. And I had been thinking about that for a long time, because I’m a historically minded person. And when you study American history, or the way they used to teach American history, one of the important strains in it is the rise of reform-of the organized labor, these various protest movements, big strikes in the 19th century. And then you have Populism and you have the progressive movement. Then you have the New Deal and you achieve the middle-class society. And so I’m coming up in the eighties and nineties and everything is going in reverse and we’re taking the middle-class society apart. And the very people that built it, that did all these great things in our past or their descendants anyway, are the ones who are doing it. And so I was puzzled by that in a historical sense, but then there was also a personal element to it for me, because as I said, I grew up in Kansas, went to the public schools of that state. And in the late nineties, Kansas got embroiled in a huge battle over the theory of evolution, this culture war over the theory of evolution. And I was at the time living in Chicago and I just couldn’t believe it. This was embarrassing to me. And I couldn’t imagine that my home state had done this, had gone in this direction and had picked this weird culture war fight. And so I decided I would get to the bottom of it. And this was my investigation of it. And how you had a conservative movement that was embracing these culture war battles that just seemed so zany. But to look into it I wanted to interview the leaders. I wanted to see how they made their case and why they were successful. And it was a fascinating story. It was absolutely fascinating. Now, one thing I should tell people, everybody sees the title and they assume that I’m just making fun of these people. I do have a lot of fun with them, that is true. Now I do have some fun with-the first part of it is me sort of boggled at how strange everything is. But ultimately I tried really hard to see eye to eye with these people. And I think I kind of succeeded, and these are the people I grew up with. I don’t dislike them. I’m not super judgmental towards them. I am fascinated by the historical. I think it’s a political mistake. I’m against their politics. And I think they’re pushing in the wrong direction, but these are ultimately, at the end of the day a lot of these are good people. That was an important part of the book. No one remembers that part anymore.

Rich Helppie:

I’ve traveled extensively through the country, hitchhiking when I was younger, in business, and for pleasure. And we’re a country filled with compassionate, generous, good people, at all, social strata coming from all races, all whether they got here on the Mayflower or they came last week. It’s a lot of good people, but we’ve got this political overlay that is really puzzling. But I think that that book in in ‘04 probably got you off the George W. Bush Christmas card list, I’m guessing, because the conservative punked the nation and then to make sure he didn’t put you back on that, you wrote The Wrecking Crew.

Tom Frank:

The Wrecking Crew is a very Washington DC book. It’s about how these conservative administrations, Reagan and Bush mainly, how they manage the machinery of government. And the funny thing about that book is I feel like Donald Trump and company used it as a shop manual, like how to run the government, hey, here’s a book all about that. Let’s use this.

Rich Helppie:

There’s a case to be made for that. And then things are going pretty well. I think the left wing of America probably felt pretty comfortable with you and probably looking forward to getting your next book in 2016. And then you wrote something called Listen Liberal. And I think some folks have opined, maybe it should have been Listen Liberal! with an exclamation point. And you pose the question, why has American liberalism been so unsuccessful at halting the deterioration of the middle-class, and how did they get out of touch with what used to be the base? So I was raised in a blue collar town and my public education was paid for in large part by two Ford plants. And there was a middle-class standard of living.

Tom Frank:

Where did you grow up?

Rich Helppie:

I grew up with a town called Wayne, Michigan, which is Wayne County, straight down Michigan Avenue from the city of Detroit, 15 miles from the old Tiger stadium, solidly blue collar.

Tom Frank:

Well, that’s who we were. I just saw a statistic the other day. It was in a podcast I was listening to about professional basketball. And one of the players that they were talking about had grown up in Flint in the seventies. And they said that at the time the median income in Flint was higher than it was in San Francisco.

Rich Helppie:

US auto companies had a dominant worldwide market share, a post-war 1945 America had the only factories on the planet that were modern and not destroyed. And consumers had money in their pockets because they were working during war, but things were rationed. They couldn’t spend it. So from 1945, really until around 1980, when the Japanese car companies started landing, things were really, really good. But one of the things that changed after that period is that the rank and file of the union workers became increasingly more conservative and more Republican, while their union leadership remained Democratic. And that was a split. And as we talk about the current political situation, many of my friends that are in blue collar world today, my best friends in the world, guys, I’ve known my entire life, they were in early for Trump. It said, to your point about why were American liberals not successful in halting the decline of the middle class, a lot of them reached the point they were fed up. They were willing to try anything because they just felt like they were being left behind.

Tom Frank:

That is absolutely right. So the point that I made in Listen Liberal was really straightforward. It’s that, and it was easy to make, which is that the Democratic party, it pays lip service to unions and it courts union leaders from time to time. But what it really cares about is a white collar professional elite of this country, that’s who they really care about. And they say this, if you do the research, which I did, and you just dig around in their magazines and their publications and read the speeches of Bill Clinton, that kind of thing, they’re very open about this. That is who they care about. Bill Clinton was very fond of these trade agreements that de-industrialized big parts of America, including the part of America where I grew up, the Midwest-well, where you grew up as well. And they knew that was going to happen, but they didn’t care. Anyhow, the Democratic party is no longer what we think it is, not what we think it is.

Rich Helppie:

To punctuate that, Hillary Clinton, when they were trying to drive through their healthcare bill said, I can’t be concerned with every under-capitalized business in America. And with all of the recovery we’re looking at right now getting past the pandemic, hopefully, I’m not hearing anything about the opportunity to start a business, to be independent, it’s all about, you need a big check from a big place. I think that really leads me to your current book. The People, No, and again, that’s The People comma and N-O, came out in 2020, and fair warning for our listeners, the people who think that politics is binary or that the conditions of today is something we just arrived at in the moment, you probably want to slow down this podcast. You’ve all known my view that the two major political parties are dysfunctional. They are very good at fighting each other, terrible at actually addressing the issues of the day. And they’re being fueled by entertainment instead of news. And Tom, you really dove into this. And I have to tell you, I really enjoyed the book, drawing the historical parallels with other periods of Populism. You drew parallels from the 1890s, 1950, 2016, maybe a little bit about the 1970s. Has the mission been lost or bolstered?

