Listen, liberal : or, What ever happened to the party of the people? / Thomas Frank.

Originally published in 2016
"With a new afterword"--Cover

Introduction: Listen, Liberal
Theory of the liberal class
How capitalism got its groove back
The economy, stupid
Agents of change
It takes a Democrat
The hipster and the banker should be friends
How the crisis went to waste
The defects of a superior mind
The Blue State model
The innovation class
Liberal gilt
Conclusion: Trampling out the vineyard
Afterword to the 2017 edition: the year they found somewhere else to go

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, political analyst Thomas 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. 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