Reddit Reddit reviews Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

We found 26 Reddit comments about Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

Books
Political Ideologies & Doctrines
Politics & Social Sciences
Politics & Government
Political Conservatism & Liberalism
Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?
Metropolitan Books
Check price on Amazon

26 Reddit comments about Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?:

u/nomadicwonder · 19 pointsr/WayOfTheBern

The person who wrote the story is Thomas Frank, but this is not the same Thomas Frank who wrote, What's the Matter with Kansas and Listen, Liberal. The latter wrote a harsh criticism of the Democratic establishment in his latest book, but the former is a corporate tool for CNN (or perhaps a former corporate tool since he has now resigned).

u/JoshuaIAm · 14 pointsr/ChapoTrapHouse

The two books Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer and Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank pair extremely well and are required reading for anyone that wishes to understand how US politics has been shifted so far to the right these past decades. Dark Money, while extremely informative regarding the propaganda of billionaires, largely gives a pass to the Democratic party which Listen, Liberal reveals as being undeserved.

u/LadyLib2 · 10 pointsr/WayOfTheBern

lol. no way I could do it justice... thanks!

I like bobswern's comment where he politely suggests kos take a sabbatical and give all this some more thought. Im tempted to pile on and tell markos to log off DKOS, turn off MSNBC for a week or two and go read a few good books. Go hole up or have a few drinks with Meteor Blades maybe, heh.

start with this one:

https://www.amazon.com/Listen-Liberal-Happened-Party-People/dp/1627795391

Im sure we collectively could come up with a pretty good reading list for him lol

u/TheSingulatarian · 6 pointsr/SandersForPresident

Kamala Harris let fucking Steve Mnuchin go when there was a mountain of evidence that he was a corporate criminal. Harris was also the only Democrat to receive a campaign contribution from Mnuchin and his criminal enterprise One West Bank. Now that crook is Trump's treasury secretary.

Get the Book "Listen Liberal" by Thomas Frank. He lists the crimes of the Clintons and Obama in detail and Frank is a well know liberal himself. It may open your eyes.

https://www.amazon.com/Listen-Liberal-Happened-Party-People/dp/1627795391

u/staomeel · 5 pointsr/PoliticalRevolutionID

We need a trust circle in which the party, activists, and the average voter can engage in dialog and support. A philosophical stalemate between activists and the Idaho Democratic Party has led to a total communication breakdown. The average citizen has given up completely as they know the Democratic Party serves only millionaires and up. The activist resent the IDP for their greed, ineptitude, and frank reluctance to show any support for FDR's values.

The IDP refuses to acknowledge that neoliberalism has failed utterly and completely. The party base continues on roaring into the void while the IDP declines to support what might have been their best field organizers. Unfortunately the IDP has been hooked on the D.C. money funnel for so long they fail to see they have lost all credibility by supporting the DNC. If the IDP were to turn off the tap and start having faith in the citizens to provide for their economic well being they might turn things around. They dare not become accountable to the majority. The simple math determines that pleasing a wealthy minority easier and more profitable then attempting to solicit funding from the cash strapped average citizens. Politics have become a safe career to leach money from the upper crust, see Sally Boyton Brown skipping town.

The enthusiasm among the citizens for the IDP has bottomed out due to the radical differences in finical desires. Idaho's majority individuals lives in poverty or near poverty.. The average the median per capita income for Idaho was $24,273 in 2015. You need at least 30k to stop living pay check to pay check per person. The citizens want healthcare, green jobs, education and social security. The IDP waits in vain for a Idaho millionaire/billionaire to help build the "collation of the ascendant" that will never come to Idaho and what little was here has begun to crumble.

The Democrats for the past 40 years have been slowly dismantling the FDR values that brought them easy votes for multiple generations. They have become lazy and spoiled expecting the working class to keep blindly heaving them over the finish line. The working class well has finally run dry, see the 2016 Presidential elections. Now we face an impasse, do we burn down the crooked orchard and start again or do we try to prune down the twisted roots put down by the neoliberal elite?

