Corp. Dems Idolize FDR, but Hate His Policies and the Populists That Supported Him -Thomas Frank (2/3)

https://vimeo.com/440854849 Corporate Democrats despise the left-wing of the party and the popular movements that support them. Thomas Frank joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast. Transcript Paul Jay Hi, I'm Paul Jay, welcome to theAnalysis.news podcast. This is part two of my discussion with Thomas Frank about his book, 'The People, No', I’ve got to get the inflection right on that to get the proper ridicule dripping off the lips of- Thomas Frank -So can I give it a shot, Paul? My daughter and I were actually working when I did the audiobook of this. We’re working on how to say the title. And here's what I finally came up with, 'The People, No'. Paul Jay And anyway, once again, joining me is Thomas Frank, who has just told us how to say the title of the book. And I assume everybody knows, but just in case, Thomas Frank is the author of many books, most notably, 'What's the Matter with Kansas?', and he's in Kansas as we speak, and 'Listen, Liberal', and his most recent book, he just told us how to say, 'The People, No', and I refuse to whine, even if it captures the full meaning of the title. All right. So we left off part one, as we head into the 1920s, the populist movement has more or less fizzled out. It's kind of split, some of the movement has kind of assimilated into democratic parties, some have gone into various socialist parties. And the 1920s is a period where everyone's optimistic, capitalism seems to be just hunky-dory, lots of people are buying into the stock market and borrowing, and there's the promise of wealth for everybody. And then along comes The Great Crash in 1929, and we won't get into exactly why all that happened, but not the least of which is the amount of speculation and leveraging, borrowing money to buy stocks and other issues, and then we headed into the Great Depression. So this now starts the beginning of— may not have been called the next version of the populist movement, but in substance, it's very similar. So talk about the development of the movement in the thirties and how influenced is, what was the populist movement coming out of areas like Kansas with the kind of socialist and communist movement that's developing in some of the cities influenced by Marx, (Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand class relations and social conflict as well as a dialectical perspective to view social transformation), and socialist movements all over the world? I guess there are separate strains, but they're certainly very related to it. Thomas Frank Yeah. So to take a step back, a lot of populists, when the People's Party fell apart after the 1896 election, a lot of them went into the Socialist Party. And in fact, Kansas had a big socialist contingent and so did Oklahoma, Oklahoma had the most socialist per capita of any state, which is hard to believe because Trump won every single county there. Paul Jay But West Virginia used to be something like that. Thomas Frank Exactly, the same story there. But, in the 1930s, the word populist was not used to describe the left-wing movements of the day, but it's appropriate because, in my mind, they come out of the same tradition, the populist tradition, Franklin Roosevelt's talks, like the populists used to, had a lot of ideas like they used to, and even more sort of important is the labor movement. So the populists had reached out to organized labor in the 1890s.