Tom Frank:

Great question, Rich. It’s a big question though. So first it starts with the fact that, so as we mentioned earlier, I’m from Kansas and Kansas has only a couple of things in its history to be really proud of. And one of them is that it’s the place where they invented the word Populism and also the political party-it was a third party movement. It was a sort of a left-wing, farmer, labor movement in the 1890s. And the word-its formal name was The People’s Party, but the nickname, Populist, was invented by some guys in Kansas actually riding on a train between Kansas City and Topeka one day. And Populism became identified with the state of Kansas. And whenever somebody in those days wanted to make fun of Kansas or make fun of Populism, they would make fun of people from Kansas, that kind of thing. People from Kansas were considered like crazy radicals, the opposite of what they’re considered today. So that word means something very definite for me and for a lot of people from Kansas, they still remember what that was. They know what that movement was. And when that word started getting used in the last couple of years, as a synonym for racist demagogue, which you hear all the time now, I mean, that’s the only way it’s used now, that really rubbed me the wrong way. And I decided I would-because it wasn’t that long ago that people used it to mean something very different. They meant someone on the left who was really focused on economic issues. Barack Obama, I found in my research, used the word that way to describe himself. Jimmy Carter described himself that way. I don’t think either of them was really being very accurate when they did, but they did use the word that way. And then all of a sudden, now the word has changed. And so I decided to do a history of what the word originally meant and how it changed and going back to starting with the 1890s and the original Populist movement.

What I discovered is that there is an important Populist theme in American life that comes straight out of the Populous movement. If you allow that these are the guys who made up the word and they have a right to define it, what they meant by it is a trans-racial movement of working class people focused on economic issues. That’s what the original Populists were. They were pretty advanced for their time, even though they were not highly educated people, they were ordinary Americans. It was a very, very, very working class movement. I mean, they said this all the time, this is a movement of ordinary people. They tended to be suspicious, not of ideas, but suspicious of orthodoxy, of the people in charge of American life and in charge of American intellectual life, meaning university professors, economists that kind of thing.

Rich Helppie:

Your book talks about the expert class or the learning class and those group having a disdain for the populace who were, might be more farmers, factory workers and the like.

Tom Frank:

Yes, and this is a constant, this goes all through the history of this movement.

Rich Helppie:

And also the other thing that I was struck with, is that the Populists in 1890, they were condemned as quote, “threatening democracy” because they were suspicious of this expert class, and that all of the elements that aligned against them-at that time, the Republican party for McKinley, the Wall Street banks, the clergy, they all kind of closed ranks to keep a, I don’t know, an orthodoxy and not [cross talk]

Tom Frank:

Yes, it’s a fascinating story. What happened was they were indeed regarded as a threat to democracy because they were too democratic. Democracy meant the people who owned America got to determine what America was, and the Populists, they were regarded as like the French Revolution. Political cartoons from the period would often depict Populism wearing one of those red caps-French Revolution-and they were going to set up a guillotine in Wall Street or something like that and they were regarded as the problem. With Populism is it was too democratic, it was anarchy. This was before communism. So they couldn’t call them that. So the images all came from the French Revolution.

Rich Helppie:

That was like their version of Occupy Wall Street, except with a guillotine.

Tom Frank:

Well, it never happened. It was just an image, but the Populists did hate Wall Street banks, they talked about it all the time. So this came to fascinate me even more than Populism itself. So the Populist movement, the Populous tradition, I should say, in American life, you can trace that from the 1890s, through the 1930s, through the 1970s, right up to someone like Bernie Sanders, who is very much in that tradition. But what really fascinated me were the people who hated Populism. Historians, generally they understand the Populous tradition in American life, but this anti-populace tradition, this is something that no one has written about before. The people who came together against Populism in the 1890s are very, very similar to a phenomenon of today that we’ll talk about in a second. And I’m sure once I start describing what happened, your listeners will know immediately what I’m talking about.

So it’s 1896, Populism is on the rise, it’s been coming now for six years, and all of a sudden, one of the two major parties, the Democratic party, appears to have been captured by Populism. They nominate this guy, William Jennings Bryan, who talks like a Populist. He’s not really all there with the Populists on the issues, but he’s with them on one big issue, which has to do with the currency. He wanted a kind of currency reform to get us off the gold standard. The sort of establishment of America reacted with a kind of hysteria. They went crazy and they started denouncing this guy, William Jennings Bryan, and what they called Populism, in the most outrageous way, calling Populists the worst names they could come up with trying to psychoanalyze them. And so it was a coming together of the American elite. Like you said earlier, it was the wealthy, of course, the Republican party and the Wall Street money, the millionaires of the time, the Vanderbilts and the Astors, and the Carnegies, these kind of people coming together with America’s most educated elite, the presidents of universities, the leading economists of the time. The leading academic of the time was a man called William Graham Sumner, he was at Yale University, wrote a whole series of articles, denouncing Populism. Psychologists, who would psychoanalyze-this is in the very early days of psychology so they didn’t really know what they were talking about, but they tried to understand Populism as a form of pathology, as a form of mental illness. Society preachers-and society preachers were a big deal in the 1890s-came together denouncing Populism from the pulpit. And of course the most important element was the press. The press, which is by and large, at that time, owned by wealthy individuals who identify with the business elite and they can’t believe what they’re seeing. They pick up their pencils and they write the most incredible bloodthirsty attacks on Populism in the press, in American newspapers. And so I have a good time in the book quoting from these New York newspaper editorials, denouncing Populism in the most extreme terms.

Rich Helppie:

As I’m reading the book, if you took the date off of it-I think I saw this over the last four years.

