Richard Helppie and Tom Frank originally aired on April 20, 2021. The length of this interview precludes us from putting the entire transcript here, but you can read the entire interview at: https://thecommonbridge.com/tom_frank/
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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-writers there,
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.
Read the remainder of the transcript here: https://thecommonbridge.com/tom_frank/
The People, NO.