The answer is neither. The IDP needs radical restructuring so as to knock out the hierarchical leadership. All party decision should return to directly to precinct captains. As in precinct captains act as a virtual house of representatives that elect a virtual senate made of the district leadership. The senate elects a party leader. Why add all this crazy complication to the political machine?

  1. The average citizen can have a direct impact on the Idaho democratic party without leaving their home precinct. It gives the power back to the people.
  2. It forces the democratic authoritarians running the party to face democratic libertarians in a honest political discussion for once.
  3. It democratizes how the donations get distributed.
  4. It gives potential candidates opportunity to practice politics in a sandbox.
  5. It limits the center-right brow beating the hierarchical structure delivers.
  6. It pushes the career political wonks away from the money and levers of power.
u/endoftheliner · 4 pointsr/GenderCritical

"With his trademark sardonic wit and lacerating logic, Frank's Listen, Liberal lays bare the essence of the Democratic Party's philosophy and how it has changed over the years. A form of corporate and cultural elitism has largely eclipsed the party's old working-class commitment, he finds. For certain favored groups, this has meant prosperity. But for the nation as a whole, it is a one-way ticket into the abyss of inequality. In this critical election year, Frank recalls the Democrats to their historic goals-the only way to reverse the ever-deepening rift between the rich and the poor in America." https://www.amazon.com/Listen-Liberal-Happened-Party-People/dp/1627795391

And the Dems are not listening to us. On the contrary, the money of the privileged class is speaking.

u/RNGmaster · 3 pointsr/starterpacks

>Also Clinton supporters being right wing? I don't see it, like Trump supporters most Clinton supporters are coming straight from Obama and I don't see how they're right wing.

From a modern American perspective, no. But from a global perspective yes. It used to be very different, in FDR's time for example. People did fight against his social-democrat policies, but they were adopted and widely popular. I mentioned how the John Birch Society shifted the Republicans to the right, and that's where things started to change. After McGovern's loss and, later, 12 years of Reagan and his VP being massively popular somehow, Democratic leaders assumed that they couldn't win by appealing to the left (which ignored the other circumstances surrounding McGovern's loss and Reagan's win). When they got back into power it was with Bill Clinton, who explicitly pursued a centrist agenda (he called it "triangulation") that included dismantling/privatizing the welfare state (welfare reform), expanding the police state and deregulating the financial industry (Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000). And these are all positions which were considered right-wing in the pre-Bill Clinton era. Now fast-forward to Obama, who has basically pursued the same foreign policy as Bush II, and whose central accomplishment is a bill which is an altered form of a healthcare-reform idea proposed by the far-right Heritage Foundation, and he is basically being attacked as a secret communist by Republicans. Frankly, it's rather insulting to the communists to group Obama with them.

(The book Listen, Liberal discusses in more detail how the Democratic Party moved to the right, if you're curious in reading further into this.)

>the real problem that we both should be against is the current corrupt people in power which is why a lot of people support Trump's promises to get rid of the people dividing us further for their own gain.

His proposals for lobbying reform and term limits aren't bad actually. But his proposed cabinet is, well, it's certainly a change from Democratic corruption but not the good kind. The people he's proposing are mostly distinguished by loyalty rather than actually fitting their position (lol Ben Carson), most of them have conflicts of interest based on their business histories, and most of them are big donors to the Trump campaign. Is any of this unusual for a Presidential cabinet? Well, not really, but it doesn't inspire hope about Trump actually wanting to address corruption more than nominally. And maybe he won't appoint any people with connections to the right-wing's favorite boogeymen such as Soros (though Mnuchin is a close Soros associate so... lol) but for every Dem-aligned billionaire rigging the system in their favor there's a Republican one doing the same thing. There's the Kochs, ALEC, and so on. Corruption isn't a Dem-only thing. When businesses spend billions to elect their stooges, that's an assault to democracy, doesn't matter which party's doing it (as I've said, the two parties are not too different in their goals at this point). But I never see Trump supporters worry about the Kochs or ALEC, oddly. I think that they're using anti-corruption as a cover for partisanship, ultimately.