Tom Frank:

So that’s the flash of recognition that goes off for me when I’m writing this book, I’m like, wait a second, I’ve seen this before, this is happening right now. And it’s the same in a lot of ways, a very similar phenomenon, a coming together of the elite. But what I discovered is that this has happened repeatedly in our history. And it happened again in the 1930s when Franklin Roosevelt was president. So Roosevelt got elected in 1932, it was this overwhelming landslide. And at the time people didn’t really know what to expect from Franklin Roosevelt. He was clearly a liberal. He clearly had this idea called the New Deal, but we didn’t really know what that entailed. And people were really glad to get a new administration in there. The country in 1932 was in the depths of despair, that was the worst year of the Depression. Get that guy Hoover out, get this new guy in and let’s see what he can do. And by 1936, everybody knew what the New Deal was. He took us off the gold standard, which the original Populists wanted us to do. He had all of these federal farm programs. He had all of these federal work programs, like the WPA hiring unemployed people, competing with private industry, jacking up wages by hiring unemployed people. In fact, the minimum wage was a Roosevelt innovation. He had the social security, the old age, retirement security. This was shocking and scary to a lot of people. And he was encouraging people to join labor unions, and labor organizing took off in the 1930s. You’re from Michigan, you know that’s part of the story.

Rich Helppie:

Very proud of that history in Michigan.

Tom Frank:

And they fought hard for it, for what we enjoy today. You look at the big sit-down strike in Flint in ‘37, I mean, that was momentous. Anyhow, this is all happening under Roosevelt. And in 1936, you have the same kind of thing. The business community comes together with leading academics, high society people, to denounce Roosevelt. And of course, again, the big part of the burden is borne by the newspaper industry. As in 1896, they are still owned by very wealthy people who identify with business, by and large. I’m thinking of the owner of the Chicago Tribune, a man called Colonel McCormick, who is-again, I had a lot of fun quoting from his editorials, which I believe a lot of them he wrote himself and which were just-he would print them on page one of the Chicago Tribune, these incredible denunciations of Roosevelt. But they had a couple of innovations in the thirties, they had radio so they were able to blanket the country with radio denunciations of Roosevelt. But it’s the same thing. It’s this coming together of elite groups to suppress this man who is very much in the Populist tradition. That time it didn’t work because this country-for a lot of reasons. They come together and denounce Roosevelt and the New Deal as being crazy and saying it empowers ordinary people. It’s the triumph of the unfit over society’s rightful rulers. Well, this sort of anti-democratic language does not work in 1936. It did work in 1896 and the Republicans were able to defeat Populism and in 1896 to really crush it. But by 1936, that kind of language doesn’t work anymore. You can’t just tell Americans they need to get back in line and they need to sort of bow down to their betters, so that stuff doesn’t work anymore. But the anti-populace tradition is alive and well. And here’s the funny thing, it’s still going on. As I was writing this book, I’m looking around me and there’s all of these articles in prestigious American magazines saying that the problem with America is too much democracy, that people who aren’t educated think they should have a say in our national affairs. And they think they know better than experts, and they need to get back in line. They even start using the word Populism in 2016 to describe both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, using it, I think, wrongly, they used it wrongly on these other two occasions also, this word is often abused. It’s a way for society’s elites to say what they dislike about democracy.

Rich Helppie:

At the risk of someone going this is a Trump support-it’s not, I’ve consistently said about Donald Trump, not qualified to be the president of the United States, not interested in learning the job and massive personal issues. We will do two episodes, we’ll just keep rolling here because some of the, I think the Democrats made the situation worse. And I know that many of people that would be considered Populists, they rejected out of hand, the establishment of both parties. And now I look today and I say, we’ve got Wall Street, elected Democrats, and Big Tech, all aligning saying, not only are we going to control things, but we’re going to pick who gets to talk.

Tom Frank:

Isn’t that, that’s a scary aspect of this.

Rich Helppie:

And I read it in the book, the HR One bill, that is a horrible bill for a lot of reasons, but they talk about, well, these social media platforms are universal, and it’s like, well, wait a minute, they can’t be universal if you can kick people off.

Tom Frank:

That’s right. That’s the famous Common Carrier Rule, but we don’t need to get into the details of that. But you’re exactly right. If it’s like the phone system, I mean, they can’t eavesdrop on your phone call and cut you off if they don’t like what you say, that’s not how it works. So if you’re going to make the system universal, then it has to be universal. It has to pretty much be open to everyone. There’s all sorts of calls out there. Now we’re in like year four of constant state of hysteria. In some ways I include myself in that. I was very concerned when Donald Trump got elected. I also, to some degree, I warned about this. This is what Listen Liberal, my book, which came out in 2016, was about the Democrats vulnerability to exactly this kind of attack. I took a couple of victory laps when he got elected, but it was also, look, I have a family. I love this country. I don’t want a man like that sitting in the in the oval office, it was very frightening to me. But what you just said turned out to be exactly the case. This man had no business being president, was not really interested in the job, never seemed to learn, and had many opportunities to step up and show what he could do and didn’t take them. I mean, the most obvious one being COVID, this country was crying out for leadership and this guy doesn’t deliver.

Rich Helppie:

Well he literally thought it was a reality show for himself. They actually, if he would’ve had advisors that he listened to, basically had three things, we’re going to fight this thing on three fronts. Number one, we’re going to get a vaccine out, which by the way, they did; number two, we’re going to make sure that the hospitals are supplied with everything they need-PPE and equipment and beds, which they did. And then the third leg is we’re going to make sure people who have been harmed by this pandemic or the reaction to the pandemic through no fault of their own, they’re not going to lose their house or their credit rating, which they did. But instead of concentrating on any crisis management:  Where are we? What are we doing? How are we measuring it? How are we moving through? But he just displayed that he thought it was about him.

Tom Frank:

You think of, we were talking about Roosevelt a second ago, you think about Roosevelt during World War II, being reassuring, going on the radio, talking us through this disaster, Pearl Harbor, talking us through the Depression, letting us know what he was doing, that it was going to be okay. And Trump, it was beyond him. And you’re right that they did a lot of the right things. They handled the economic side of it really well, I was a little surprised by that, but no, he was just, his leadership was just so astonishingly poor.

