Thomas Frank, _The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism_

FRANK IS ONE of my indispensables. Not only does he write well, but he also has a better historical foundation for his political analysis than most of his pundit peers, and furthermore his heart is in the right place, by which I mean right here in the Midwest, even though he now lives "outside Washington, D. C." You can take the boy out of the Midwest, but you can't take the Midwest out of the boy.

The Midwest is where the 1890s version of American Populism flourished, and Frank writes to correct the misapprehensions that mushroomed during the Trump administration. Trump's appeal was often ascribed to something coastal pundits called populism, by which they meant a foul brew of racism, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, and ignorance found in its highest concentration here in the red states. 

No, no, writes Frank. The foul brew is real enough, but let's not call it populism. Actual, historical populism was something else--democratic, progressive, community-minded, knowledgeable.  And he's got the research to back up his claims (unlike historian and Populism-hater Richard Hofstadter, whose unfamiliarity with the primary documents of populism Frank notes more than once). 

Another fine book from Frank, then. I do have a demurral on one point. 

Frank has a chapter ("Peak Populism in the Proletarian Decade") that dwells on some of the cultural products  of the Popular Front Era--Paul Robeson, Ben Shahn, John Dos Passos, Orson Welles, James Agee, various WPA projects--and why not? Good on them. I was a bit surprised, though, when Frank's praise of Carl Sandburg's book of poems called The People, Yes (obviously, the source of Frank's title) included the claim that "what we expect from our poets is abstruseness, exclusivity, peer-reviewed professional excellence" (p. 114). Jeez. Does he read any contemporary poetry? Little of it sounds like Sandburg, true, but it is about as engagé as anyone would ask. Somebody get this man a subscription to Oversound or any boom that won the Pulitzer for poetry in the last ten years. He sounds like one of those folks who never forgave their high school English teacher for assigning The Waste Land.