If anti-corruption reform does happen, it's not going to occur thanks to politicians and businesspeople who've benefited from it. You can't use the system to change the system. Big money is the problem. And capitalism more broadly is the problem. Electing someone who'll just put the big businesses in power directly, rather than having them go through middlemen, isn't a solution in my opinion. If you want to get shit done, you do it through a mass movement and direct action. The civil rights and women's rights movements didn't succeed because they elected the right people, they succeeded because they essentially used sheer manpower (or, womanpower in the latter case) to make the government change shit. That's real democracy, IMO.

u/frosty67 · 3 pointsr/NeutralPolitics

Listen, Liberal by Thomas Frank

u/Ellison4DNC · 2 pointsr/politics
u/Just_Bob_2016 · 2 pointsr/Kossacks_for_Sanders

Those two quotations are from the front matter of Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, the new book from Thomas Frank.
http://www.amazon.com/Listen-Liberal-Happened-Party-People/dp/1627795391

u/GlyphGryph · 2 pointsr/changemyview

I'll ignore the "insult" part and just focus on the label.

Liberals isn't just used by people talking about those who are "too far left". They are people who believe in or advocate for one of the liberal ideologies. Why do you think it's "toxic" to have a label we can use to refer to those who believe in and advocate for a specific ideology (or family of closely related ideologies)?

Now, I'm not going to disagree it's not misused, but that's a thing that's always going to happen with words, especially ideologies. It's a useful rhetorical tool and, let's be honest, most people aren't gonna have, want, or need a nuanced understandings of the features that differentiate their perceived enemies. Euphemisms happen. Ignorance is a fact of life. I understand people are going to call me a liberal sometimes because they don't know what I am, and that's okay - I'm sure I've done the same to others in other situations!

And yeah, it's gonna get misused as a symbol for the purpose of virtue signaling, but anything could be.

That doesn't mean the word isn't useful, and it is (often) used in a way that is perfectly descriptive. To a certain extent, I sort of feel like this post is an attempt to deny that the ideology even exists, or that it's particularly common - but it is an ideology, a fairly coherent one, and it is a common (often outright dominant) ideology on college campuses, in news rooms, in the entertainment industry and the halls of politics on the Democratic side. How else will you better describe those ideologies and their advocates if not using the word that literally means that?

I think it's also important we have the word, so we can differentiate between the different flavours of leftist thought - between the liberals, the neoliberals (who really aren't particularly liberal despite the name), the socialists (of various flavours) and those who identify as none of the three.

What exactly do you think "Listen, Liberal" should have been called instead? Who exactly would we say the book was trying to address?
https://www.amazon.com/Listen-Liberal-Happened-Party-People/dp/1627795391

u/Redditron-2000-4 · 2 pointsr/politics

The Democratic Party hasn't been liberal for 35 years. It is astounding that liberals still believe the DNC represents them.

Thomas Frank explains it way better than I can, and it is worth a read or listen:
Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? https://www.amazon.com/dp/1627795391

u/bolbteppa · 2 pointsr/politics

Exactly, a system excluding independents 7 months before the vote, when people barley know any other candidate but the establishment name-recognition candidate, is not corruption, definitely not rigged, it's the voters stupidity for having busy lives and being disgusted by the dirty tricks of the two parties.

https://www.amazon.com/Listen-Liberal-Happened-Party-People/dp/1627795391

They should just know to make sure the system didn't exclude them months before the candidates have even set foot in their state to pitch for their vote.