Rich Helppie:

I think vacuum’s the word you’re looking for, because it just wasn’t there. And I’ve got this view that the nomination of Donald Trump was the end of the establishment of the Republican party. The election of Donald Trump should have been the end of the establishment of the Democratic party. Did the establishment of the Democratic party fight off Bernie Sanders, who I think is as close to a Populist as you could get, to survive or is there another wave coming? The end of the anti-populous forces of history, when you studied them, did they play the race and class divisions the way we’re seeing those splits today?

Tom Frank:

Wow, so many good questions there, Rich. The last one, first. The race and class divisions, oh my God, yes. But not the way that it’s being done today. I mean, very much the opposite. So they played on those divisions in a sort of racist way. So one of the very interesting things about Populism, and historians are fascinated by this, is that it was strong in three regions of America:  the far West, which didn’t have a lot of people in it; the Great Plains area-Kansas, Dakotas, Nebraska, Texas; and then in the South. And these are all areas with a lot of farmers. And Populism was very strong in the South. The South at the time was very poor. Everyone was a farmer, but there was a very strong ruling elite who were identified at the time. This is a white ruling elite planter class who were identified with the democratic party at the time. They called themselves Bourbon Democrats. Populism went into the South and actually grew up in the South and said, this is our appeal to voters of the South. This is in the 1890s now. And in a lot of southern states, blacks could still vote. They hadn’t been disenfranchised yet. None of that stuff had happened yet. I mean, it had happened a little bit in some of the states, but not in all of them. And so Populism went into these southern states.

Southern politics at the time was dominated by racist appeals to white people. It was this idea-they called it White Solidarity. The idea that the only thing that mattered was the color of your skin. And so white people had to stick together as a race, show solidarity as a race, poor white farmers voting for the party that was controlled by the people who owned the South-that’s White Solidarity.

Populism went into the South and said, no, your interests as a farmer are more important than your interests as a white person. And on that basis, we’re going to reach out to black voters whose interests are the same as white farmers and reach out to them and try to build a coalition based on class interests rather than on racial interests. And this was absolutely shocking, as you might imagine this challenged the Southern system at its very heart. And things like this had happened before in the South, there was a kind of a constant threat beneath the surface that poor whites and poor blacks might get together and realize their common interests.

Rich Helppie:

Our ancestral history, you’re a person of this color or you’re a person of this heritage. You have to think this way, we’re going to put you in this box with everyone else. And don’t talk to these other guys. And I look at that and go, okay, well, who wants us to not talk to folks like that? We all agree that our government today is not doing a very good job. And frankly, everybody’s more than concerned about the surrendering of privacy and very worried about the amount of power that the big tech monopolies wield.

Tom Frank:

So let me finish this story. And then I’ll come to that. Basically the southern elite came down on Populism like a ton of bricks with all kinds of racist appeals. They basically defeated them everywhere except in North Carolina, that was the only southern state where the Populists won. And they made an alliance with the Republican party, which was a small party. That was a party that black voters tended to be loyal to. And they came together and they won and they elected a governor, sent people to Congress, US Senator, et cetera, et cetera, took over the state legislature, all that stuff. And they did a lot of the things that Populists do. They allowed local home rule in cities around North Carolina, which meant that suddenly in areas where blacks were in the majority, they were electing city governments and stuff like that. And this was just intolerable. And the local elite came at them in the year 1898 with something they called-this is famous but it’s something people don’t like to talk about because it’s very uncomfortable, what happened next-it was called the White Supremacy Campaign. They actually called it that, the White Supremacy Campaign. And they brought in all of these racist speakers from all around the south, they built a militia, a racist militia. They were called the Red Shirts. A winner, I know, it was like the Brown Shirts, but they were called the Red Shirts. They went around intimidating voters, shooting voters, frightening people. And then the campaign of hysteria, in this case racist hysteria, directed against Populism and against the Republicans. And they did it, they won. This was in 1898 and they take control of the state legislature and they do two things immediately. The first one is they disenfranchise black voters and a lot of poor whites. This is the beginning of Jim Crow. And so people ask, where did Jim Crow come from? It didn’t just develop, it wasn’t, hasn’t been around forever. It was developed deliberately to make sure that Populism never happened again.

Rich Helppie:

Separate the races.

Tom Frank:

And make sure they are not friends, make sure that they don’t get back together and try this again. And this is, I’m generalizing it, in some southern states that happened before Populism, in some states after Populism, but in a bunch of them, they did this deliberately to stop Populism. And they took the vote away from black voters all over the South. And it’s a terrible story. And in North Carolina, it actually ended in a really bloody manner where in one of the cities there, in Wilmington, North Carolina, the local Democrats armed themselves and marched into the city and they had a Republican mayor and they chased him out of office. They had a Populist police chief, they chased him out of town. They went through the black part of town shooting and burning. There was a black newspaper in the town. They burnt, it, killed a bunch of people. And they took over the government of this town. This town had-it’s a city actually-had an elected government and they overthrew it. And it’s apparently the only time there’s been a successful military coup in America since the civil war. It’s the craziest story. I didn’t even know this story until I started writing the book. And I know it’s an uncomfortable story and people don’t like to talk about it, but you can find the research on it. It’s out there if you dig. And it’s an incredible tale. Anyhow, that’s what happened to Populism. It’s ironic that the word that these guys invented to describe themselves, Populist, that this word later became, they flipped the meaning of it and made it a synonym for racism.

Rich Helppie:

Two other quick things. When I hear you going through that, and I can’t help but going back to the 2016 election and its aftermath. And we agree that we ended up with a bad president. The thing that struck me is that following the 2016 election, there was like a doubling down. This was the party that said a certain part of your voters are deplorable, they’re irredeemable, they’re not worth appealing to. And following the election instead of saying, we missed something, we need to go to Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, we missed something, there was like, almost like a doubling down of, well, wait a minute, they really proved how dumb they are and how misinformed and how emotional, because it wasn’t a problem with we, the Democrats, it was a problem with you, the voters, aren’t good enough or smart enough to vote for us.

