What's the matter with the left? Thomas Frank's factually un-rigorous assault on the Clinton and Obama administrations.

• Author: Alter, Jonathan
• Position: 'Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People?' - Book review

Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People?

by Thomas Frank

Metropolitan Books, 320 pp.

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In 2004, Thomas Frank wrote an important book, What's the Matter with Kansas?, that tried to answer the question of why a state with a populist tradition (though he exaggerated it) was now producing toxic right-wing politics. Frank had a polemical edge, but mostly he sorted through the complexities of why so many working-class Americans routinely vote against their own economic interests.

Frank's new book, Listen, Liberal, a relentless assault on wealthy Democrats and the Clinton and Obama administrations, offers no such complexity and suffers greatly for it. If you can't trust a book--and you can't trust this one--it becomes an active disservice to readers, in this case readers on the left. Listen, Liberal (even the title sounds like a dubious drunken exhortation) arms Bernie Sanders supporters with arguments that will boomerang because they are often grossly oversimplified and sometimes flatly untrue.

From start to finish, I wished that Frank had at least taken account of moderate Democratic arguments on the other side, then demolished them. Instead, he bulldozes anything in his path. I don't know why he does so, but my theory is that this is at least partly a consequence of his having done zero original reporting for the book. If he'd gone out and interviewed Clinton and Obama administration policymakers instead of cherry-picking the reporting of people like me (he cites my Obama books accurately, but without context, a half-dozen times), the resulting nuances and qualifications would have strengthened, not weakened, his overall indictment.

Frank is right that Democratic 1 percenters are often smug, complacent, oblivious, annoying, and, most important, spectacularly wrong in at least some of their policy prescriptions, particularly the loathsome 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act signed by Bill Clinton (touched on only in passing, unfortunately). He is especially tart and usefully provocative in his cultural critique of "the melding of money with the literary sensibility" in places like Martha's Vineyard, where hedge fund managers shop in bookstores that use Charles Bukowski poems about the brutality of blue-collar life to sell their wares.

The price we've paid for the financialization of the American economy cannot be stressed too often. Frank quotes the Nobelist Joseph Stiglitz: "What were we...