THE HARD PATH TO UNITY

The late Massachusetts congressman and gay-rights activist imagines a political left invigorated by shucking off internal divisions.

“We struck down evil with the mighty sword of teamwork and the hammer of not bickering,” says a character in the superhero spoof Mystery Men. That pretty well summarizes Frank’s critique of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which, he charges, effectively laid the grounds for the “political strength that xenophobic populism has come to enjoy in the developed world.” One fatal flaw is the gulf between those who are committed to winning elections and those who are committed to ideological purity and “the uncompromising advocacy of their principles.” This insistence, Frank maintains, led to litmus tests of various sorts: If you don’t support an open border, you’re a bad progressive, and if you push for climate change solutions that will overburden an already overburdened working and middle class, then you champion the good cause. By his calculus, this is a fine way to lose elections, as is “the denial that male and female are valid categories” and that Latinos should be called by the genderless Latinx, a demand “rarely voiced in communities where people had long spoken Spanish in its gendered form.” Frank can hardly be considered a conservative, but he takes some interesting centrist stances while asserting that progressives are missing the key issue motivating the right by dismissing immigration as a concern. Another failure, he argues, came during the financial meltdown of 2008, when public outrage over “massively overgenerous treatment” of the corporations responsible for it at the expense of ordinary taxpayers led to the formation of the Tea Party and then MAGA. In the end, Frank asserts, progressives need to center on real issues: providing reasonably priced health care and housing, lessening economic inequality, and otherwise speaking to immediate needs and not the culture wars.

An eminently sensible political program that will doubtless rile many readers on the left.