Tom Frank:

People said that. They said exactly what you just described, that you are not exaggerating. There’s a whole chapter of the book-people know-the last chapter of the book is filled with quotations from leading pundits and thinkers saying exactly that, that the problem is not that the Democrats failed the people, it’s that the people failed the Democrats.

This is a good stopping point for part one of Rich’s interview with Tom Frank, we’ll drop episode two at this time next week. In the meantime,

And welcome back to the Common Bridge. This is part two, the continuation and the final part of Rich’s interview with author Thomas Frank. When we join them in conversation, Rich and Thomas are talking about the failure of the Democratic party after the 2016 election and what they probably missed and maybe what they should have done. So now we join them in conversation.

Rich Helppie:

The thing that struck me is that following the 2016 election, there was like a doubling down. This was the party that said a certain part of your voters are deplorable, they’re irredeemable, they’re not worth appealing to. And following the election, instead of saying, hey, we missed something, we need to go to Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. There was almost like a doubling down of, well, wait a minute, they really proved how dumb they are and how misinformed and how emotional, because it wasn’t a problem with we, the Democrats, it was a problem with you, the voters, aren’t good enough or smart enough to vote for it.

Tom Frank:

People said that, they said exactly what you just described, that you are not exaggerating. There’s a whole chapter of The People, No, it’s the last chapter of the book, filled with quotations from leading pundits and thinkers saying exactly that. That the problem is not that the Democrats failed the people, it’s that the people failed the Democrats, which is like, that is so upside down. I just want to take a step back. Hillary Clinton made the famous or the notorious deplorables remark and right away figured out that she’d put her foot in it, that this is not something that a politician who’s counting on-in a democracy this is not something that a politician should say-and she tried to take it back. You remember, she tried to get out of it and apologize for it. What’s fascinating to me is that so many of the thinkers and supporters of the Democratic party were like, no, that was exactly right.

Rich Helppie:

It was a prepared remark. And she did it twice.

Tom Frank:

When you say doubled down on it, I think they’ve done considerably more than that. It’s like people want to identify, not just to say that Donald Trump was a bad president, which I think he was, but that people who voted for him were sinful and were depraved in some way for having done that. And I think a lot of them probably are bad people. But there’s 70 million of them, but I know personally people who voted for him, I know they’re not bad people. They may have been deceived. They voted for a guy who was a lousy president. I didn’t vote that way, but to attack the people for making a wrong decision, I think is such a strange turn. And yet, like you say, doubling down on it, the Democrats then proceeded to invent all sorts of excuses for why they lost in 2016, rather than look this thing in the face and say, look, we lost Wisconsin. That one really blew my mind because-I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin. This is a pretty liberal state. This is a state with a very liberal history. This is the home of the LaFollett family, et cetera. Michigan, that one hurt, Pennsylvania, all of these things, Iowa, this astonished me that this happened. It was obviously a wake up call to the Democratic party. Look, read Listen Liberal, see where you’ve gone wrong. How have you lost the confidence of these people that used to be your rank and file used to be your core support. This was your base. This was the base of the party. And you’ve lost them.

Rich Helppie:

If I could pile on to a little bit of what you’re saying, then I will tell you this, in 2016, I didn’t vote for either of them. I wrote myself in because I thought they’d make a terrible president. And I lost by the way. The number of people that voted for Donald Trump, they thought, what more could go wrong? A big middle finger, all those reports that you cite about how they doubled down on insulting the very voters. And then I kind of look at this today where we have this speech suppression and a misinformation campaign coming out around what’s in voting bills and the like, I think that’s just the next step.

Tom Frank:

It’s closely related because if you’re-by the way, and I want to exempt Joe Biden from everything that I’m about to say, and there’s a bunch of Democrats who I really like-Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders. I mean, I don’t know about Biden, jury is still out on him. I mean, he’s brand new as president, but there’s a lot of Democrats…

Rich Helppie:

He’s the fresh face of politics.

Tom Frank:

Exactly. Fresh face 78 year old. Anyhow, but if you’re a party and you’ve just been handed this this sort of shocking defeat. Remember every pollster said that Hillary was going to win. The New York Times said it was 95%. You remember all those things. And so then the unthinkable happens. And if you are determined to not look in the mirror and not do a post-mortem and not figure out where you went wrong, but instead you’re going to do these other things, you’re going to blame Russia, you’re going to blame all sorts of external actors.

Rich Helppie:

You and I could probably go on for hours about that because I thought of the Democrats-and I said it over and over again-I said, if the Democrats would’ve just acted like adults and played it straight, people would have seen how bad Trump was and the fact they didn’t, they just gave Trump cover. And it’s all it did. And when you come out like the non whistleblower-there is no whistleblower, none existed. If you look at the document that Adam Schiff brought forward, it is overly lawyered. It didn’t come from some strange guy that thought he saw a problem. But the Russia piece…

Tom Frank:

Some of it was true. I mean, the Russians did buy ads on Facebook, we know that. The ads are actually kind of interesting if you want to look at them, but to blame the entire election on that is ridiculous. And they never did show that Trump was a Russian agent or whatever the hell it was that they were trying-the collusion.

Rich Helppie:

They had a resource available.

Tom Frank:

I’ll tell you something. I never wrote about that. All those years when that was the only news story, I never wrote about it, it just was not my thing. And I was like, this doesn’t ring true to me, it feels like someone trying to invent an excuse.

Rich Helppie:

When I watched that, I said, well, with the amount of money, the time, the access, including breach of client-attorney privilege, being able to give out non-prosecution agreements, if there’s something there they’re going to find it. I thought the premise was a little weird. Like here’s a guy who’s in his seventies, been in the public eye most of his adult life, wants to become president and says, yeah, Russia’s the way to go. I mean, that’s okay I said, you know, I guess.

Tom Frank:

It could happen. It could happen. Turns out it didn’t happen. I remember being relieved when Mueller, when his report came out and saying, Oh, thank goodness, the president is not a Russian agent.

Rich Helppie:

That was a bad day for a lot of people.

