About a month or so ago, I read the 2016 book, Listen Liberal (with a 2017 afterword) by Thomas Frank. I don’t necessarily agree with all of the content, but it does present a very interesting perspective and critique.

This critique that the author provides is from more of an FDR New Deal Democratic Party perspective and is critical of the Bill Clinton and Obama administrations as well as of Hillary Clinton. The author Frank notes how these administrations and politicians really transformed the party of “we the working people” into more of an elitist white collar one that abandoned its blue collar base. The author cited trade agreements (NAFTA), bank deregulation, financial “modernization”, bank bail outs, the crime bill , non-enforcement of anti-trust legislation, etc as policies that weakened workers and led to further consolidation and income inequality. Thus reducing the Clinton’s and Obama’s egalitarian campaign rhetoric about fairness to just meaningless lip service. Frank pointed out a lot of Democratic hypocrisy and duplicity.

Of note, the author provided a good critique of Democratic emphasis on innovation pointing out how a lot of this innovation is contingent upon intellectual property and is thus intrinsically monopolistic in order to attract venture capital. He also pointed out how some of this innovation circumvented regulations and undermined unions. He provides Uber as an example.

In the 2017 afterward, the author also provided a cogent analysis of Trump and Trump supporters. No, these supporters aren’t all bigots, misogynists, and “deplorables” as many hyper blue partisans like to portray them as. Many are the blue collar workers that the coastal elitists Democrats have abandoned. Many have been screwed by the system where both parties are now corporate parties. Hillary was just more of the same old same old. And thus many turned to Trump to shake up the status quo.

The author ended by noting that Democrats rather than be self-critical and recognize their shortcomings, instead just chose and continue to choose to blame whoever they could blame for their 2016 loss.

Now moving into 2024, it doesn’t seem like the Democratic Party learned anything. They still lack any ability to look in the mirror. Thus they still don’t understand why someone like Trump still gets so much support. Seems like the Democrats desperately want Trump to be the candidate so that their entire Democratic campaign against Trump will be one where they portray him as Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin combined. Unfortunately, this “end of democracy” and lesser of two evils strategy seems to mainly work with hyper blue partisans (many of whom have severe TDS) and never Trumpers rather than anyone else.

Instead of this strategy, Democrats and other 3rd party candidates should make a sincere and concerted effort to understand Trump’s appeal largely as a supposed outsider (and phony populist). Though again, to understand Trump’s appeal about the system being rigged, and the need to drain the swamp, Democrats really have to look in the mirror and make government reform a central and real concern. It just seems not enough Democrats are willing to do this in any meaningful way. They don’t seem to understand that what we need is better government rather than more and more government. Today it’s nearly impossible to have any sort of New Deal government perspective since corruption is so rampant. This is especially true at regulatory agencies that too often act as if they’re subsidiaries of the industries they’re suppose to regulate. Too many Pfizer Blue pilled Democrats fail to recognize the severity of this problem.

And that seems to be the real distinction between the Pfizer blue pilled party and others of different parties who’ve been red pilled. The Pfizer Blue pilled party members still somehow think the government is looking out for their interests even at the FDA, CDC, EPA and elsewhere. Thus they still hold prevaricators like Fauci in high esteem. Whereas red pilled people at various places along the political spectrum recognize that they’ve been repeatedly lied to for the benefit of corporations and other vested interests pulling the politicians strings. So the red pilled people have very little faith or trust in government and its institutions. They realize the corruption is systemic. And thus some of these people will even embrace phony populists who seem to say the right thing.