Based on my knowledge of his work, Frank is taking the long view. I’d wager that he’d argue CHIPS and IRA were too little, too late.
I mean, that's fair. There are a couple of points:
1. As you know, I get quite taken aback by the accusations that Dems just "weren't listening to the working class or offering them anything" in this election. It's just not true and it's even kind of silly.
As a long-term proposition, it's more credible. People's partisanship tends to crystallize at a fairly young age and doesn't change all that much with time. So it's possible that Dems are still being dinged for things that may or may not have happened two decades ago.
That said, the exit poll data I saw showed Gen X to be the most Trump supporting demographic. If you do the math on that, the majority of Gen Xers came of age during Reagan/Bush. And that sets their partisanship, just like the people who came of age during Kennedy and early Johnson have long been more liberals and more Dem than their older or younger siblings. In this sense, we are still paying the price for the Iran hostages.
2. I confess to getting really annoyed by terms like "Brahmin left" -- used by Joan Williams in that article. The first problem is that only people who even know what the "Brahmin left" means are people in the Brahmin left. I mean, let's look at the bio of the woman complaining that Dems don't know how to talk to "ordinary people" (her phrase):
Joan C. Williams is an American feminist legal scholar, the founding director at the Center for WorkLife Law, and a distinguished professor of law at UC Law San Francisco.
I mean, if not for feminist legal scholars, how would we ever know how to communicate with anyone? She's a fucking law professor. Obviously I have no issue with that, but it is annoying for the feminist legal scholar -- whose work is far more abstruse and remote from everyday concerns than, say, the lessons taught in a deal making class -- to call me out of touch. Her bio brags that she's the 11th most cited scholar in critical theory. Oh.
Second, there's a math problem that is so frequently overlooked. Working class people are bad at managing money. They buy lottery tickets; they are disproportionately smokers; a lot of alcohol consumption; especially among men, love affairs with certain types of vehicles that are expensive to drive and maintain.
For most of the 20th century, the people banging this drum were the "center right" establishment GOP folks. That was frustrating because a) they weren't wholly wrong; but b) they used this observation as a reason not to enact popular politics. We saw that at its most vulgar with Jason Chavetz' whining about how working class people have smart phones (gasp!), but in general the line was "look, they aren't struggling; they just drink too much" -- as if working people should be expected to be monks and not want to have a good time.
Now that the roles have shifted, it remains true that working people are frequently authors (in part) of their own financial struggles. To me, unlike the GOPers mentioned above, that's not a reason to oppose sympathetic policies. Even spendthrifts ought to have health insurance. Buying lottery tickets is a poor financial decision (as is sports betting, another disproportionately working class activity), but it shouldn't consign one to poverty.
But it becomes a problem when we play these recrimination games. It's not helpful to anyone for this critique to be front-and-center (I almost never mention it, nor do others that I see) but it's also not helpful to ignore it. Living paycheck to paycheck isn't a choice for everyone who does, but I would guess that more people choose that lifestyle than have it thrust upon them. Fine. Again, government should accommodate everyone. But what are we to do when we're told, "look at how we're struggling, do something to help us," and then fall into the cycle we've been through before? We can't say "stop buying lottery tickets," but we can't fix peoples' choices to consume their whole paycheck when they get it.