Tom Frank:

I was really happy, I was like, that’s good news. All these dire reports on TV that were very scary. And all of a sudden it turns out it’s not true. It’s funny because I’ve learned since then that I think I’m the only one in America that reacted that way.

Rich Helppie:

I’m nerdy enough to watch C-span and what was done with the FISA court and what the Inspector Horowitz report was in it. And I’m not-I kid you not-when they caught…so Comey, Sally Yates, Rod Rosenstein, asked under oath at Senate intelligence committee, if you knew then what you knew now, would you have signed those FISA warrants? All of them answered, no. No one asked the followup question-well, what did you know today that you didn’t know then? It could be because the answer is just that we got exposed. And the reason they said that it wasn’t politically motivated-and I kid you not-was that the IG, following his first report, they pulled 25 random cases of appeals to the FISA court, and most of them, the FBI had lied on. And so the answer was, you see, we do this to everybody. We weren’t just going after Trump.

Tom Frank:

Wow. I’m not a big Russia-gate expert. I learned years ago, I wrote about Iran Contra. And I remember interviewing this guy who was a great expert on Iran Contra. This is in The Wrecking Crew. I got really interested in Iran Contra for reasons that don’t really matter anymore. But at one point I was talking to this guy and the conversation ballooned and went on much longer. And I said, this is really interesting. He said, yeah, but you should stay away from it, people come into this, people get interested in Iran Contra, they start studying it and they never come out again. They go into the maze and they never come out again because they get drawn into it and they think it’s so fascinating. And so I try to stay away from things like that.

But the stuff about censorship, this is what’s happening now. And it is real. When I first started looking into this I said, this can’t be true. I’m a liberal, I’ve been a liberal for a long time. Liberals believe in free speech. Liberals believe in protecting the speech, even of viewpoints they hate because that’s-we know that’s the principle. That’s how the conversation works in America. Every viewpoint is allowed its say and then the public gets to choose from amongst this wide array of choices. And we also know that if we were to, I mean, this seemed obvious to me, that if you start shutting down, if you start censoring people or start shutting down certain viewpoints, they’re going to come after you, liberal. They’re going to come after people like me. I know this, my views are extremely unpopular in this country. And there’s a long history of whenever there’s been a censorship regime in this country, and it’s happened a couple of times. It’s always people on the left, who are the target. During World War I, remember the hysteria I was talking about with populism, again, in the McCarthy era it’s always people like me who were on the receiving end of these things. So that’s not something that we ever fool around with. And then I start reading, the New York Times is calling for Joe Biden to appoint, what do they call it, a Reality Czar? I mean, it sounds Orwellian.

Rich Helppie:

Is college speech codes elevated to a federal level?

Tom Frank:

There is one difference now between censorship regimes in the past. And that is that they have the tool to do it, which never existed before and that’s social media. And they can see the power that social media has. And it’s scary. It bothers me. I mean, I think these companies are monopolies and need to be broken up or regulated as monopolies. But the Democrats, a lot of Democrats, not all of them, of course, but a lot of Democrats say the opposite. We want these companies to start pushing the mute button on our political opponents. And they’re open about this. This is not a secret. This is really happening

Rich Helppie:

They’re trying to convince their base that it’s a good thing. And my argument to that is if we give someone the power to mute, what if we elect another Donald Trump? Now he’s got the power.

Tom Frank:

Yes. That is a very good concern. That is a very worthwhile concern.

Rich Helppie:

Tom, as a historian, we had a man on-Professor Dan Crane, he’s at the University of Michigan Law School. His specialty is antitrust. And what got me really interested in having him on the show is that he wrote a number of papers about the rise of fascism when there’s monopolies. And he goes back to pre-World War II Germany, and he says, Germany had two airplane companies, two pharma companies, Hitler just compromised those, controlled the entire economy. Fast forward, here we are. 2021. We’ve got Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft.

Tom Frank:

And it’s terrifying. And look, part of populism was the fear and hatred of monopolies, it’s very deep in the populism. That’s one of the things they were very concerned with in the 1890s. Franklin Roosevelt had a strong antitrust enforcement regime. Democrats used to believe in that. Jimmy Carter was the last president to actually enforce antitrust law in this country. Since Reagan though, Republicans and Democrats agreed to not enforce it any longer. And so you have these companies with the kind of power that John D. Rockefeller could only dream of-a kind of power that we don’t-it boggles the mind, the sort of power that Google and Facebook, et cetera, have over our lives, Amazon, it’s extraordinary.

Rich Helppie:

Wasn’t it Reagan that broke up AT&T into the Baby Bells, and also the consent decree on IBM?

Tom Frank:

The AT&T thing, I believe might’ve happened then, but Reagan was the one that brought in the, the sort of new thinking about antitrust, where it’s all about consumer prices and so you just have this wave of consolidation. And so it’s extraordinary to me that these companies are allowed to exist, but…

Rich Helppie:

I think Google needs to be broken up. Amazon needs to be broken up. Microsoft needs to be broken up. Apple-I think it’s in a different category, but they need to be looked at, there’s too much power concentrated in too many places.

Tom Frank:

And we’re discovering power over the culture. How do we talk to each other? Well, the newspaper industry is dying. It turns out social media is how we talk to each other now. And these guys have a complete stranglehold on the way we converse.

Rich Helppie:

In your Guardian column, which we are going to put a link up to that at RichardHelppie.com, it’s a catchy title. And I know even if you didn’t write it, I take credit for it. It’s really good. Liberals Want To Blame Right-Wing Misinformation For Our Problems. Get Real. And you mentioned debunking and shushing and censoring, all the tools for the same end. You made mention that…

Tom Frank:

Well I do, that’s what people like me do. We use reason. We make arguments. I mean, that’s my whole life. If I didn’t believe in the power of argument, I wouldn’t have done what I’ve done. I started my own magazine. I studied and studied. I write and write and write. The whole point of everything I’ve done in life is to persuade people, to try to convey information. If I thought that the way you do this is by pressing the mute button-build a monopoly and then use your monopoly to force people to shut up. That is so contrary to anything that people like me believe in.

