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Radio War Nerd EP #239 — The Anti-Populists, with Thomas Frank (Patreon)

Published:
2020-07-28 00:59:28
Imported:
2026-06
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Guest: Thomas Frank, author 

Recorded: July 21, 2020

Author Thomas Frank talks about his new book "The People, No" — on the whole sordid & infuriating history of elitist anti-populists, from the 1890s through today's Democracy Scare. 

Buy Thomas Frank's book "The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism". Check out his website and his gallery of Gilded Age anti-populist cartoons.

For more, check out previous Radio War Nerd episodes on populism & anti-democratic politics: EP #161 - "Populism" vs populism; EP #205 - Recovered History of Neoliberalism & Fascism.

Total time: 1:52:48

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here 

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Comments

ukhc

It would have been great to listen to you guys talking to Michael. Rest in power.

loicdupre

Mark's laugh when Thomas Frank talks about beer testing Obama! Excellent!

Cosmo

Really good

Jake Palmer

Amazon UK lists the hardcover of "The People, No" at 320 pages and paperback of "People Without Power", which seems to be the same book(?) with a different title, at 224 pages. What's up with that? Only the latter is available for pre-order.

Ellen Harold

I wish you could release this to the public free.

Cade Jameson

When Frank mentioned the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation I remembered that Lipset, the antipopulist sociologist, wrote his first book on the CCF. This is when he was a socialist. Bell was also an ex socialist, who knew a bit about the history of populism and American socialism (pretty much the same movements, as Debs and others came out of the People’s Party.) Hofstadter had been a communist. These guys had issues.

Simon

Yanis Varoufakis in "Adults in the Room" claims Larry Summers told him this: "'There are two kinds of politicians,' he said: 'insiders and outsiders. The outsiders prioritize their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price of their freedom is that they are ignored by insiders, who make the important decisions. The insiders, for their part, follow a sacrosanct rule: never turn against other insiders and never talk to outsiders about what insiders say or do. Their reward? Access to inside information and a chance, though no guarantee, of influencing powerful people and outcomes.'" Varoufakis references Warren's similar quote as well in the endnote. Great episode!

Jed Hovey

Really great interview. Frank nails a lot of the dynamics of the current political moment in the US. I think "elite failure" pretty much sums up what's happening right now, they lashing out to mask how badly they're doing. I'll definitely have to read the book. Have either of you thought of interviewing Peter Turchin? His stuff about Cliodynamics and elite overproduction fits pretty well with that. He's also a Russian expat.

Zacharias Bowen

Wait, why is Orwell a bastard now? Did I miss something?

Mark Ames

Pretty sure Zamyatin's novel was the model for 1984. But yeah influence is a tricky thing with writers, an "anxiety" as the feller said.

Zacharias Bowen

Maaan, I knew about this, but I don't know if it makes him a bastard. In Homage to Catalonia he describes how the Stalinists effectively betrayed the revolution, and they imprisoned/killed some of his friends. I probably wouldn't have betrayed a bunch of leftists to the British state, but I can definitely see why he might want to nip Stalinism in the bud, so to speak. Maybe I just have rose-tinted glasses.

Gengeros

The anarchists betrayed left unity by not forming a united coalition with the "Stalinist" Marxist Leninists and republicans to defeat the fascists.

Zacharias Bowen

Well, couldn't you say that every side in the civil war betrayed left unity? In that, every faction saw themselves as the only effective vanguard (some more than others) and didn't want to make any ideological concessions. IMO the POUM's goals in Spain were far more true to socialism than Stalin's (sure, call me a Trotskyist). So, why did the foreign faction deserve to be top dog? I'm no expert, but my impression was that the Stalinists refused to work with other factions, and it was the Stalinists that chose to stop the flow of weapons and supplies to leftwing militias, driving the movement to cannibalise itself and lose to the fascists.

Mark Ames

The author of 1984 and the "conscience of the Free World" handing in lists of suspected wrong-thinking intellectuals to the secret police to get them fired...I dunno, doesn't get more hypocritical disgusting than that.

Zacharias Bowen

I mean, it's not like they were shipped off to a penal colony. He recommended to a Labour government that Stalinist sympathisers should not be hired for a government propaganda campaign. They weren't even fired. From the list of writers, they mostly went on to have happy endings, some even went on to spy for the KGB... Yeah, I get the hypocrisy, but I just feel like we've got to reappropriate Orwell from the right, who use him as a critique. We don't freak out about Adorno calling the police and actually getting people arrested, so I just don't get why it's fashionable to hate on Orwell for something so trivial (maybe it's because the Guardian and Independent chose to report it, those beacons of left-wing journalism).

Solfish

I think it's honestly another case of smuggled christian morality. Orwell is a Judas for becoming a bourgeois liberal later in life, which is somehow worse than being an avowed fascist your whole life.

THEKILLERWHALE

Great interview. I would be interested on the author's thoughts on Perlstein. They kind've share real estate as popular historians of the modern era, and they have both written some killer books. But a through-line in Perlsteins book is a kind of anti-populism, though it is not always so overt (his first was subtitled 'The Unmaking of the American Consensus'). Seems like a natural heir to Hofstader in that love/hate sense.

Mark Ames

Perlstein writes some great books but you nailed it exactly, and this comes through in his current events posts. He went full in with Russiagate conspiracism and wrote love posts to the CIA as defenders of democracy. Big disappointment but you can see that defense-of-centrism theme running throughout his otherwise brilliantly written books.

Dara McHugh

Yep, you're dead right - mixing up my anti-communism.

Ellen Harold

His book on Nixon is very unsympathetic to the left and focuses on instances of the worst behavior of demonstrators and dissenters, in the form of long lists of undigested inflammatory and sensational headlines, apparently compiled by paid researchers, to describe their behavior.

Clinton Hallahan

Anyone have a link to that Nugent on Hofsteader article Frank was talking about?

Benjamin Cuthrell

Wanna thank y’all for having Thomas Frank on! I’m already deep into my second of his books since this ep

radiowarnerd

He was a great interview. Very lively voice.