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

"For those who don’t know him, Thomas Frank writes beautifully. He’s very, very readable. What he’s looking at in this book is the way the Democratic Party lost its working-class base. What struck me is that it’s a very similar story—a slightly more analytical version— from the United States of Fiona Hill’s story. It’s about the Democrats falling in love with high tech and with innovation and forgetting those working-class voters who have traditionally made up the core of their support. Many of those working-class voters defected to vote for Donald Trump. It’s a salutary reminder that, as Fiona says in her book, many of the factors driving developments in the United States are identical to those in the UK. Central to all that is deindustrialization. What do you do with places that were industrial powerhouses once the industries move out? The book’s an indictment of the US political class, and particularly the Democrats for not thinking more about this and not doing more for those people. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter About a year and a half after the referendum Thomas Frank wrote a really interesting piece in The Guardian , comparing one of the places he looked at in the United States in Massachusetts with Wakefield, my hometown, which drew out the comparison explicitly. That comparison is not there in the book, but it’s latent there and you can look for it."