Rich Helppie:

More than a hundred percent with you on that. To me, it’s more dialogue, more facts. And so I read the Georgia SB202, and I read HR1. Which John Sarbanes wrote.

Tom Frank:

Wow, you’re way ahead of me on this.

Rich Helppie:

I’m nerdy like that, okay, what can I tell you? And then I started seeing the reports come out and I go, well, that’s patently false. And it reminds me of the Maxwell Smart school of logic. Oh, you can’t give a person water in line. Actually you can. Okay, it’s just like every other. Alright. Well, would you believe absentee ballots are going to be restricted? Well, they’re actually not. Okay, well, would you believe, and it goes on, the narrative changes until people are exhausted. And then there’s another breaking news story. 

Tom Frank:

Are you familiar with the work of Mr. Matt Taibbi?

Rich Helppie:

Matt was on my show. Matt, I believe, is a fantastic writer. I wish more people would listen to Matt Taibbi and read his writings. And like yourself, and you didn’t talk about this much, but my sense, and I know for sure from Matt, that his friends on the left, when he broke liberal doctrine, they went a little berserk on him.

Tom Frank:

I don’t know what it is, but that did happen to me. And I was surprised by that, because I thought that what I was saying in the Guardian was like I’m just reminding my fellow liberals of the way we have always been-who we are, what we stand for-free speech, first amendment, that is central to us. And I put that up on Facebook and Twitter and I was astonished at how much push-back I got and how how strongly my my erstwhile friends disliked what I was saying. I mean, really surprised, because this seemed to me like I was making, well, it seemed like a straightforward no-brainer argument to me. And instead, I didn’t have too many people deny that this was happening. I thought that’s what people would say-like, no way, Frank, you’ve lost it. This is not taking place, there is no censorship regime. Instead people are saying, basically, we’ve got the power we should use it.

Rich Helppie:

Exactly.

Tom Frank:

And I just couldn’t believe that.

Rich Helppie:

I had a gentleman on my show named Stewart Taylor, has a group called Princetonians For Free Speech, and going at the speech codes on campus and getting support because that is an area that got out of control. It’s not to me, a big leap, if someone says, well, you know what, if we can control what you can say on a college campus, then why not? We’ve got these tools. We can control what’s said on Facebook and Twitter, and the like. The legitimate argument about deliberate misinformation and disinformation.

Tom Frank:

Well, that’s where this all comes from. It’s an 80th ripple of Russia-gate. And that’s sort of one of the things that annoys me about this, because I can see the same impulse in it, which is, I mean, they’re right. The Russians did buy a lot of misleading ads on Facebook.

Rich Helppie:

But if you look at what was spent versus [cross talk]

Tom Frank:

I know it’s infinitesimal, but here’s the thing Rich, our entire culture is based on stuff like that. Remember, my first book was about the advertising industry. I’m here to tell you, they mislead people constantly. It’s what they do. Or you look at Hollywood, which that’s how we get our historical information. It’s not by reading books like mine, it’s by watching movies. And it’s like, that’s not really what happened in World War II, you know what they say in these movies, that’s not really what happened.

Rich Helppie:

No, it’s not. And this is why I think that-and I’m an eternal optimist, I’ll tell you that-that I look at these platforms and it lets a person like me read legislation, invite a guest like you to come on and we can talk about real things. And I’ve put forward, with the help of my guests, real policy solutions for some of the issues of the day. I’m not saying they’re perfect, but they’re frameworks. And if you ask the question, is it better than what we’re getting from the people we elect, that are hired to actually think about these things and come up with a solution, it’s a resounding yes. I mean, I was just on Anthony Scaramucci’s program called MoochFM and he said, okay, give me two policies now.

Tom Frank:

Well, what did you say?

Rich Helppie:

I went through healthcare, firearms. Well, healthcare I’ve had, if you count me as a healthcare knowledgeable person, we’ve got six healthcare knowledgeable people. We all agree. I’ve got one guy coming from libertarian, another guy from public health perspective, all vectoring in, we all agree on what the solution looks like. It’s not rocket science, but I think one of the lines in your book, you said we reformed healthcare without troubling. the big pharma and private insurance.

Tom Frank:

That’s Obamacare.

Rich Helppie:

And you nailed it. By the way, I read the Obamacare bill, because that’s part of my job.

Tom Frank:

That’s what you do.

Rich Helppie:

Well, I did, I had a healthcare consulting business too, but you nailed it. And those are the two bad actors in this. And pharma is in a different category than private insurance. but the notion that you get your healthcare from your employer maybe made sense maybe to my grandfather who worked for Chrysler corporation for 40 years. But now you’re talking about a gig economy and you’re talking about employers that are really sophisticated about how to not have to give you healthcare. It makes zero sense. But guess what? If your employer gives you healthcare, you don’t pay any taxes on that. And we used to have company cars. That was a benefit. Why don’t you see those anymore? Because IRS said, guess what, if you get a car from your employer, that’s income.

Tom Frank:

That’s right, they changed the tax code back in the day.

Rich Helppie:

Exactly. In firearms, everything else that’s dangerous requires skill. You have to go through-like driver’s licenses-you don’t go from here’s your first license to drive a semi. A pilot, you don’t get your private pilot license and now you’re driving an airliner. You can’t get a fireworks license unless you show you know how to operate them and how to store them. Medical practice the same way. But with firearms, you can take an 18 year old, in a lot of states, walk into a gun store, walk out with some automatic rifle and a thousand rounds. First time they ever bought a gun. Can we all agree that’s just like crazy. We don’t want to do that.

Tom, let’s jump to some, I got some odds and ends. And I’m going to ask you to riff a little bit. You get a call today from the Republican party and they say, tell us what to do. What do you tell them?

Tom Frank:

Oh my God, I don’t know. The Republicans are fascinating because all my life that’s been the party of big business, big money. And all of a sudden here they aren’t anymore. And they don’t know what to do. They’re lost. They’re casting about trying to figure out their new purpose.