Trump merely just has to say the democratic primary was rigged and it falls on sympathetic ears, he's now winning amongst the people cheated by that process, and you are calling them idiots, I have rarely seen something so obviously backwards, your perspective makes it that that simple for one of the biggest liars to tell the truth, my god.

u/williafx · 1 pointr/environment

Continued support for the military industrial complex
Bold and expressed support for the war in Iraq
Pushing for the war In Syria
Continued support for more wars abroad, even adding 4 more major conflicts under the Obama presidency
Continued support for the war on drugs
Continued support for the prison industrial complex
Continued support for predatory lending industries
refusal to support a living wage
refusal to support single payer / medicare for all / universal healthcare
refusal to support extending public education beyond k-12
growing support within the party to move towards greater and greater privatization of public services
Enactment of the ACA, a healthcare proposal initially concocted by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
refusal to break up the big banks
refusal to support or truly fight for a carbon tax
a continual decline of support for unionized labor
The continued and increasing acceptance of legalized bribery / money in politics
A general abandonment of leftist economic policy


The democrats do pander very frequently to leftist ideals, but they are either extremely ineffective at governing toward their ideals or are disingenuous. In my view I lean toward the latter, mostly due to the blatant and transparent acceptance of enormous sums of money from special interest groups. It makes them look like they are paid to lose/throw the fight - but still pander to the left and win votes.


This criticism of the Democratic party as moving rightward by no means excused the disgusting sprint toward facism of the Republican party, but the Democrats have been trying for years to run away from being branded with associations to FDR or New Deal style politics. For a very thorough analysis, check out this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Listen-Liberal-Happened-Party-People/dp/1627795391


u/thesilverpig · 1 pointr/politics

cool. Thanks for acknowledging my point and stating your disagreement in a diplomatic way. I think we are getting to a real discourse here.

My first disagreement with your statement is I don't think fighting republicans and making democrats better is either or first or second type of situation. In fact, considering how the democrats are always chasing the republicans rightward often losing big in election seasons, I think that making the democratic party a stronger one that better represents and inspires its people will stop the rightward shift of both parties.

Because policy polling shows the democratic platform is way more popular than the republican one and actually on most polices, the majority of American's are left of the democratic party but the constant losing of ground on policy, the appearance of elitism and corruption, the focus on identity politics which doesn't resonate compared to economic issues, and the fact that economically the middle and working classes have been devastated by republicans AND Democrats are some of the reasons why Democrats keep losing. That and the Democrats constant shift rightward, because when voters are presented with the options of republican and republican light, they'll go with the real thing.

I do agree the republicans are worse and we should fight and obstruct their agenda I also don't think investing energy in trying to change the republicans is the most prudent strategy.

There is a cogent argument made by Thomas Frank in his book Listen Liberal that the democratic party abandoning the working class in favor of the professional class is what led to them losing the majority of legislatures over the last 40 some years. So the way I see it, if the democratic party can take on the role of being the party of the people again, in a meaningful not rhetorical, way they will win seats and if the republicans want to stand a chance as a party they'll have to follow the democrats lead.

u/ginnj · 1 pointr/politics

>1. The Democratic party, for some insane reason, followed the Republican party to the right. I dunno what the strategy behind that was, but if they had not, they would likely have control of most State governments + Congress.


Read or listen to Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank

u/jengabeef · 1 pointr/todayilearned

Read Listen Liberal if you really believe Dems aren't neoliberal.

u/Patango · 1 pointr/politics

Here is his new one , another home run imo

[Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?]
(https://www.amazon.com/Listen-Liberal-Happened-Party-People/dp/1627795391/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8)

>From the bestselling author of What's the Matter With Kansas, a scathing look at the standard-bearers of liberal politics -- a book that asks: what's the matter with Democrats?

>It is a widespread belief among liberals that if only Democrats can continue to dominate national elections, if only those awful Republicans are beaten into submission, the country will be on the right course.

