https://vimeo.com/440526579

The liberal elites don't like real democracy and see mass movements as endangering their 'educated and wise leadership'. Populism and anti-populism has deep roots in American history. Thomas Frank ('What's the Matter with Kansas' and 'The People, No.'), joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast.

Transcript

Paul JayHi, I'm Paul Jay, and welcome to theAnalysis.news podcast.Born in Kansas, Thomas Frank, author of, 'What's the Matter with Kansas', has with great insight revealed the disillusionment of large sections of working people in rural and urban America with the liberal elites that run the Democratic Party. In his recent book, he takes on the contempt that this liberal aristocracy feels towards what they call, populism. Here's a quote from the book, 'The People, No.' "Opponents of the right should be claiming the high ground of populism, not ceding it to guys like Donald Trump. Indeed, this is so obvious to me that I'm flabbergasted. Anew every time I see the word abused in this way, how does it help reformers, I wonder, to deliberately devalue the coinage of the American reform tradition? It is my argument that reversing the meaning of populist tells us something important about the people who reversed it. Denunciations of populism, like the ones we hear so frequently nowadays, arise from a long tradition of pessimism about popular sovereignty and democratic participation, and is that pessimism, that tradition of quasi aristocratic scorn that has allowed the paranoid right to flower so abundantly". That, again, is from the book, 'The People, No' by Thomas Frank. Thomas is a political analyst, a historian, a journalist. He co-founded and edited The Baffler magazine, and he's written several books, most notably, 'What's the Matter with Kansas' in 2004, and 'Listen Liberal', in 2016. I did a long series of interviews with Thomas about 'Listen Liberal', and I can attest to the fact that the liberals did not listen.At any rate, his most recent book is, 'The People, No', and I guess that speaks to the same point. Now joining us is Thomas Frank. Thanks for joining us, Thomas.

Thomas FrankYou got it, Paul. It's great to be here.

Paul JaySo we're going to divide this interview into three parts. Part one, we're going to talk about the history of populism and especially in the American context. How did this word begin to be used to describe a political movement? Part two, we're going to talk about getting into the heads of these liberal elites and the Trump version of populism, if that's even how one wants to use the word. And then part three, we're going to talk about what would a democratic populist movement look like if one imagines what it should be and what it is today. But let's start with the history, but before we do, let's talk just a little bit about the title of the book.

What was your thinking behind 'The People, No'?

Thomas FrankSo it's a reference to an American classic that's not widely read anymore. It's a book-length poem by Carl Sandburg called, 'The People Yes', and Sandburg was you know, they called him, in his heyday of the 1920s and 1930s, they called him the poet of the people. And his whole career was about making poetry out of the language and the experiences of ordinary people.There's something of a tradition of this in America. So Walt Whitman did the same kind of thing, and there are many others who have done it as well. But Sandberg was in some ways the best known and most popular poet who sort of worked in this particular vein. And he wrote this book in 1936, 'The People Yes', it was a populist book in a populist era. I mean, the 1930s were the great period of celebrating ordinary people, you know, folk traditions, painting WPA murals of average working people.