Rich Helppie:

So they’re coming to you and saying, hey, we’re casting about, we’re lost. Give me three bullet points-do A, B and C. What do you do?

Tom Frank:

I think if Trump had run on universal healthcare in 2020, he would have won. I think they should become the party of universal health care. I mean, look, follow their voters, universal health care, strong unions, and they should completely drop all of their voter suppression stuff and do the opposite, try to get everybody to vote.

Rich Helppie:

Democrats. And we’ve got a really old guy in office. We’ve got some majorities. What do we do?

Tom Frank:

Democrats, it’s much simpler. What I said about the Republicans, that’s never going to happen ever in a million years, but with the Democrats, they could reform the Democratic party really easily. And that is an inside the party commission to look into what, where they went wrong, what the hell happened. Study their own history, investigate how they went wrong and how they’re going to remedy it. How are they going to rebuild their bridges with the people that you and I grew up among. And how they’re going to become the majority party of Franklin Roosevelt again, because it wouldn’t be that hard to do. But they would have to kiss all that Wall Street money, goodbye, that would have to go, and all that big pharma money, and their great friendships with the guys in Silicon Valley.

Rich Helppie:

Quit taking money from those people and start legislating for the common man.

Tom Frank:

Exactly. And believe me, the political rewards for that are enormous. Like Roosevelt’s Democratic party, they held the majority in the House of Representatives until from 1930, until 1994 with only two brief interruptions. They were always the majority party in this country. That’s the world you and I grew up in. Well, they can be that again. I mean, whoever captures that sort of populist spirit, that’s going to be the majority party. And it’s funny, right now, both parties want that. And they talk it and they reach out to it. And both parties have this anti-populist wing also that wants to suppress voting or censor conversations. So they’re both pulling in both directions at the same time. I wonder which one’s going to do it-possibly neither.

Rich Helppie:

I’m a hundred percent with you, and I’ve said this on many occasions, a strategy that relies on turnout, or a low turnout, to me is enough anathema to what we need to become as a country. And I think we’ve also shown that you don’t necessarily need to take big money. I mean, Trump didn’t in his first run, because you can reach audiences.

Tom Frank:

He was a media creation. People will be writing about his victory forever, but Hillary out-raised and outspent him two to one. Biden, it was a little different 2020, because Trump was obviously the incumbent, but Biden still out-raised and outspent him. It wasn’t quite two to one, but it was substantial. And Biden specifically out-raised him from Wall Street, Silicon Valley, pharma, the commanding heights of the economy-Hollywood, the people who matter. Trump had, who did Trump have in his corner? He had big oil. He had casinos.

Rich Helppie:

Okay, this time, if you had to advise the news outlets, whether it’s cable or the legacy broadcasters or the former print media, what would you tell them to do?

Tom Frank:

So, unfortunately, Rich, this is a question where any suggestion I would propose would be by definition, wrong because you talked to Matt Taibbi, this is his theory. Everybody has become Fox news. Everybody has become politics for entertainment, getting outraged at one another as a form of entertainment. And I hate it and I hate what it’s doing to us. I bet you have seen the Fox News effect on people you know and how it changes their personality. And I’ve seen that and it’s disturbing. And now MSNBC and CNN, they’re doing the same thing.

Rich Helppie:

Precisely, the same formula.

Tom Frank:

I hate it, but it’s, for them by their standards, this is a winner. They’ve got a lot more viewers now than they did a few years ago.

Rich Helppie:

It is the outrage centers and just like you and I find that repulsive, that I think enough people say, we know we’re getting played and we need to be able to have honest reporting, like what’s in the bill? And that’s the thing I keep asking people, every time someone tells you dislike this or dislike that or hate this person, I hate that person. It’s like, okay, stop. What’s in the bill? We’re about to look at an infrastructure bill. We’re going to be talking to professor Rick Geddes from Cornell University who’s going to break down what’s in the bill. The president needs to say what’s in it that’s not really infrastructure.

Tom Frank:

Yeah, exactly.

Rich Helppie:

Tom, you’ve been a great guest and I apologize that we’ve gone over. I could hope that you’ll agree to come back at some time.

Tom Frank:

Oh, absolutely. I’d be glad to.

Rich Helppie:

That’s great. Is there anything that we didn’t cover today that we perhaps should have discussed? Or is there any closing thoughts that you have?

Tom Frank:

Well not really, I think this was a wonderful conversation and I really like the core idea of your show, which is that ultimately we have to live with each other. This is a democracy and we have to get along with one another. And I want to just echo a statement that you made at the very start of the show. This country is filled with fundamentally decent people. And that’s the core value of populism, is that we like the people. I took my title, The People, No from a famous book from the thirties by a guy called Carl Sandburg. Carl Sandburg, another great Chicagoan. And he wrote something called The People, Yes. And it’s a celebration of the American vernacular and of ordinary Americans and how we talk to each other. And it’s a very 1930s thing to celebrate ordinary Americans. And I feel like nowadays, we are doing the opposite in this country. We are denouncing ordinary Americans. We think that they are diseased in some way, and that they’re psychologically-that there’s some pathology has got them. And I just want to say, I still believe in the people, yes. I still believe in ordinary Americans. And I think that’s very close to who we are when we can actually talk to each other in a normal way, not screaming and not social media and that sort of thing.

Rich Helppie:

I think your historical perspective is a great step in that direction. We talk about the deliberate attempt to divide us, black versus white, and that same model being applied.

Tom Frank:

Yes, politically, it’s just crazy what’s going on now.

Rich Helppie:

And I know you said that your book, The People, No is your last political book. I hope you mean it’s your most recent, because I think you’ve got a lot of gas in your tank. And I know I would sure love to hear more from you and I’m sure our readers will too.

Tom Frank:

Alright, thanks a lot Rich.

Rich Helppie:

This is Rich Helppie signing off on the Common Bridge, where we talk about the issues of the day, the opportunities of the moment and the policy solutions that can help us address them. We’ve been with our guest, Thomas Frank, so long till next time.

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