>But this is to fundamentally misunderstand the modern Democratic Party. Drawing on years of research and first-hand reporting, Frank points out that the Democrats have done little to advance traditional liberal goals: expanding opportunity, fighting for social justice, and ensuring that workers get a fair deal. Indeed, they have scarcely dented the free-market consensus at all. This is not for lack of opportunity: Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and yet the decline of the middle class has only accelerated. Wall Street gets its bailouts, wages keep falling, and the free-trade deals keep coming.

u/NateRoberts · 1 pointr/Kossacks_for_Sanders

>Democrats have done little to advance traditional liberal goals: expanding opportunity, fighting for social justice, and ensuring that workers get a fair deal. Indeed, they have scarcely dented the free-market consensus at all. This is not for lack of opportunity: Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and yet the decline of the middle class has only accelerated. Wall Street gets its bailouts, wages keep falling, and the free-trade deals keep coming.

>With his trademark sardonic wit and lacerating logic, Frank's Listen, Liberal lays bare the essence of the Democratic Party's philosophy and how it has changed over the years. A form of corporate and cultural elitism has largely eclipsed the party's old working-class commitment, he finds. For certain favored groups, this has meant prosperity. But for the nation as a whole, it is a one-way ticket into the abyss of inequality. In this critical election year, Frank recalls the Democrats to their historic goals-the only way to reverse the ever-deepening rift between the rich and the poor in America.

From the publisher's description of Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal. Sounds like I gotta read this book!

u/Gua_Bao · 0 pointsr/politics

I can't tell if this a bot response, or someone throwing their hands up in the air before even making an effort to have a discussion. If I'm not worth the time that's fine, but I do recommend that book. Here's a link. There are also plenty of interviews on Youtube where the author talks about details from the book. I promise it's all more worthwhile than talking to random dudes online for fake internet points.

u/cyanuricmoon · 0 pointsr/Political_Revolution

>Obama had his cabinet picked by CitiGroup

Have to stop reading once you say something I know is bullshit. This is false.

If anyone wants a non-reddit, educated understanding of the topic at hand, please read "Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?". This is where Dems lost there way. And believe it or not, some of the blame is on the American people who fail to show up.

u/robbiedo · 0 pointsr/politics

Read the book "Listen Liberal" from noted conservative hell brand, Thomas Frank. There is lucid argument how the Democratic Party abandoned the "working class."

u/[deleted] · 0 pointsr/videos

I implore you to read this book!. Everything you just talked about is neoliberalism, aka Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama.

u/Lochleon · -7 pointsr/PoliticalDiscussion

This NYT piece explores that question pretty thoroughly, and includes a lot of outside links

This section is a decent summary:

>In other words, upscale voters were just as important to the Obama coalition as downscale voters. One consequence of the increased importance of the affluent to Democrats, according to Bonica and the three co-authors on the inequality paper, is that the Democratic Party has in many respects become the party of deregulated markets.

>“The Democratic Party pushed through the financial regulation of the 1930s, while the Democratic party of the 1990s undid much of this regulation in its embrace of unregulated financial capitalism,” the four authors write.

> They cite the crucial role of congressional Democrats in enacting the Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994, which eliminated past restrictions on interstate banking; the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of 1999, which repealed the 1933 Glass–Steagall Act separating commercial banking from other financial services; and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which restricted government oversight of most over-the-counter derivative contracts, including credit default swaps — all of which played a role in the financial crisis of 2007-2009.

>The critique of the increased Democratic dependency on the rich by Bonica and his co-authors is modest in comparison to that of Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, political scientists at Princeton and Northwestern. In a 2014 essay, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” they analyze congressional voting patterns and conclude that

> >"The majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose."

> >“These findings may be disappointing to those who look to the Democratic Party as the ally of the disadvantaged,” Gilens wrote in a 2012 essay published by the Boston Review:

It's going to be more slanted, but the Thomas Frank book Listen, Liberal charts the road the Democrats traveled from focusing on common welfare to catering to the needs of the upper-middle professional class.